The “Old Testament”

Everybody knows that the Old Testament is the “Jewish” part of the Bible. I’ve written earlier about the fact that “the Bible” means three different things to Jews, Catholics, and Protestants. Now it’s time to clarify another misconception that many people share: that the Jewish Bible consists of the Old Testament alone.

It’s true, of course, that none of the books of the New Testament or Apocrypha are part of the Jewish Bible. But that doesn’t mean that what is left is the Old Testament. Here’s why:

• First, of course, “Old” Testament implies the existence of a “New” Testament, which Jews don’t in fact accept. (Exactly why Christians call these parts of their Bible “Testaments” will be the subject of a later post.) That is why some considerate Christians have begun to refer to this part of their Bible as “the Primary Testament” or (awkwardly) “the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.” So Jews who refer to their Bible as “the Old Testament” are speaking from a non-Jewish perspective.

• But there’s a much more important reason not to call the Jewish Bible “the Old Testament.” It’s not just a matter of perspective; the contents of the two books are arranged in a different order. That means each one tells a different story.

The Old Testament starts (of course) with Genesis, and carries the historical story all the way through the book of Esther. Then there’s a short grouping of (mostly) poetic books, followed by the prophets, ending with Malachi.

The Jewish Bible starts out the same way as the Old Testament, and (with one slight change) follows the same order as far as the end of the book of Kings. But the Jewish Bible is not divided into history, poetry, and prophecy, but into Torah, Prophets, and Writings. (They’re capitalized because these three parts of the Bible each play a different role in Judaism; more on this in a later post.) So the first five books, from Genesis to Deuteronomy, constitute a section on their own. Then come the books of the “Prophets,” divided into a historical section and a prophetic section. Finally, the catch-all “Writings,” ending with Chronicles.

Both versions begin with the creation of the world. Here’s how the Old Testament ends:

Mal. 4:4*
Remember ye the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments. 5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: 6 And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

Then you turn the page, and the New Testament begins:

Matt. 1:1
The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

“Elijah” shows up in ch. 3, in the person of John the Baptist, and the Old Testament prophecies ending with Malachi begin to be fulfilled.

The Jewish Bible tells a very different story—it is a book not of fulfillment but of potential:

2Chr. 36: 22
And in the first year of King Cyrus of Persia, when the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah was fulfilled, the LORD roused the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia to issue a proclamation throughout his realm by word of mouth and in writing, as follows: 23 “Thus said King Cyrus of Persia: The LORD God of Heaven has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and has charged me with building Him a House in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Any one of you of all His people, the LORD his God be with him and let him go up.”

It ends with the beginning of the return from exile. The historical story told in the Bible actually continues (with the books of Ezra and Nehemiah), but the Bible itself ends as the Torah, its first and (for Jews) most important part ends—with the Jews on the point of returning to their homeland.
Bottom line? The Old Testament is arranged to introduce the New Testament. The (Jewish) Bible is arranged to introduce the Jews to a life in their land. So even though they contain the same material, they tell a very different story.

*(Jews will notice that there are 4 chapters in the Christian version of Malachi rather than 3—but that’s just because the chapters and verses are numbered a bit differently. More on this in a later post.)

Three Different Bibles

The headline at the top of this blog claims that I’m “The Bible Guy.” So maybe it’s time for me to explain what I mean by “the Bible.”

If I buy a copy of Huckleberry Finn or Don Quixote or David Copperfield, I know what’s going to be inside the cover. More to the point, I also know what I’m getting when I pick up a Qur’an or a Book of Mormon. But “the Bible” means different things to different people. Leaving aside the many variations that reflect different translation styles, there are three different books all called by different groups “the Bible”: a Jewish Bible, a Protestant Bible, and a Catholic Bible. Chronologically, the Catholic Bible should obviously come before the Protestant Bible. But I’m going to introduce the Bibles in order of size, from the smallest to the largest.

• The Jewish Bible
The books in the Jewish Bible are the oldest. The writings here date from the 12th century BCE to the 2nd century BCE. (More on the use of BCE/CE rather than BC/AD in a later post.) All of them were originally written in Hebrew, with the exception of two chapters in Ezra and six chapters in Daniel, which are written in Aramaic, a cousin language to Hebrew. (Some scholars have suggested that a few of the other books were originally written in Aramaic as well, but we’ll leave these technical discussions aside for now.) All of the books in the Jewish Bible are found in the two Christian Bibles as well, though they are arranged in a different order there. With just three exceptions, all of these books focus on the (somewhat rocky) love affair between God and the Jewish people.

• The Protestant Bible
The Protestant Bible has all of the books of the Jewish Bible plus a separate section of books dating from the mid-1st to mid-2nd centuries CE and written originally in Greek. (Again, some scholars believe that one or two of these may have originally been written in Hebrew or Aramaic.) These books are “The New Testament,” focused on the life of Jesus and on the early history of the religion that developed into the Christianity that we know today. In either kind of Christian Bible, the books of the Jewish Bible are grouped into a collection called “The Old Testament,” contrasting with the New Testament.

• The Catholic Bible
The Catholic Bible is the biggest of the three. But instead of adding yet newer books to the Old and New Testaments of the Protestant Bible, instead it fills the gap in between them with the Apocrypha. This is Jewish literature of the “intertestamental” period—the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE. Most of it was written in Hebrew or Aramaic, but two of the books were written in Greek. These books were outside the canon of the Hebrew Bible, but were preserved in the Greek translations of the Bible that were used by the early Christians. However, when Jerome prepared a new Latin version of the Bible, he made a translation directly from the Hebrew text—which did not contain these extra books. They were nonetheless accepted as part of the Christian Bible, but fell into a different category than the “Old Testament.” According to James Charlesworth (writing in the Anchor Bible Dictionary) in the 16th century Martin Luther moved them to the end of his Old Testament translation and labeled them Apocrypha; meanwhile, the Catholics declared them part of the Christian Bible on April 8, 1546, at the Council of Trent.

That means that a Catholic Bible—the most inclusive–contains three different parts. Here’s a chart of who accepts what:

Jews: “Old Testament”*
Catholics: Old Testament, Apocrypha, New Testament
Protestants: Old Testament, New Testament

*As noted, the Old Testament contains the same books as the Jewish Bible, but in a different order.

The interesting thing about this chart (for me) is that both the Jews and the Catholics—the groups whose religions rely largely on a later group of sacred writings (rabbinic literature for Jews, patristic literature for Catholics) have a Bible that maintains historical continuity from beginning to end. The Catholic Bible does not have the same linguistic continuity that the Jewish Bible has, but here too the Apocrypha bridge the gap with books from the period when Jewish literature was expanding from Hebrew into Greek. The Protestants, whose sola scriptura perspective was a major cause of the break with Catholicism, have a Bible with a big chronological and linguistic gap in between its two sections.

The bottom line is that the Bible is a unique book. You may open someone else’s copy of it and discover that books you expected to find are missing, or that books you don’t consider to be part of the Bible are there.

So, caveat emptor. When someone calls himself “The Bible Guy,” you always have to ask which Bible he talking about. In my case—though I expect to write about Apocrypha and New Testament topics from time to time—“the Bible” is the Jewish Bible.

The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism by Adele Berlin

Book #8 on my curriculum of 10 is The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism by Adele Berlin. And consider this post itself a mini-”Beginners’ Guide” to parallelism.

“Parallelism” is the basic element of biblical poetry. It plays a role something like what rhyme did for so long in English-language poetry, creating a rhythm that matches two different lines. For a quick introduction, consult “Reading Biblical Poetry,” 2097-2104 in The Jewish Study Bible, book #1 on my list. Here’s a quick example to demonstrate:

Deut 32:1

O heavens, | give ear | and let me speak;
Let the earth | hear | the sayings of my mouth.

The first line takes three words in Hebrew; the second line “matches” each one of them:
1 “Earth” matches “heavens” because they are an obvious (biblical) pair.
2 “Hear” matches “give ear” because the two verbs mean (more or less) the same thing.
3 “The sayings of my mouth” matches “let me speak” because both phrases refer to what the poet is going to say.

The “matching” effect is so strong that this phenomenon sometimes used to be called “thought-rhyme.”

We owe our English expression “a voice crying in the wilderness” to Matt 3:3, which misread Isa 40:3.

Matt 3:3

This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.’” (NRSV translation)

But parallelism shows that “in the wilderness” should be inside the quotation marks:

Isa 40:3

  A voice cries out:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” (also NRSV)

Again, line B “matches” line A (though not in exactly the same order):
1 “In the desert” matches “in the wilderness.”
2 “Make straight” matches “prepare.”
3 “A highway” matches “the way.”
4 “Our God” matches “the LORD.”

Note that even the quotation in Matthew reads the Isaiah verse with poetic parallelism—but moving “in the wilderness” outside the quotation marks led Matthew to drop “in the desert” from line 2 of the Isaiah verse.

Berlin’s book describes the manifold ways in which this technique is used to create poetry in the Bible. She’s a good writer, but if the technical language or the Hebrew there is too much for you, you might want to have a look at James Kugel’s The Idea of Biblical Poetry. The book is about the history of how biblical poetry has been understood, but the first chapter is another description of parallelism.

I hope eventually to present some biblical poems myself; watch this space!

Bible and Torah

This week, a break from my Ten Best Books list to start a new series of posts that I’ll label “Beginner’s Guides.”

In my discussion of Who Wrote the Bible? I noted the following:

It’s too bad the book is called “Who Wrote the Bible?” when it is really mostly about who wrote the Pentateuch; but I’ll have more to say on this topic another time.

As promised, here is that discussion. I’ll leave for yet another occasion the differences between the Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic Bibles. What I’m writing about today is the fact that lots of Jews seem to use the words “Bible” and “Torah” interchangeably. The culprit here — if you’ll excuse the expression — is the word “Torah.” It can be used to refer to:
•  Jewish learning in general, including what I’ll have to say later this week on Torah Talk;
• the “Oral Torah”: the books of classical rabbinic literature: Mishnah, Talmud, and the various midrashim, as opposed to the “Written Torah”: the books of the Jewish Bible;
• the Pentateuch, a/k/a “Chumash,” that is, the Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

In my Hebrew-English JPS Tanakh, those first five books — labeled “Torah” — take 454 pages out of 2023. That’s somewhere between 1/4 and 1/5 of the entire Bible. When I ask people to bring a “Bible” to class they often bring a Chumash instead by mistake. The reason, of course, is that every synagogue has dozens of Chumashim available. But it’s pretty hard to find a Bible in most synagogues. The Bible, however, contains not only the Five Books of Moses, but also (from a Jewish perspective) the Prophets and the Writings, or (from a Christian perspective) books of history, literature, and prophecy. (I’ll save the differences between the Jewish Bible and the Christian Old Testament for another Beginner’s Guide entry.)

Why is Friedman’s book called Who Wrote the Bible? rather than Who Wrote the Torah? or Who Wrote the Pentateuch? Don’t know whether it was he or his publisher who made the choice, but it seems obvious to me that this was a marketing decision. “Bible” is a far more recognizable word (and of course the subject of the book does have some bearing on who wrote other texts in the Bible than those of the Pentateuch). I’m just sorry that it adds to the confusion for those who can’t properly distinguish the two terms.

The potential confusion is somewhat worse in the case of Friedman’s later book, The Bible with Sources Revealed (2003), which bears the subtitle “A New View into the Five Books of Moses.” Again: the Five Books of Moses make up the Pentateuch, NOT the entire Bible; they are one part of the Bible, and a fairly small one at that. (This quibble aside, it’s a quite useful book, though not all of his source identifications should be taken as — you should excuse the expression — gospel.)

I add for those who don’t believe this confusion exists the story of a synagogue president in New England — told me by a friend who was hired as High Holiday rabbi there. The president opened the Ark to show my friend the synagogue’s three Torah scrolls. He apologized: “We don’t have a lot of money. But we’re hoping one day to have all five.”

(My friend assured him that each scroll had all five books of the Torah = Chumash = Pentateuch, but the synagogue president wouldn’t believe him.)

James Kugel’s book How to Read the Bible does something similar to Friedman’s, but for a different reason that’s worth thinking about. Kugel does talk about the entire Bible, but (as I pointed out) in far different proportions that did Marc Brettler in his book of the same name. As I said in last week’s post, Kugel is interested not merely in the texts that make up the Bible, but in “The Bible” as it has affected our cultural history. The stories of Genesis carry far greater weight in our culture than do those in the book of Kings. (Everyone understands that a drawing of a naked man, a naked woman, and a tree with a snake in it is about the “Adam and Eve” story.) That’s why half of Kugel’s book Traditions of the Bible is about Genesis.

In my Commentators’ Bible project, I began — in fact, it was at Marc Brettler’s suggestion — with Exodus, rather than Genesis, because it would be a little less intimidating. Now I’m continuing on with Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy before returning to complete the first part of the project with Genesis. I can testify that people have been asking me for five years, “When are you going to do Genesis?” and no one ever asked me, “When are you going to do Leviticus?” But Leviticus is as much as part of the Torah, and the Bible, as Genesis is.

By the same token, books like Habakkuk or Ecclesiastes may not be part of the “Torah” (if by that word you mean the Pentateuch/Chumash), but they are indeed part of the Bible. I mentioned last week that, for Kugel, all the texts are biblical, but some are more biblical than others. In fact, this is true for almost all of us. Even Bible-thumping fundamentalists will have parts of the Bible that they thump frequently and other parts that they read rarely, if ever, and that don’t figure much into their thinking. Part of what I hope will eventually happen on this blog is that I’ll begin to highlight some of the less familiar texts that are, nonetheless, also “Bible.”

[Note: If you have suggestions or requests for a "Beginner's Guide" entry, send 'em in.]