“Spinning” the Bible

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Most people think that the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible are two names for the same thing. Actually, they are quite different, as I shall show—even though all of the books of the Hebrew Bible are indeed included in the Old Testament: Protestant Bibles contain all the same books as the Hebrew Bible; Roman Catholic Bibles have several additional books as well. Structurally, however, the two collections—the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible—are by no means the same. The difference in the order of the books gives each collection its own powerful yet divergent message.

Before getting into the details, however, I must tell you that I don’t like to use the term Old Testament when speaking of the books of the Hebrew Bible that are included in Christian Scriptures. “Old Testament” seems to imply something outmoded or superseded by the New Testament. So for many years, I have referred to these two collections of ancient books as the First Testament and the Second Testament. Recently other scholars have begun to adopt this nomenclature. Perhaps someday it may catch on more widely.

My reason for avoiding the term Old Testament relates to the history of how the two Testaments came to be canonized as Christian Scriptures.

In the late fourth century, when the church father Jerome translated Christian Scriptures into Latin (the “vulgar” or widespread language of the day, hence the name Vulgate for his translation), he used Hebrew texts available to him in Bethlehem, where he was studying with a local rabbi. Jerome wanted to 024translate the books of the Jewish canon directly from Hebrew into Latin.

Even earlier, when Latin was gradually replacing Greek in the western churches, Latin Bible translations had been made from old Greek translations commonly called the Septuagint. The Septuagint (often abbreviated LXX) had been translated from Hebrew in pre-Christian times in Alexandria, Egypt, where a sizable Jewish community had lived for centuries.^a These early Latin translations were thus translations of translations. These texts are commonly called the Vetus Latina, or Old Latin (abbreviated OL).

In 382 Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome to produce an authoritative Latin Bible that would eventually replace the Septuagint and the Old Latin. For those books included in the Christian First Testament but not in the Jewish canon—commonly called deuterocanonical (meaning secondary canon) by Catholics and apocryphal by Protestants—Jerome used both the Septuagint and the Old Latin as the base of his new work.

But for those books that were included in the Jewish canon, Jerome adhered to a principle called Hebraica Veritas, the true Hebrew text. His devotion to Hebraica Veritas was based on what he perceived as an advantage in the ongoing debates between Jews and Christians over crucial differences in interpretation of Scripture. Jerome wanted the text of the original Hebrew forms of the First Testament to be available to Christians.

Jerome placed those books that were not in the Jewish canon in a separate, deuterocanonical section of the Vulgate. He called the longer LXX portions of Esther and Daniel not found in the Jewish versions of those books Addenda ad Esther and Addenda ad Daniel. The reason most Protestants today have only the books of the Jewish canon in their First Testament is that Martin Luther, in the 16th century, agreed with Jerome. Luther placed the deuterocanonical books, which he called the Apocrypha, and which included the “additions” to Esther and Daniel, in a separate section. The Catholic Church never took this step.

But this does not explain how Christianity came to adopt the books of the Jewish Bible as part of its own canon. In the late second century, a dispute arose among Christians over what books should be considered authoritative, or canonical. Due largely to the acerbic character of the debate between Christians and Jews over the interpretation of passages in Jewish Scripture crucial to Christian beliefs, a certain Marcion contended that only the Gospel of Luke and some letters of Paul should be included. Marcion held that Christians should not include any of the Jewish canon in their Bible. Marcion’s position was soon rejected. But the impetus among Christians to retain the Jewish Scriptures as part of the Christian Bible and to create a double-testament Bible, in reaction to Marcion and others like him, advanced the growing Christian conviction in the second and third centuries that Christianity had superseded Judaism as God’s true Israel.¹ Keeping the Jewish Scriptures as part of the double-testament Bible was anything but pro-Jewish in terms of these ongoing debates between Christians and Jews over exegesis of the First Testament—or in terms of the ongoing debates within Christianity between Jewish and gentile Christianity.

Jerome argued that the churches should have a translation directly from the Hebrew. In this respect his view was much the same as that of the Alexandrian theologian Origen. A century earlier, in his Hexapla, Origen had set the Hebrew text of the Jewish Scriptures alongside the various Greek translations. But neither Jerome nor Origen acted out of sympathy or respect for Jewish readings of Scripture. By declaring the Hebrew text of the Jewish Scriptures authoritative, Origen and Jerome were countering Jewish arguments outside the church as well as pro-Jewish or Judaizing arguments within it. Christianity had started out as a hellenized form of Judaism but had become increasingly Greco-Roman in thought and expression as churches moved westward. Struggles between Jewish and Greco-Roman strains of Christians developed early and continued well into the second and third centuries. The upshot was the growing conviction by both groups of Christians that Christianity had superseded Judaism and become God’s true Israel. The double-testament Bible underscored this conviction; jettisoning the First Testament would have eventually eliminated both the debate and the force of the conviction. This 025history may help explain why I prefer to use the terms First Testament and Second Testament.

Let’s return to the difference between the Old Testament (as I shall still call it when I am speaking of what the church called—and still calls—this collection) and the Jewish Scriptures, or Hebrew Bible. Structurally they are quite different; they are in fact different canons. The received Jewish canon, the Tanach, as the Hebrew Bible is called, is tripartite in structure, while the received canon of the First Christian Testament is quadripartite in structure. The structure of each dictates the interpretive lens (or hermeneutic) through which each is read in the respective believing communities. This is most evident—and most poignant—in the Protestant canon of the Old Testament as compared to the Tanach because, as noted earlier, they both have the same Hebrew text base. Despite their having the same text base and the same contents, however, the Protestant First Testament and the Tanach convey quite different messages precisely because of their different structures. And all the other Christian canons are basically the same as the Protestant structure.

The three parts of the Hebrew Bible are (1) the Torah (the Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses); (2) the Prophets, which is divided into the Former Prophets (actually historical books—Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings) and the Latter Prophets (the literary prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel—and the Book of the Twelve—the minor prophets); and (3) the 026Writings. The Hebrew term “Tanach” is actually an acronym formed from the first letter of the Hebrew words for these three divisions (Torah, Nevi’im and Ketuvim—that is, Pentateuch, Prophets and Writings).

The quadripartite First Testament includes (1) the Pentateuch, with the same five books as the Hebrew Bible, in the same order; (2) the historical books, including the Former Prophets of the Hebrew Bible followed by the historical books found in the Writings; (3) the rest of the Writings; and (4) the Literary Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and the Twelve).

A major difference between the Jewish and Christian canons is the position of the Latter Prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve. As we will see, this results in a significant difference in interpretation. A second major difference between the two canons relates to the tendency in the Christian canon to lengthen the story line, or history, that begins in Genesis. In the Jewish canon the story that starts in Genesis ends at the close of 2 Kings with the defeat of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah at the hands of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, respectively. The Jews are now exiled from their land.

In the Christian First Testament, Ruth is treated as a historical book and is inserted after the Book of Judges and before the Books of Samuel. And the history does not end with the Books of Kings. In the First Testament, Kings is followed by Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah and Esther, and in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles by Judith, Tobit and the Maccabees as well.

Each of these major differences in structure makes a clear statement of its own.

In the Jewish canon, the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve) come immediately after the historical narrative to explain the risings and fallings, the victories and defeats, the weal and the woe that had happened since God’s promise to make the descendants of Abraham and Sarah a great nation (Genesis 12:1–7). The venture began with this promise, which was completely fulfilled in the time of Solomon (1 Kings 10) but had clearly failed by the end of Kings. In the tripartite Jewish canon, the Prophets play the crucial role of explaining the uses of adversity in the hands of One God.

In the quadripartite Christian canon, the Prophetic corpus comes last, after (1) the Pentateuch, (2) the historical books, and (3) the wisdom books, or Writings. Only then do we read (4) the Prophets. Moreover, the Book of Daniel, which is in the Writings in the Jewish canon, is in the Prophets in the Christian canon (between Ezekiel and the Twelve).

The function of the Prophets in the Christian canon is not so much to explain God’s uses of adversity as to point to Jesus Christ. Although the words of the Prophets, even in the Septuagint text, are 027broadly the same, the intertextual structure conveys quite a different hermeneutic; it is this hermeneutic which determines how the text is read by believers.

Not only is the prophetic corpus placed last in the Christian canon (in order to point to the Gospel of Jesus Christ), the second, historical section provides the churches with a story line that begins with the Creation and extends far enough through history so that the Gospels and Acts (the Christian sacred history) could be appended to that long-established history. This structure supported the developing Christian argument that the God of Creation was the God incarnate in Jesus Christ, the same God who had abandoned the old ethnic Israel and adopted the new universal Israel in Jesus Christ and the Church. In this sense, the placement of the Prophets at the end of the Christian canon not only pointed to God’s work in Jesus Christ and the church, it also supported the Christian argument, current at the time the canon was being formed, that God had rejected the old Israel in favor of Christ and the church, God’s New Israel.

By contrast, the third section of the Jewish Tanach, the Writings, made an entirely different kind of statement. The Writings (Ketuvim) served well a Judaism that was retreating from the rest of the world after three disastrous defeats at the hands of Rome in Palestine alone: the War of Varus, after the death of Herod in 4 B.C.E.; the Jewish War (66–70 C.E.), which effectively ended with the destruction of the Temple and the burning of Jerusalem (although the Zealots on Masada held out until 73 C.E.); and the Bar-Kokhba Revolt (132–135 C.E.), which ended in utter disaster for Palestinian Judaism.

Various parts of the Writings reflect on past history, including Daniel and his friends in the royal court of long ago Babylon. This placement of Daniel in the Writings of the Jewish canon provided an entirely different hermeneutic by which to read and reflect on the text. In the Jewish canon, Daniel serves as a lesson to all Jews living in foreign, hostile environments. The book encourages them to refuse to abandon belief in God, even if they must suffer unbearable punishment for doing so, because God is in charge of all history. Placed among the Prophets in the Christian canon, however, the later chapters of Daniel dominate the whole book, which was read instead as a visionary foretelling of God’s interventions to bring about the end of history.

In the Jewish canon, the Writings, even with their many reflections on past history, supported the 028movement of surviving rabbinic Judaism to depart from history in order to live in closed communities where they could pursue lives of obedience and service to a God who had come to seem remote and ineffable. Undoubtedly, one reason for the rapid spread of Christianity was its contrasting message that God had just been sighted walking the hills of Galilee.

The Greek translation known as the Septuagint was originally made for the Jews in Alexandria but later became the basis of the Christian Old Testament. I wonder how the Greek translations of the Jewish Scriptures developed in areas outside Christian control and transmission. Unfortunately, all the codices of Greek translations like the Septuagint come to us from ancient Christian communities, precisely from the time when the Jewish-Christian debates were most acerbic and when the debates within the church between pro-Jewish and pro-gentile understandings of Christianity most influenced emerging normative Christianity. These Christian codices show differing orders of the books. Perhaps even in Jewish circles there was a tendency to pull all the so-called historical books into a lengthened story line. Doing so might have been in the interest of pre-Christian Judaism in its ongoing dialogue with Greco-Roman culture, bolstering its image as a people with a long and worthy history that compared well with the Greek epics of Hesiod and Homer. If that indeed occurred, the Christian canon of the Old Testament would already have had a start in the direction it would eventually take in this regard and could easily have been adapted and resignified for Christian purposes. But unfortunately this is only speculation 029and cannot be demonstrated one way or the other.

We would very much like to know when Judaism adopted its tripartite division and Christianity its quadripartite division. But the evidence is unclear.

Until about 30 years ago there was a widely accepted view of the formation of the Jewish tripartite canon: The Pentateuch had become canon by about 400 B.C.E. and the Prophets (Former and Latter) by 200 B.C.E., but the Writings were not explicitly canonized until a rabbinic council convened at Yavneh (Jamnia) after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. and before the Bar-Kokhba Revolt in 132–135 C.E. In 1964, however, Jack P. Lewis published a study that investigated all the passages in rabbinic literature mentioning the gathering of the rabbis at Yavneh.² He found little or no support for the idea that this assembly was a canonizing council. Lewis showed that the notion of a canonizing council in Judaism at such an early date had been read into the passages where Yavneh is mentioned. Lewis’s work has been almost universally accepted as a needed corrective.

While it remains uncertain exactly when the Jewish canon became specifically tripartite and the Christian quadripartite, it seems clear that the basic structure, if not the text itself, of the Torah and the Prophets was relatively stable as Jewish Scripture by the end of the fifth century B.C.E., while the Writings did not become so until Judaism cut itself off from the world, so to speak, to live in stasis as scattered rabbinic communities some time after the Bar-Kokhba Revolt.³

At this point, it is necessary to introduce the evidence from Qumran—the Dead Sea Scrolls—to see what part these texts play in our conclusions and to determine the limits of this evidence.

Even though more than 200 different biblical manuscripts (almost all extremely fragmentary) have been recovered from the Qumran caves, these texts tell us next to nothing about the order of the books. The codex—what we would call a book, as opposed to a scroll—did not come into widespread use until the late second century in Christianity, and as late as the sixth century in Judaism. (In synagogue worship, Jews still read from scrolls.) The biblical manuscripts from Qumran are all scrolls. They contain only single books, except for the Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets, so we can learn nothing from them about the order of the books.

But a canon involves not only a list of books in a certain order, but also the authority of the texts within a believing community. A text may be authoritative even before it is stabilized; indeed it may be authoritative even before it is written down, when it is still part of an oral tradition. In these terms the Qumran corpus has much to tell us. Here I will limit myself to three observations.

(1) As late as the first century C.E., what books were authoritative (or canonical) remained an open question even though the books of the Torah and the Prophets were clearly included.

(2) The texts remained relatively fluid even though they may have been considered canonical.

(3) Because Judaism was so multifarious at the time, different Jewish groups considered different texts authoritative.

The Temple Scroll (or Torah Scroll) published by the late Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin is only one text that may or may not have been canonical for the Qumran sectarians—and possibly for other Jewish groups.⁴ Yadin considered this matter in his editio princeps, but neither he nor any later scholar has arrived at a clear answer.

One of the striking characteristics of even nonbiblical texts from Qumran literature is actually typical of Jewish literature of the period generally: It is markedly scriptural in composition. That is, when new literature was being conceived, it was written in scriptural terms and rhythms. My teacher at Hebrew Union College, the late Samuel Sandmel, often remarked that Torah is Judaism and Judaism is Torah and until one comes to terms with that observation one cannot grasp what Judaism is about. Sandmel meant Torah in the broad sense of Torah and all traditions that flow from it. Jewish literature was written scripturally.

At the same time, there was considerable room for variations in texts. In short, Scripture at that time was still in a stage of limited fluidity. Scribes and translators were free to make Scripture comprehensible to the communities they served. This has always been true of tradents of Scripture.

I pause to define tradents. This is both necessary and important because it is a word used by scholars in connection with biblical textual criticism, but it is not found even in unabridged dictionaries. It refers to someone who studies or preserves tradition. The old term for such a person was traditionist, but this was too often confused with traditionalist, that is, one who wants to make the present look like the past. Tradents, on the other hand, examine and process traditions for their own time. Thus, all scribes, translators, commentators, midrashists and even preachers are tradents.

It is now clear that all tradents of Scripture have had two responsibilities—to the text and to their community, that is, to the community’s past and to its present. A tradent inevitably brings the past into the present in contemporary terms.

The tradents who produced the Qumran texts were still working in a time of at least limited 044textual fluidity—as evidenced by the variations among the Qumran biblical scrolls. This contrasts with scrolls from the period after the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. These later texts, a number of which have been found in wadis (dried riverbeds) south of Qumran and at Masada, show considerably less fluidity.

A picture is beginning to emerge in which earlier biblical texts were relatively fluid, while texts dating after the first century C.E. were relatively, and amazingly, stable and markedly proto-Masoretic (the Masoretic text is the textus receptus of the Jewish Bible). During the first century C.E., there was a distinct move from a limited fluidity in treatment of Scripture to rather marked stability. (A similar shift from relative fluidity to relative stability took place in Second Testament manuscripts in the early fourth century C.E., when Christianity emerged as a dominant cultural factor in the Roman Empire.)⁵

One example will illustrate the limited fluidity of Scripture during the Qumran period. The large Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave 11, which I unrolled and edited, has non-Masoretic compositions in it. And the order of the psalms in the last third of the Psalter differs from that in the Masoretic text. The Psalter, like the Writings, must have been open-ended in the first century C.E.⁶

One of the most important things the scrolls have taught us is that early Judaism was pluralistic; that is, the Judaism that existed before the end of the first century C.E., before surviving Pharisaism evolved into what we call rabbinic Judaism, came in a variety of modes.⁷ This is so much the case that Professors Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton speak of the “Judaisms” of the period, and they refer to the early Christian movement as a new Judaism.⁸ Prior to the discovery of the scrolls, a thesis by George Foot Moore held sway. He proposed that there was a normative Judaism, which found expression in Pharisaism, and that over against it was heterodox Judaism, which produced what we call the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha.⁹ Moore’s view no longer holds.

The scrolls have taught us that significant numbers of Jewish groups disagreed with the Pharisaic/rabbinic position that prophecy or revelation had ceased in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. The Qumran sectarians were one such group. The nascent Christians were another. That perhaps explains why rabbinic Judaism, in contrast to the Qumran community, has not illuminated the origins of Christianity as much as some would like. The Qumran community shows us a Jewish sect that believed, as Christianity also does, that revelation had not ceased but that God was continuing to reveal God’s will to God’s people.¹⁰ Likewise, the scrolls tell us that the Qumran leader, the Teacher of Righteousness, possessed the true raz (mystery/revelation) with which to interpret Scripture, just as Paul claimed an equivalent God-given mysterion (Romans 11:25, 16:25; 1 Corinthians 2:1, 4:1) and Matthew claimed to have special training that allowed him to bring out of Scripture what he called “treasure” (Matthew 13:52) and what Luke called the kleis, or “key,” to understanding Scripture (Luke 15:2). Both the Qumran sect and Christianity claimed that they lived at or near the end-time, and both shared a common hermeneutic whereby to understand Scripture: (1) Scripture spoke to the end-time; (2) they lived at the end of time; and (3) therefore Scripture spoke directly to them through special revelation.¹¹ This is the same basic 045hermeneutic by which eschatologists and apocalypticists read Scripture even today.

Rabbinic Judaism, as it developed after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, proceeded quite differently. The Writings provided surviving rabbinic Judaism with the scriptural basis to affirm that God had already departed from history and become remote and that revelation had ceased already at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. This view would explain the disastrous defeat of Bar-Kokhba (despite Rabbi Akiba’s messianic claims for him) and would also explain the need to close ranks around the basic concept of rabbinic Judaism: A Jew was called to the service of God, and rabbinic Judaism was the correct way to express that service (‘avodah).

Until the true Messiah came, all speculation or “prophecy” about what God would do next was essentially non-Jewish. Halakhah (religious law, or walking the way of God’s Torah) was now the essence of Judaism.

Most people think that the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible are two names for the same thing. Actually, they are quite different, as I shall show—even though all of the books of the Hebrew Bible are indeed included in the Old Testament: Protestant Bibles contain all the same books as the Hebrew Bible; Roman Catholic Bibles have several additional books as well. Structurally, however, the two collections—the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible—are by no means the same. The difference in the order of the books gives each collection its own powerful yet divergent message. Before getting into […]