Old Testament

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Old Testament has 39 books in most Protestant Bibles, 46 in the Catholic version, and up to 49 in Orthodox editions. That gap surprises many readers. This is the first division of the Christian Bible, and every Christian church uses the same name for it. Yet they do not share one list of its books. Who wrote these books, and across how many centuries? Why do Christians and Jews read the same pages so differently? And how much of the history these books tell can archaeology support?

  2426

• 2. Four Sections

  ›

  The Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, counts 24 books. Those writings in Hebrew, with occasional Aramaic, form the main base of the Old Testament.

  Christian tradition sorts the material into four groups. The first is the Pentateuch, the five books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, which match the Jewish Torah. The second is the history books, which follow the Israelites from their conquest of Canaan to their defeat and exile in Babylon. The third is the poetic and wisdom literature, which reflects on human experience, morality and divine justice. The fourth is the prophets, who warn of what follows when people turn away from God.

  Jewish tradition arranges the same writings in another order. The Talmud, in Bava Batra 14b, sets out its own sequence for the Nevi'im and Ketuvim, and Mishneh Torah Hilchot Sefer Torah 7:15 cites the same order. Only the order of the Torah books is identical in every denomination of Judaism and Christianity.

  The languages vary too. Daniel and Ezra-Nehemiah mix Hebrew with Aramaic, while Wisdom and 2 Maccabees were composed in Greek. The New Testament, the second division of Christian Bibles, was written in Koine Greek.

  In Hebrew, the opening book is called Bereshit, followed by Shemot, Vayikra, Bamidbar and Devarim.

  23132

• 3. Written Over Centuries

  ›

  Between 538 and 332 BC, the Persian period, the first five books reached the form that readers know today. Their authors were the elite among the exiles who returned and then controlled the Temple. Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel and Kings follow them and carry Israel's story down to the Siege of Jerusalem around 587 BC. Most scholars agree these began as one work, the so-called Deuteronomistic History, composed during the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BC.

  The two Books of Chronicles, probably from the 4th century BC, retell much of the ground covered by the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History. Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah were probably finished in the 3rd century BC. The Maccabees books, which number two in the Catholic Old Testament and up to four in the Orthodox, were written in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. Together, the history books make up about half of the Old Testament.

  The prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, along with the twelve minor prophets, produced their books between the 8th and 6th centuries BC. Jonah and Daniel are the exceptions, written much later.

  The wisdom books have scattered dates. Job was complete by the 6th century BC, and Ecclesiastes by the 3rd. Proverbs may have been finished in the Hellenistic period (332-198 BC), though it holds much older material as well.

  Timothy H. Lim, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Edinburgh, describes the Old Testament as "a collection of authoritative texts of apparently divine origin that went through a human process of writing and editing." He adds that it is not a magical book, and that God did not literally write it and hand it down. By about the 5th century BC, Jews regarded the Torah as authoritative. By the 2nd century BC the Prophets held similar standing, though with somewhat less reverence than the Torah.

  1133831

• 4. Covenant and Conscience

  ›

  Yahweh is portrayed throughout the Old Testament as the creator of the world. The text does not always claim that he is the only god who exists. It does insist that he is the only God Israel may worship, and that he alone is Almighty.

  Moses receives the covenant at the heart of the bond between God and Israel, his chosen people. The law codes of Exodus, and especially Deuteronomy, spell out its terms. Israel swears faithfulness, and God swears to protect and support Israel. The books also include instructions for outsiders who wish to join.

  The Jewish Study Bible objects to calling this arrangement a contract. In the ancient Near East, a covenant was sworn before gods who enforced it. Here God is a party to the agreement rather than a witness. The Jewish Study Bible therefore reads the Hebrew word brit as a pledge.

  Salvation, redemption, divine judgment, obedience, disobedience and faith run through the books. Ethics and ritual purity both receive strong emphasis. Yet some prophets and wisdom writers argue that God demands social justice above purity, and perhaps does not care about purity at all. The moral code requires fairness, defence of the vulnerable, and righteous justice from those in power. It forbids murder, bribery, corruption, deceitful trading and many sexual misdemeanours. All morality is traced back to God as the source of goodness.

  The Babylonian exile posed the hardest question. If God is good, he must have had just reason to let disaster strike his people. Kings and Chronicles, the prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah, and the wisdom books Job and Ecclesiastes each work through this problem of evil in their own way. Their answers differ widely, and that variety helps explain why later communities argued over which books belonged.

  31384035

• 5. Translations

  ›

  Around 280 BC, in Alexandria, Hebrew texts began to be translated into Greek, and the work continued until about 130 BC. Tradition says Ptolemy II Philadelphus commissioned these translations. They became known as the Septuagint, abbreviated LXX, after the supposed number of translators involved. The Eastern Orthodox Church still bases its Old Testament on this version.

  The Septuagint differs from the Masoretic Text in many places. It includes books that some traditions no longer count as canonical, among them 1 Esdras, Judith, Tobit, the Maccabees books, Wisdom, Sirach and Baruch. Early modern critics blamed deliberate or careless corruption by the Alexandrian scholars. Most recent scholarship disagrees and points instead to source texts that differed from the ones the Masoretes used later.

  Hellenized Jews, whose Greek was better than their Hebrew, first used the Septuagint. Gentile converts and the early Church then adopted it, since Greek was the church's common language. Greek wording therefore shaped later Christian interpretation. Three early translators won particular acclaim: Aquila of Sinope, Symmachus the Ebionite and Theodotion.

  Origen placed his edition of the Hebrew text in his Hexapla beside a transcription in Greek letters and four parallel translations. Those four came from Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint and Theodotion. Two further Greek translations, the so-called fifth and sixth editions, were supposedly found miraculously by students outside Jericho and Nicopolis. They were added to Origen's Octapla.

  In 331, Constantine I commissioned Eusebius to deliver fifty Bibles for the Church of Constantinople. Around 340, Athanasius recorded Alexandrian scribes preparing Bibles for Constans. Little else is known, though speculation is plentiful. Some suggest these projects inspired canon lists, and that Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus are examples. With the Peshitta and Codex Alexandrinus, they are the earliest surviving Christian Bibles.

  In 382 AD, Pope Damasus I asked Jerome, the leading scholar of his day, for an updated Latin Bible. Latin had by then replaced Greek as the common language of Christians in the western Roman Empire. Jerome's task was to replace the Vetus Latina, a Latin translation of the Septuagint. Instead he translated directly from Hebrew, arguing that the Hebrew texts were superior on philological and theological grounds. His Vulgate Old Testament became the standard in the Western Church, in the form of the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate. The Eastern churches kept the Septuagint, and still do.

  The Aramaic Targums were produced at about the same time as the Septuagint. Aramaic was the language of Jews in Palestine and the Near East, and likely of Jesus. The word Targum means translation, and these versions helped Jewish congregations understand their scriptures. Aramaic Christians had the Syriac Peshitta. Other versions appeared in Coptic, the everyday language of Egypt in the first Christian centuries, and in Ethiopic, for one of the oldest Christian churches. Arabic versions followed. Armenian versions came from Armenia, the first country to adopt Christianity as its official religion.

  1819212524

• 6. Disputed Books

  ›

  Jerome, in the prologues to his Vulgate, described some portions of Septuagint books missing from the Hebrew Bible as non-canonical, and he called them apocrypha. His Prologue to Jeremiah names Baruch and notes that it is neither read nor held among the Hebrews. He does not, however, explicitly call it apocryphal.

  In his Prologue to Judith, Jerome claims that the Council of Nicaea counted the Book of Judith among the sacred scriptures. The canons of the First Council of Nicaea show no evidence of any decision about the canon.

  The Synod of Hippo in 393 may have been the first council to explicitly accept a canon that included books absent from the Hebrew Bible. The Council of Carthage in 397 and another in 419 followed. All were strongly influenced by Augustine of Hippo, who regarded the canon as already closed.

  In the 16th century, the Protestant reformers sided with Jerome. Most Protestant Bibles now contain only books found in the Hebrew Bible, yet they follow the order of the Greek Bible. Rome answered with the Canon of Trent in 1546. It includes most of the Septuagint, though not 3 Ezra or 3 and 4 Maccabees. Catholics call these extra books deuterocanonical.

  Greek Orthodox Christians, following the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, use the traditional name anagignoskomena, meaning "that which is to be read." Some historic Protestant versions kept these books, including the German Luther Bible and the English King James Version of 1611. After the English Civil War, the Anglicans reached a compromise. They kept the extra books for private study and for reading in churches, but not for establishing doctrine. The Lutherans kept them for private study, gathered in an appendix as biblical apocrypha.

  The Latin Vulgate itself carried an appendix. It held 3 Esdras and 4 Esdras, which Eastern Orthodox use calls 1 Esdras and 2 Esdras. It also held the Prayer of Manasseh and a short poem titled the Psalm of David when he slew Goliath, known in Orthodox use as Psalm 151.

  1716202224

• 7. Two Readings

  ›

  Jeremiah 31:31 promises a New Covenant, and that verse explains the very name Old Testament. Christianity understood itself as the fulfilment of that promise, replacing the earlier covenant between God and Israel. The label is therefore a Christian theological category rather than a Jewish one, and Jewish interpretation does not treat these writings as an old covenant that has been superseded. In Christian thought, the emphasis moved from a pledge between God and the Jewish people to one between God and any person of faith who is "in Christ."

  The Second Vatican Council set out a Catholic view of how the two halves relate. It declared that "God, the inspirer and author of both Testaments, wisely arranged that the New Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old be made manifest in the New." Dennis Hamm reads this teaching as a counter to the "perennial temptation... to dismiss the Old Testament as irrelevant for Christians."

  The Confession of Peter shows how the Christian claim rests on Jewish ideas. Christians believe the historical Jesus is also the Christ. Messiah in Hebrew and Christ in Greek both mean "anointed." The Hebrew Scriptures describe a king anointed with oil on taking the throne, who becomes Yahweh's Anointed.

  By the time of Jesus, hopes for a Messiah took several forms. Some Jews expected a flesh-and-blood descendant of David, the Son of David, who would establish a real Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem in place of the Roman province of Judaea. Others looked for the Son of Man, an other-worldly figure who would appear as judge at the end of time. Some combined the two, picturing a messianic kingdom in this world that would last for a set period before the World to Come.

  Some believed the Messiah was already present but unrecognised because of Israel's sins. Some expected a forerunner, probably Elijah, as promised by the prophet Malachi. His book now ends the Old Testament and sits just before Mark's account of John the Baptist. No view of the Messiah drawn from the Old Testament, however, foresaw one who would suffer and die for the sins of all people. The story of Jesus' death therefore marked a profound shift in meaning from the older tradition.

  26273335

• 8. Testing the History

  ›

  Andrew R. George points to a striking likeness between the Genesis flood narrative and the Gilgamesh flood myth. The psychoanalyst Otto Rank noted in 1909 that the origin story of Moses resembles that of Sargon of Akkad. Twentieth-century writers such as H. G. Wells and Joseph Campbell later popularized the comparison. Jacob Bronowski wrote that "the Bible is... part folklore and part record. History is... written by the victors, and the Israelis, when they burst through Jericho (c. 1400 BC), became the carriers of history."

  In 2007, the historian of ancient Judaism Lester L. Grabbe described earlier scholars such as Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) as maximalists. They accepted the biblical text unless something disproved it. The substantial historicity of the patriarchs and a unified conquest of the land were widely accepted in the United States until about the 1970s. Grabbe says that scholars in his field are now minimalists, at least on the patriarchal period and the settlement, and that "very few are willing to operate as maximalists."

  In 2022, the archaeologist Avraham Faust summarized this shift. Early histories of Israel leaned heavily on the biblical accounts, and their reliability has been questioned more and more. Debate has centred on the Patriarchs, the Exodus, the Israelite conquest and the United Monarchy, with archaeological evidence often challenging the stories. Faust notes that the minimalist school of the 1990s dismissed the Bible's historical value. Mainstream scholarship now balances skepticism with evidence. The firmest overlap comes from the 9th century BC onward, where some biblical traditions line up with archaeological findings.

  51331239