INTRODUCTION TO THE OLD TESTAMENT

Most of the religions of South Asia have sacred texts. Hinduism has the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, Islam follows the Qur’an, Sikhism reveres the Guru Granth and Zoroastrianism honours the Avesta. The small community of Jews has what is variously called the Tanakh or Miqra, which constitutes the first section of the Christian Bible, where it is referred to as the Old Testament. The Qur’an also borrows from the Tanakh, making it common to the three major monotheistic religions – Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

The Tanakh is also often referred to as the Hebrew Bible, because that is the language in which most of it was written. (Some parts of Ezra and Daniel are in a related language, Aramaic.)

Sections of the Old Testament

This Hebrew Bible is generally divided into three sections known as the Law (or Torah), the Prophets and the Writings.

The Torah consists of the first five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. That is why it is also referred to as the Pentateuch, from the Greek word meaning “five books”.

These books are all associated with Moses, which is why they are sometimes referred to as “the Law of Moses” (see Neh 8:1). They tell the stories of creation, the patriarchs and the formation of the nation of Israel, and set out the laws by which the nation should live because of its covenant relationship with God.

The second section of the Hebrew Bible is known as the Prophets.

The name is significant. It indicates that the focus of these books is not on wonder-working judges and grand kings but on the prophets and seers through whom God spoke to his people.

These books are subdivided into two sections: the Former Prophets and the Latter Prophets.

The Former Prophets are the four books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings (the latter two books are each divided in two in our Bibles, but each was originally one book). We may wonder why these books are included among the “prophets” when their content is the history of Israel from the conquest of the promised land through the years when it was ruled by judges and kings up to the time when the people were taken into exile in Babylon. Yet many prophets are mentioned in these books, including Samuel, Nathan, Gad, Elijah and Elisha. Even Joshua, the military commander, came to be seen as a prophet in that his words were fulfilled at a later time (1 Kgs 16:34).

The Latter Prophets are the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and “the Book of the Twelve” (that is, the twelve short books from Hosea to Malachi which were all contained in a single standard-length scroll). The Latter Prophets are those whom we tend to think of as prophets. They differ from the earlier prophets in that their utterances have been preserved at length. And unlike the earlier prophets who engaged primarily with the rulers, these prophets mostly addressed the people.

The Writings form the final section of the Hebrew Bible. They include Chronicles (originally one volume), Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentations and Daniel. In the Hebrew Bible, they are arranged in a different sequence to the one we are familiar with, often with Psalms beginning the section and Chronicles ending it. That is why all the books in the Writings are sometimes lumped together under the title “the Psalms”.

All of these books were probably composed or compiled after the exile, when the Jews had returned from Babylon and resettled in a now-impoverished land. Esther and Daniel were the last to be written, perhaps as late as the second century BC. The Writings reminded the people of their glorious history and enhanced national pride. The oracles of the prophets reassured them that they could hope for a future matching their past.

Understanding the arrangement of the Hebrew Bible helps us to understand why Luke 24:44 refers to the Scriptures in terms of the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms. It also makes sense of Jesus’ words, “from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah” (Matt 23:35). The Hebrew Bible’s list of martyrs ranges from Abel, the first, to Zechariah, the last. This Zechariah is probably the priest mentioned in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22, which would have been the last book in the Hebrew Bible that Jesus used.

The Old Testament Canon

What criteria were used to decide which books to include in the Hebrew Bible? There were certainly some books that did not qualify for inclusion (e.g. the book of Jashar, mentioned in Joshua 10:13). It seems likely that books that agreed with the Torah or were related to it in some way made it into Scripture. For example, the history books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings would have been favoured because they used Deuteronomy as the benchmark for the evaluation of the judges and kings. It is also likely that books that were used in temple rituals and worship or at the main Jewish festivals eventually became part of Scripture. Examples are Psalms and the group called the Five Scrolls – Ruth read at the Feast of Weeks, Song of Songs read at Passover, Ecclesiastes read at the Feast of Tabernacles, Lamentations read on the anniversary of the destruction of Jerusalem, and Esther read at the Feast of Purim. Finally, all the books containing utterances by prophets that were seen to have been fulfilled would have been considered inspired and become part of the Hebrew Bible.

While it is true that Scripture is a collection of authoritative books because it is divinely inspired, it is equally true that Scripture is an authoritative collection of books because humans discerned this inspiration and acknowledged these books as sacred. For the most part, this must have happened gradually, with long-term community use sanctioning the sacred status of the books.

An Indian example of community endorsement of certain texts as sacred is the Bhagavad Gita, a 700-line discourse embedded in the narrative of the epic Mahabharata. Eventually, Hinduism came to see the Gita as a summary of its earlier sacred texts – the Upanishads – and claimed for the Gita a higher status than the Mahabharata itself.

Around the third century BC, scholars in Alexandria in Egypt made the first translation of the Hebrew sacred books into Greek, a work called the Septuagint. This was the Bible that Paul and the other apostles referred to when they were spreading the gospel in the Greek-speaking world of their day.

At some point in the second century BC the Hebrew Bible was formally declared to contain the twenty-two books we know as the OT. But the earlier Septuagint also included books such as Judith, Tobit, Sirach, the Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch, 1–2 Maccabees and additional portions of Esther and Daniel. When the church fathers officially declared which books were in the Christian OT, they favoured the longer list found in the Septuagint, and that is why these books were included in Bibles up to the time of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches have continued using variations of this longer form of the OT. However, the Reformers opted to separate these books into a category called the Apocrypha and to recognise only the twenty-two books that the Jews recognised as constituting the Hebrew Bible.

They reorganised them, grouping together all the books of history (Genesis to Esther), the books of poetry (Job to Song of Songs) and the books of prophecy (Isaiah to Malachi). They also broke some of the books into two (e.g. 1 and 2 Kings) and separated out the Twelve, so that they were no longer one book but the twelve books known as the Minor Prophets. The result is that although the Christian Bible now contains the same books as the Hebrew Bible, the Jews would say that it contains twenty-two books, where Christians identify thirty-nine books.

While the books of the Apocrypha are not regarded as equal to the sacred Scriptures, they were still accepted as useful reading. For an Indian parallel of double-tiered sacred literature, Hinduism has its two categories. Shruti or “heard” literature such as the Vedas and Upanishads, are supposedly divinely revealed to the human ear. The lower tier covers the smriti or “remembered” texts, containing the wisdom of later sages. In a somewhat similar manner, Muslims distinguish between the Qur’an and the Hadith.

The Protestant canon’s lower tier, the Apocrypha, was written in the four centuries between the close of the OT and the start of the NT.

These books thus give us information about the history and developing theology of those centuries. Concepts like resurrection, for example, which are barely mentioned in the OT but are extensively treated in the NT, begin to develop in the books of the Apocrypha.

The thirty-nine books of the OT were those that Jesus and the apostles used. These are the Scriptures that 2 Timothy 3:16 endorses as “God-breathed”. As such, they remain “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that all God’s people may be thoroughly equipped for every good work”.

Havilah Dharamraj