What's your belief about the best placement of the Apocrypha in the Bible? I've read the Roman Church's reason for the Latin Vulgate order, the reason why they were put between the Old and New Testaments, and why most protestant Bibles don't include the Apocrypha at all. I do believe the Apocrypha should be in the Bible, but am undecided about the Latin Vulgate versus separate placement. One thing I appreciate about Bibles with separately placed Apocrypha is they include the books of the Apocrypha that the Roman Church doesn't.
Yeah, I like the Ecclesiastical Books between the Testaments. I get surprisingly grumpy at how the ESV with Apocrypha places them after the New Testament. I'd rather have the Roman integration than the post-NT position.
I am fine with either arrangement. Including the Deuterocanonicals interspersed with the OT is the more traditional option, as the LXX was the Church’s Bible, centuries before the Hebrew text was standardized into the MT. Also, placing them in a separate section makes it that much easier to ignore them outright. On the other hand, mixing them together gives the impression that the books with only Greek originals are equal in authority to those in Hebrew.
I would prefer the wisdom literature to be integrated with the OT wisdom literature. Baruch is a lament and could be incorporated into the Jeremiah-Lamentations cycle. The histories fit best between the Testaments. Tobit is difficult to classify; what is it? Judith is a morality tale. People like to poke holes in the histories because they have been proven to be inaccurate. In truth, they are more hagiography than what we expect history to be in our day. But this is not unusual for their time. They are really not significantly different from some of the self-serving literature left by the Egyptians and Assyrians of antiquity.