Jews and Christians

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Christians typically view the Old Testament prophets as individualists, as religious geniuses and defiant rebels, driven by their own personal experiences with God, answering to no one, and obedient only to their own inner voice. In Jewish tradition, however, the prophets are enforcers of God’s law—or torah—on earth.

The difference is so striking, one might wonder whether Jews and Christians are even reading the same books. But the content of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible is more or less the same as in the Christian Old Testament. So what accounts for this disparity? Why do Jews and Christians read the Bible so differently?

The difference is not insignificant: I believe that in this difference may lie, in part, the roots of Christian anti-Semitism.

The difference is immediately apparent when we open any Bible to its Table of Contents (see the sidebar to this article). If it’s a Jewish Bible, whether in Hebrew or in English (or in my native German), it is clearly divided into three sections. The first is the Torah or Pentateuch—the Five Books of Moses. The second is Nebi’im, or Prophets, which in Jewish tradition includes the Former Prophets—Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings—and the Latter Prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Book of the Twelve, the so-called Minor Prophets. The third section is, in Hebrew, Ketubim, or Writings.

Christian Bibles, in all traditions and languages, have a different structure: The most striking difference is that the Latter Prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve—have been plucked out of the 026middle of the Old Testament and placed at the end, after the Writings. We don’t know when the change occurred: These prophets (sometimes called the literary prophets), are found at the end of the Old Testament in even the earliest Christian Bibles, which date from the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. So there is no way to know how the change was made or who was responsible for it.

We can, however, make a good guess about why the shift occurred: so that the Old Testament prophets are juxtaposed with the New Testament Gospels in which their prophecies are, in Christian tradition, fulfilled.^a

It might seem to serve the aims of the Christian story nicely to reorder the books in this way, but, in fact, this altered placement has led Christians to miss the Jewish context of the prophetic message. It has also encouraged a kind of anti-Semitism. As Henry Levinson of Harvard Divinity School recently put it:

Ketubim [the Writings, coming at the end of the Hebrew Bible] ends with God and Israel sufficiently reconciled to one another to allow for large life. Reordering the Hebrew Bible in the Christian Old Testament way, with Nebi’im at the end, left Israel and God alienated from one another. The Old Testament finishes up with Israel requiring prophets to rail at them for their rebellion against God, creating a spiritual distance and vacuum that virtually begs for the good news of the New Testament, the incarnation of God in Christ Jesus, and so the gracious drawing-near of God to humankind. And then the New Testament pictures the Jews, especially Scribes and Pharisees, that is, rabbis, as pathetic followers of the letter, rather than the spirit of God’s law.¹

Placing the Prophets at the end of the Old Testament has also encouraged the understanding of them as radical reformers in opposition to the existing tradition—that is, as rugged individuals.

At least since the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, Protestant theologians and Bible scholars have used the Hebrew prophets to buttress their own view of their mission of reform. Protestant Reformers regarded a Hebrew prophet as “a radical, a religious individualist pitted against the ‘establishment,’ a proponent of new morality,” as one historian noted.² Reformers could then “cast themselves in the role of Old Testament prophets in opposing the institutional character of the Roman church,” in the words of another scholar.³ Carrying this self-identification one step further, the Reformers would eventually describe themselves as opposed even to the institutions of their own churches and, indeed, to any institutions at all.

Three hundred years later, this same thread was picked up by one of the most famous 19th-century Bible scholars, Julius Wellhausen. It was he who elaborated Karl Heinrich Graf’s earlier suggestion that the Pentateuch was composed of four separate authorial strands—called J or the Yahwist (Jahwist in German) after the personal name of God (YHWH, or Yahweh) used in this strand; E, or the Elohist, who uses a more 027generalized term (Elohim) for God; P, the Priestly Code, which makes up much of Leviticus; and D, which stands for Deuteronomist and consists of much of the Book of Deuteronomy. With relatively slight modifications, the JEPD theory, also called the documentary hypothesis, has held up remarkably well. Most every mainline critical Bible scholar adheres to it today.^b

Wellhausen saw P (the Priestly Code) as a late composition that degraded the Israelite religion by introducing institutions of law and ritual that lacked any ethical, moral or spiritual elevation.^c This degraded Judaism was saved, in Wellhausen’s view, by the gospel. That Wellhausen had little use for the law is reflected in his most famous book, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (first published in German in 1878), which described the JEPD theory.

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Wellhausen wrote:

In my early student days I was attracted by the stories of Saul and David, Ahab and Elijah; the discourses of Amos and Isaiah laid strong hold on me, and I read myself well into the prophetic and historical books of the Old Testament … [But] I had no thorough acquaintance with the Law, of which I was accustomed to be told that it was the basis and postulate of the whole literature. At last I took courage and made my way through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and even through Knobel’s Commentary to these books. But it was in vain that I looked for the light which was to be shed from this source on the historical and prophetical books. On the contrary, my enjoyment of the latter was marred by the Law; it did not bring them any nearer me, but intruded itself uneasily like a ghost that makes a noise indeed, but is not visible and really effects nothing … At last, in the course of a casual visit in Göttingen in the summer of 1867, I learned that Karl Heinrich Graf placed the Law later than the Prophets, and, almost without knowing his reason for the hypothesis, I was prepared to accept it; I readily acknowledged to myself the possibility of understanding Hebrew antiquity without the book of the Torah [Law].⁴

Wellhausen’s assessment shaped Protestant Old Testament scholarship for more than half a century. It became the basis for a fundamental distinction between 029the original “Israel,” which was dominated by intellectual and religious freedom, and the later “Judaism,” which was ruled by written law that suppressed that very freedom.

Obviously this kind of understanding of Judaism embodied an element of anti-Judaism—the specific Christian contribution to anti-Semitism. By no means was it the only source of anti-Semitism, but it is clearly one of the structural stones with which the edifice of anti-Semitism was built.

Even today, scholars identify the prophets as brilliant individualists who rebelled against the stultifying political, social and religious institutions of their day.^d In Rainer Albertz’s recent work, The History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, the prophets oppose everything around them. An entire chapter is devoted to what Albertz calls “The Prophetic Total-Opposition.”⁵ For example, the ninth-century B.C.E. prophet Elijah is depicted by Albertz as antimonarchic because of his opposition to the injustice King Ahab perpetrated on the landowner Naboth. The king arranged for Naboth’s death so that he could confiscate his vineyard (1 Kings 21:1–16). Through public and vocal opposition to this act (1 Kings 21:17–24), Elijah became—in Albertz’s view—a prophet in the strict sense.

What is wrong with this oppositional view of prophecy?

It suggests that the prophets had no relation whatsoever to any institutionalized religious law or traditions. Indeed, it brings into question the very existence of any such institutionalized law. But even in this early period of Israel’s history, there must have been certain rules, even laws, concerning social and religious norms.

When scholars debate this question they usually frame it in terms of institutional law rather than the biblical concept of torah, but the two are not the same. The concept of torah (not to be confused with the Torah, the first section of the Hebrew Bible) is much 031more than institutional law; it includes the entire phenomenon of the declaration and formulation of God’s will—in particular, God’s will towards Israel.

If we put the matter this way, it is obvious that the prophets fall completely within the scope of torah: They might seem like individualists, but they are in truth bound to the torah. God wants the people to do what he had commanded to them in his torah; the prophets preached this law, or torah. They were not outsiders; and their message contained nothing new—just that the people should follow the laws they had already received from God.

The concept of torah applies to all three parts of Hebrew Bible, not just the first section that shares its name. And it is what the prophets preached.

“From Zion shall go forth the torah and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,” proclaims Isaiah (Isaiah 2:3). And in the opening chapter of his prophecies, Isaiah tells the people to “Hear the word of the Lord” (Isaiah 1:10). In the last book of the last of the literary prophets, Malachi warns the people to “be mindful of the torah of my servant Moses” (Malachi 3:22). The Book of Psalms begins by telling us of the delights in “the torah of the Lord” (Psalm 1:2). Here we see the importance of the torah for the Hebrew Bible as a whole, as well as for the history of Israelite religion.⁶

It is impossible to understand the prophets without understanding the concept of torah. This is powerfully elucidated by the great German Bible critic Gerhard von Rad, who declared that the prophets preached law—that, indeed, they were the first to preach law. In this way, von Rad bridged the gap between prophets and law that Wellhausen had created. This was an important step out of the pattern that dominated modern Protestant Bible scholarship, toward a new understanding of the Hebrew Bible in its original Jewish context.

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Unfortunately, von Rad made this argument for a deleterious and offensive purpose: He argued that the prophets preached law destructively, leading to an end of God’s salvation history with Israel; in other words, because of Israel’s sins, God’s grace was lost. Von Rad interpreted the prophets and their message mainly in an eschatological sense: In the end, God will open a new future for Israel and for all mankind. This approach is obviously influenced by a Christian understanding of the relation of the Old Testament to the New—a pattern of “prophecy” and “fulfillment.” Needless to say, I do not agree with von Rad in this respect. Nevertheless, his interpretation of the relation of prophecy and law (or torah) is an important step on the way to freeing ourselves from the Wellhausian heritage of modern Protestant Bible scholarship and moving toward a new understanding of the Hebrew Bible in its original Jewish context.

True, there are many different kinds of formulations and explications of religion within Israel—but this is always the case, both within the prophetic literature and apart from it. Israelite religion is a complex phenomenon. But the prophets have no religion other than that of Israel in general. Unfortunately, this notion of a specific prophetic religion remains a typical element of modern Protestant theology. Usually this kind of imagined prophetic religion is understood as independent or even in opposition to the religion of Israel’s society in general. But if we understand the prophets as an integral part of biblical Israel, we should not ask how the prophets differ from the rest of Israel but how they specifically contributed to Israel’s religion and to its social and political life.

It is impossible to understand the prophets without the whole tradition of Israel’s religion. And it is likewise impossible to understand Israel’s religion without the prophets. This is particularly true for the relation of the prophets to the law—and of the law to the prophets. If Christians would take this approach, then the question of whether Christians and Jews are reading the same texts would no longer be a question.

Christians typically view the Old Testament prophets as individualists, as religious geniuses and defiant rebels, driven by their own personal experiences with God, answering to no one, and obedient only to their own inner voice. In Jewish tradition, however, the prophets are enforcers of God’s law—or torah—on earth. The difference is so striking, one might wonder whether Jews and Christians are even reading the same books. But the content of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible is more or less the same as in the Christian Old Testament. So what accounts for this disparity? Why do Jews and […]