Hebrew BIBLE and
Canon
I.
What Are the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament?
The writings that make up the Hebrew Bible or
Christian Old Testament are by any reckoning among the most influential
writings in Western history. The idea of sacred Scripture, however, is by no
means a clear one, and it is taken to mean very different things by different
people. Some conservative Christians regard the Bible as the inspired word of
God, verbally inerrant in all its details. Before we can begin to discuss what
it might mean to regard the Bible as Scripture, there is much that we need to
know about it of a more mundane nature. This material includes the content of
the biblical text, the history of its composition, the literary genres in which
it is written, and the problems and ambiguities that attend its interpretation.
It is the purpose of this book to provide such introductory knowledge. If the
Bible is Scripture, then the idea of Scripture must be formed in the light of
what we actually find in the biblical text.
The Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament are not
quite the same thing. The Hebrew Bible is a collection of twenty-four books in three divisions: the Law (Torah), the Prophets (Nebi’im), and the Writings (Ketubim),
sometimes referred to by the acronym Tanak . The Torah consists of five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, and Deuteronomy (traditionally, the books of Moses). The Prophets are
divided into the four books of the
Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings; 1 and 2 Samuel and 1
and 2 Kings are each counted as one book) and the four books of the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and
the Twelve; the Twelve Minor Prophets [Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah,
Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi] are counted as one
book). The Writings consist of eleven books: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of
Songs (or Canticles), Ruth, Lamentations, Qoheleth (or Ecclesiastes), Esther,
Daniel, Ezra- Nehemiah (as one book), and Chronicles (1 and 2 Chronicles as one
book). The Christian Old Testament is so called in contrast to the New
Testament, with the implication that the Old Testament is in some sense
superseded by the New. Christianity has always
wrestled with the theological. significance of the Old Testament. In the second
century c.e., Marcion taught that Christians should reject the Old Testament
completely, but he was branded a heretic. The Old Testament has remained an
integral part of the Christian canon of Scripture. There are significant
differences, however, within the Christian churches as to the books that make
up the Old Testament. The Protestant Old Testament has the same content as the
Hebrew Bible but arranges the books differently. The first five books are the
same but are usually called the Pentateuch rather than the Torah. Samuel,
Kings, EzraNehemiah, and Chronicles are each counted as two books, and the
Minor Prophets as twelve, yielding a total of thirty-nine books. The Former
Prophets are regarded as historical books and grouped with Chronicles and
Ezra-Nehemiah. Daniel is counted as a prophetic book. The (Latter) Prophets are
moved to the end of the collection, so as to point forward to the New
Testament. The Roman Catholic canon contains several books that are not in the
Hebrew Bible or the Protestant Old Testament: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon,
Ecclesiasticus (or the Wisdom of Jesus, son of Sirach = Ben Sira), Baruch,
Letter of Jeremiah (= Baruch 6), 1 and 2 Maccabees. Furthermore, the books of
Daniel and Esther contain passages that are not found in the Hebrew Bible. In
the case of Daniel, these are the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three
Young Men, which are inserted in Daniel 3, and the stories of Susanna and Bel
and the Dragon. The Greek Orthodox Church has a still larger canon, including 1
Esdras (which reproduces the substance of the book of Ezra and parts of 2
Chronicles and Nehemiah), Psalm 151, the Prayer of Manasseh, and 3 Maccabees. A
fourth book of Maccabees is included in Greek Bibles but is regarded as an
appendix to the canon, while another book, 2 Esdras, is included as an appendix
in the Latin Vulgate. These books are called Apocrypha (literally, “hidden
away”) in Protestant terminology. Catholics often refer to them as
“deuterocanonical” or “secondarily canonical” books, in recognition of the fact
that they are not found in the Hebrew Bible. Some Eastern Christian churches
have still more extensive canons of Scripture. The books of Jubilees and 1
Enoch attained canonical status in the Ethiopian church.
II. Why Are There Different Canons of Scripture?
By “canon” we mean here
simply the list of books included in the various Bibles. Strictly speaking,
“canon” means “rule” or “measuring stick.” The word was used in the plural by
librarians and scholars in ancient Alexandria in the Hellenistic period (third
and second centuries b.c.e.) with reference to literary classics, such as the
Greek tragedies, and in Christian theology it came to be used in the singular
for the Scriptures as “the rule of faith,” from the fourth century c.e. on. In
its theological use, canon is a Christian concept, and it is anachronistic in
the context of ancient Judaism or even of earliest Christianity. In common
parlance, however, “canon” has come to mean simply the corpus of Scriptures,
which, as we have seen, varies among the Christian churches. The differences
between the various canons can be traced back to the differences between the
Scriptures that became the Hebrew Bible and the larger collection that
circulated in Greek. The Hebrew Bible took shape over several hundred years and
attained its final form only in the first century c.e. The Torah was the
earliest part to crystallize. It is often associated with the work of Ezra in
the fifth century b.c.e. It may have been substantially complete a century before
that, at the end of the Babylonian exile (586–539 b.c.e.), but there may have
also been some additions or modifications after the time of Ezra. The Hebrew
collection of the Prophets seems to have been formed before the second century
b.c.e. We find references to the Torah and the Prophets as authoritative
Scriptures in the second century b.c.e., in the book of Ben Sira
(Ecclesiasticus) and again in the Dead Sea
III.
The Manuscript, Text and Codex of the Bible:
Manuscript (mss):
Not only did the list of books that make up
the Bible take shape gradually over time, but so did the words that make up the
biblical text. Modern English translations of the Bible are based on the
printed editions of the Hebrew Bible and the principal ancient translations
(especially Greek and Latin). These printed editions are themselves based on
ancient manuscripts. In the case of the Hebrew Bible, the most important
manuscripts date from the tenth and eleventh centuries c.e., almost a thousand
years after the canon, or list of contents, of the Hebrew Bible was fixed.
Text:
The text found in these
manuscripts is known as the Masoretic text, or MT. The name comes from an
Aramaic word meaning to transmit or hand down. The Masoretes were the
transmitters of the text. What is called the Masoretic text, however, is the
form of the text that was established by the Ben Asher family of Masoretes in
Tiberias in Galilee.
Codex:
Masoretic text is found
in the Aleppo Codex, which dates
from the early tenth century c.e. This codex was kept for centuries by the
Jewish community in Aleppo in Syria. About a quarter of it, including the
Torah, was lost in a fire in 1948. It is now in Jerusalem. The Pentateuch is
preserved in a tenth-century codex from Cairo. Codex Leningrad B19A from the eleventh century is the single most
complete source of all the biblical books in the Ben Asher tradition. It is
known to have been corrected according to a Ben Asher manuscript. The Cairo Codex of the Prophets dates
from 896 c.e., and a few other manuscripts are from the tenth century. These
manuscripts are our oldest witnesses to the vowels of most of the Hebrew text.
In antiquity, Hebrew was written without vowels. The Masoretes introduced the
vowels as pointing or marks above and below the letters, as part of their
effort to fix the text exactly. There are fragments of vocalized texts from the
sixth or perhaps the fifth century c.e. Besides the Tiberian tradition of
vocalization, represented by the Ben Asher family, there was also Babylonian
tradition, associated with the family of Ben Naphtali. The first printed Hebrew
Bibles appeared in the late fifteenth century c.e. The discovery of the Dead
Sea Scrolls in caves near Qumran south of Jericho, beginning in 1947, brought
to light manuscripts of biblical books more than a thousand years older than
the Aleppo Codex.
Fragments of about two hundred biblical
scrolls were found in the caves near Qumran. Most of the fragments are small,
but the great Isaiah Scroll, 1QIsaa, contains the whole book. This scroll dates
from about 100 b.c.e.; the oldest biblical scrolls from Qumran are as old as
the third century b.c.e. Most of the scrolls contained only one biblical book,
but three Torah scrolls contained two consecutive books. The Twelve Minor
Prophets were contained in one scroll. Many of these texts are in substantial
agreement with the text copied by the Masoretes a thousand years later. But the
Scrolls also contain other forms of biblical texts. Several biblical texts,
including an important copy of the book of Exodus (4QpaleoExodm), are closer to
the form of the text preserved in the Samaritan tradition. (The Samaritan text
is often longer than the MT, because it adds sentences or phrases based on other
parallel biblical passages, or adds a statement to indicate the fulfillment of
a command that has been described.) Moreover, the text of some other biblical
books is very similar to that presupposed in the ancient Greek translation
(LXX). Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, our oldest copies of Old
Testament texts were found in Greek translations. There are fragments of Greek
biblical manuscripts from the second century b.c.e. on. The oldest complete
manuscripts date from the fourth century c.e. These are Codex Vaticanus and
Codex Sinaiticus. Another important manuscript, Codex Alexandrinus, dates from
the fifth century. These manuscripts are known as uncials and are written in
Greek capital letters. The Greek translations of biblical books were generally
very literal and reflected the Hebrew text closely. Nonetheless, in many cases
the LXX differed significantly from the MT. For example, the books of Jeremiah
and Job are much shorter in the Greek than in the Hebrew. The order of chapters
in Jeremiah also differs from that of the MT. In 1 Samuel 16–18, the story of David
and Goliath is much shorter in the LXX. In Daniel 4–6 the LXX has a very
different text from that found in the MT. New light was shed on some of these
cases by the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scrolls contain Hebrew texts of Jeremiah
that are very close to what is presupposed in the LXX. (Other copies of
Jeremiah at Qumran agree with the MT; both forms of the text were in
circulation.) It now seems likely that the differences between the Greek and
the Hebrew texts were not due to the translators but reflect the fact that the
Greek was based on a shorter Hebrew text. This is also true in 1 Samuel 16–18
and in a number of other cases. Not all differences between the LXX and the MT
are illuminated by the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scrolls do not contain a short
text of Job or a deviant text of Daniel 4–6 such as that found in the LXX.
Nonetheless, the assumption must now be that the Greek translators faithfully
reflect the Hebrew they had before them. This means that there were different
forms of the Hebrew text in circulation in the third, second, and first
centuries b.c.e. Indeed, different forms of the text of some books are
preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In some cases, the LXX may preserve an older
form of the text than the MT. For example, the shorter form of Jeremiah is
likely to be older than the form preserved in the Hebrew Bible. What this
discussion shows is that it makes little sense to speak of verbal inerrancy or
the like in connection with the biblical text. In many cases we cannot be sure
what the exact words of the Bible should be. Indeed, it is open to question
whether we should speak of the biblical text at all; in some cases, we may have
to accept the fact that we have more than one form of the text and that we
cannot choose between them. This is not to say that the wording of the Bible is
unreliable. The Dead Sea Scrolls have shown that there is, on the whole, an
amazing degree of continuity in the way the text has been copied over thousands
of years. But even a casual comparison of a few current English Bibles (say the
New Revised Standard Version, the New English Bible, and the Living Bible)
should make clear that there are many areas of uncertainty in the biblical
text. Of course, translations also involve interpretation, and interpretation
adds to the uncertainty. For the present, however, I only want to make the
point that we do not have one perfect copy of the original text, if such a
thing ever existed. We only have copies made centuries after the books were
originally composed, and these copies often differ among themselves.
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