Old Testament Insights: How the Heck Did We Get this Old Testament?

Christians believe that the Holy Spirit not only inspired the original authors of the Scriptures, but the editors and the communities that received them as well. This was a long process that ultimately culminated in what we call the “Canon.” “Canon” is from a Greek word meaning “measuring stick.” You could think of the canonical books as the books that measured up to the standards that these ancient religious communities used to determine what was especially inspired and what was less so.

This process was long and also complicated. In fact, we don’t really know all of the details about how the books in our Bible were composed, nor do we know much about how they came to be recognized as holy Scripture. When we talk about the formation of Canon, we should recognize four distinct processes: 1. the oral traditions that preceded many of our biblical narratives; 2. the original composition of the texts that were eventually included in our Canon; 3. the editing and redaction of these texts; and 4. the reception of these finished texts into the Canon.

Something that will help us appreciate this process is understanding a hierarchical principle of organization operating in the Hebrew Bible, in particular. The Jewish people organize the Hebrew Bible into three portions of descending authority, the Torah, Prophets, and Writings, (providing the letters for the acronym TaNaK, Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim). The Torah is supreme in Jewish life. Sabbath synagogue services are built around reading it as a community in a yearly cycle. In the same services, selections from the books of the Prophets are read as a sort of accompanying commentary on Torah. These books include everything from Joshua through the Minor Prophets. What is left are the Writings, the storage-closet of the Hebrew Bible, where everything else is kept until it is needed for liturgy. The most important of these books is the Psalms, used in daily prayer. The five Scrolls, Esther, Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Lamentations also are stored here for safe-keeping, until they are brought out for their respective feasts. But other things that hardly ever appear in Jewish liturgy are preserved here, as well: Proverbs, Job, Ezra and Nehemiah, and even Daniel. The collection closes with the two Books of Chronicles. These are all revered as Scripture. There is not a question of any of them being less inspired than Torah, even. But there is an importance that Torah bears that Daniel and the others cannot. Books like Daniel are there to help us better contemplate and live out Torah; it is decidedly not the other way around.

Let us think, then, of the Torah as the mountain peaks of this Old Testament revelation. The Prophets are the slopes leaning up towards their summits. The Writings are the foothills of these mountains. In fact, we might well consider the non-canonical literature revered by our spiritual ancestors, the collections of midrash and the writings of the Church Fathers, as the plains lying directly at the foot of this mountain range, for many of these have been recognized to have a certain measure of inspiration in their own right. All this other literature aids us in our approach to the towering majesty of Torah. And remembering this hierarchy will also help us better perceive why and how the Old Testament Canon formulated.

In the Beginning … Moses

The first step in the formation of the Canon is really Moses. Many biblical scholars take an extremely skeptical view of the stories surrounding Moses, and would not necessarily suppose that a historical Moses actually even existed. But for believers in Jesus, a historical Moses is virtually a matter of dogma. Jesus had a conversation with him on the Mount of Transfiguration, after all! Since the tradition remembers him as the great lawgiver, I think that we should receive that tradition as having at least a kernel of historical truth in it. (As we shall see, this doesn’t mean that Moses wrote nearly everything in the “Books of Moses”).

The period of Moses and the Exodus is disputed, but for our purposes here, we’ll accept the majority opinion, dating the Exodus to sometime in the 13th century BC. When Moses went up Mt. Sinai and received the revelation of the Law, this essentially began the long process of Old Testament composition. No doubt, many of the traditions of the Patriarchs that we read of in Genesis were passed down orally long before the birth of Moses, but Moses is the first of the prophets to be remembered as an author of texts. We can’t know for certain how much of the Torah he actually composed. Many of the laws in Exodus are obviously quite ancient; some of them virtually quote the code of Hammurabi, who flourished in the eighteenth century BC. I think we can say that the core of Torah can be traced back to Moses. This would include the Ten Commandments, especially, and much of the “Book of the Covenant” that is associated with it. This core of legal material is like a snowball that rolled through the centuries that followed, picking up more material here, losing a bit there, until it was published in its final edition as the law for Judah in the Persian period, by the scribal school of Ezra.

The School of the Prophets

A few centuries after Moses, around 1000 BC, a “school of prophets” emerged under Samuel. At this stage, prophecy was mostly an oral, extemporaneous affair, but these are the ancestors of the literary prophets who polished their craft and published their work as the pieces of literature that make up a large part of our Bible. Even at this stage, we can assume that the prophets preserved and passed down the traditions relating the history of Israel.

The Documentary Hypothesis

Some of these different traditions made up the distinct accounts and documents that later scholars label “Yahwist,” “Elohist,” “Priestly,” and “Deuteronomist” in the “Documentary Hypothesis.” This is the theory that developed, largely in 19th century Germany, that the books of Torah were composed from at least four sources. The Yahwist is characterized by its predilection for the divine name, Yahweh. The Elohist supposedly prefers to refer to God simply as “Elohim,” i.e., “God.” The Priestly source is made up of Leviticus and the sections of the Pentateuch that occupy themselves with rubrics, measurements, matters of purity, and maintaining all manner of distinctions and separations. Deuteronomy, with a style and theology all of its own, is the easiest to set apart as a distinct source.

I confess that I am rather skeptical that a Yahwist or Elohist ever existed. This is not to say that I reject the theory that various sources entered into the composition of the Torah. Rather, I suppose that there were a great many sources that were taken up and adapted by the editors of our Bible, and that the prehistory of our current text is hopelessly complex, to such an extent that whatever sources might have existed in the distant past are quite beyond recovery. I prefer the viewpoint of canonical criticism, which takes the finished product as its starting point. But to speak of distinct traditions in broad outline is quite feasible, and this is the approach with which we will proceed.

North and South

In 922 BC, a monumental event in Israel’s history occurred. Civil war broke out between the Northern Tribes and the Davidic King Rehoboam in Judah. Consequently, the sense of national unity that had kept the Twelve Tribes of Israel together was broken, and the traditions of the Northern Tribes became isolated, localized, and distinct from those of the Tribe of Judah in the South. Today we can detect such local traditions in the attention given to places like Bethel and Dan in the patriarchal narratives. These were shrines established by the rebel king, Jeroboam. Historians from Judah would have been very reluctant to pass down traditions that associated these places with the Patriarchs.

Only 200 years later, the Northern Kingdom was devastated by the Assyrians, and never recovered. (The Samaritans are descended from the few Hebrews who were left and the foreign peoples that Assyria moved in to colonize the territory). We have reason to believe that some of the Israelites from the North fled to Judah at this time. Among them would have been priests and prophets carrying their precious religious texts with them, including an early version of Deuteronomy. So, the two Israelite peoples and their traditions, isolated from one another for a few hundred years, were brought together again.

Reform and Exile

That early version of Deuteronomy seems to have been hidden away in the Temple shortly afterwards, and then it was forgotten. But then, in the 600s BC, King Josiah carried out a refurbishment of the Temple, and some of the priests happened upon the scroll of -proto-Deuteronomy. We are almost certain that the text that these priests discovered was Deuteronomy because Josiah carried out drastic reforms in his kingdom after the discovery of the scroll, and his reforms mirror the peculiar commandments of Deuteronomy. Josiah probably published a newly edited version of Deuteronomy as the basis of his reform campaign.

In 609 BC, Josiah was slain in a battle with Pharaoh Necoh. Unfortunately, Josiah’s reforms died with him, and in 586 BC, God allowed the Babylonians to destroy Jerusalem, including the Temple, the one place where legitimate sacrificial worship could be offered in accordance with Deuteronomy. All of the elite members of Jerusalem society, including the priests, were exiled to Babylon, where many of them were employed as scribes in the service of Nebuchadnezzar II.

From a human standpoint, it certainly looked as though this was the end of the Jewish people. The tribes of the Northern Kingdom, arguably more cultured and powerful than the Kingdom of Judah, disappeared with very little trace. It would not at all have been surprising if the same had happened to the Jews.

Synagogues Save the Day

It was at this point that the priests, faced with the certain extinction of their faith and nation, invented something ingenious: the synagogue. They established times of prayer that mirrored the times of Temple sacrifice. But instead of communal sacrifice, these services revolved around the communal reading of Torah.

Of course, for a lectionary cycle of Torah readings to even exist, there had to be a somewhat definitive edition of Torah available. This is why the Babylonian exile was so important for the process of developing the OT Canon. It precipitated synagogue liturgy, and that required the publication of the liturgical text that we now recognize as Torah. Moreover, all of the other texts that had been composed by prophets and poets were employed in the same liturgical development. Cycles of readings from the prophetic books were selected as commentary on the Torah readings. Psalms were chanted at set times of the day, in correspondence with the times of sacrifice, and they were used for other liturgical situations, like blessings. Now we are very close indeed to the library of religious texts that we recognize as the Old Testament today. Again, let me stress, the engine for all of this was public worship.

In 539 BC, Cyrus conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews in his new empire to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple. But synagogues were here to stay.

Jewish tradition remembers Ezra, the priest and scribe, as a new Moses. In fact, the rabbinic sages say that the Torah had been lost to Israel during their exile to Babylon, and that Ezra had to write out the entirety of the Torah from memory anew. There may be a grain of historical truth to this legend; it seems likely that Ezra and his scribal school are responsible for the final edition of Torah that was produced at this time. Moreover, there is evidence that this Torah was published as the law of the land, with imperial sanction.

Targums

The earliest translations of the Bible also date back to this time. Nehemiah Chapter Eight describes a liturgical service in Jerusalem in observance of Rosh Ha-Shanah. All of the people gather in front of a wooden pulpit, and Ezra reads from the Torah. Scattered throughout the crowd are a number of men who help “the people to understand the Law” (vs. 7) and “gave the sense” (vs. 8). Both verses use the Hebrew word for “translate,” tirgamu. What is going on here is that most of the returning exiles were a few generations removed from speaking Hebrew in day-to-day life. Instead, they spoke Aramaic as their lingua franca. Consequently, they couldn’t understand all of the Hebrew that Ezra was reading. These translators were delivering extemporaneous translations of the sacred text into Aramaic.

This translation work became a regular part of the synagogue service. Eventually, the Aramaic phraseology became formalized, until it was written down in what we know today as the Targums.

A View of the Bible in 500 BC

Let’s consider what the “Bible” looked like at this stage, around 500 BC. This is where the categories of Torah, Prophets, and Writings become really helpful. The first category was the most defined, because it was the most important for liturgy. The Prophets were also more or less crystallized into their current form, because they were also used in liturgy, but as a commentary on Torah. But that last category, the Writings, was still fairly fluid. Not all of the books that are in that section today had even been composed yet.

If you wanted to look at a Bible at this time, you might be taken to a beyt midrash, a “house of interpretation,” with a number of scrolls on the shelves. Every beyt midrash would have certain scrolls. They would all have a copy of the Torah. They would all have the scrolls of the Prophets. But the other books, the Writings, would vary ever so slightly from one library to another.

The Septuagint

Now let’s fast-forward a few hundred years, to about 250 BC. During the Babylonian conquest of Judea, many Jewish refugees fled to Egypt for safety. (The Book of Jeremiah tells us something about this). In the years that followed, this Jewish population increased, supplemented by colonists from all over the Persian Empire. By the third century BC, there was a sizable Jewish population in Alexandria. These Jews barely spoke Hebrew, if at all. Their native tongue was Greek.

Somewhere in the middle of this third century BC, some Jewish scribes in Alexandria began the process of translating the Torah, and then the rest of the Hebrew Bible, into Greek. Legend tells us that Ptolemy II invited scribes from the Temple in Jerusalem to carry out this work, and that the high priest sent seventy scribes to him. When their work was complete, everyone marveled at how well the sense of the Hebrew had been conveyed into Greek, and they concluded that the Hebrew was essentially superfluous; the Greek was more than adequate. In fact, the translation bore the stamp of divine inspiration, just as the Hebrew did. Later renditions of the legend added an important detail to heighten this sense of inspiration: the seventy translators were locked in separate cells and produced seventy distinct copies of the Torah rendered into Greek. When their copies were compared with one another, they discovered that they were identical, word for word. To this day we refer to the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament as the “Septuagint,” from the Latin for “seventy.” In Greek-speaking synagogues, the Hebrew Bible was abandoned for this Septuagint.

The Palestinian and Alexandrian Canons

This is when the real differences between what would become the Protestant and Catholic Old Testaments begin to take shape. In the land of Israel, where Hebrew was still used liturgically, only books that had been composed and widely published in Hebrew or Aramaic were included in the Writings. But among Greek-speaking Jewry, other books, that had either been composed in Greek or become more popular in Greek translation than their Hebrew originals ever did, began to be associated with the Septuagint as a part of the Writings. The result was that by the time of Christ, there were essentially two different canons operating among the Jews. Scholars refer to these as the “Palestinian” and “Alexandrian” canons.

The broader, Alexandrian Canon included a number of books that Catholics refer to as the “Deuterocanon,” and Protestants call “Apocrypha.” There are seven of these books: Tobit, Judith, Baruch, Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. There are two other books that are significantly different in their Greek, Alexandrian versions: Esther and Daniel.
When the early Church started, the dynamics between these two canons came into especial prominence. First of all, since Jesus and the Apostles were Palestinian Jews, the Bible that they knew in their local synagogues surely would have looked most like the Palestinian Canon used elsewhere in Israel. But Christianity was most successful in Greek-speaking populations, almost from the very beginning. And the Old Testament that these Greek-speaking Christians used was the Septuagint, including the broader, Alexandrian Canon. When the authors of the New Testament, writing in Greek, quote the Old Testament, they most often utilize direct citations from the Septuagint. The Old Testament of the earliest Church is the Septuagint.

The Use of the Deuterocanon in Early Christianity

The New Testament never directly quotes from the Deuterocanon, but it makes numerous allusions to these texts. The Nestle-Aland edition of the Greek New Testament offers more than four pages of examples of these. For instance, in Matthew 24:16, Jesus tells the people dwelling in Jerusalem to flee to the mountains when they see the Abomination that Causes Desolation installed in the Temple. Well, this is precisely what 1 Maccabees 2:28 tells us that Mattathias and his sons did when Antiochus installed the original Abomination that Causes Desolation in the Temple sometime around 175 BC.

The Church Fathers quote the Deuterocanon much more directly. For instance, St. Clement, the fourth Pope, is one of the Apostolic Fathers, the most ancient of the Church Fathers. Tertullian says that he was ordained by St. Peter. He was martyred around 100 AD. Before that, he wrote a letter to the Church in Corinth that we call “1 Clement” today. In it, he holds up many examples of faith from the Old Testament, most of whom we know from the Palestinian Canon: Moses, David, and Esther. But he also includes a Deuterocanonical figure alongside of them, and seems to place her alongside of these others as a biblical saint.

Many women, waxing strong through the grace of God, have performed many manly deeds. The blessed Judith, when the city was besieged, asked of the elders that she should be permitted to go forth into the camp of the aliens. She therefore delivered herself unto danger, and went out through love of her country and of her people, who were besieged. And the Lord delivered Olophernes into the hands of a woman.

1 Clement 55:3-5

So, here is strong evidence that the early Church considered these books to be Scripture.

Late Jewish Debates over Canon

It’s important for us to remember that the Jewish people had not completely defined the Canon of their Bible when the Church began. Now, that’s not to say that it was all up in the air. Josephus provides a list of Scriptures in his Against Apion that accords with the Palestinian Canon discussed above. No one seriously disputed the privileged position of the Torah or even the Prophets in either Israel or the Hellenistic synagogues. But there are clues that the idea of canon was still an emerging concept. In fact, Christians were the first to use this word and apply it to an official list of Scriptures in the Second Century.
The first clue that suggests the fluid status of canon at this stage is the wide variety of literature we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls that seems to have been treated as Scripture by the community that preserved them. The Essenes who lived in Qumran, where the Scrolls were discovered, preserved copies of nearly every book of the Old Testament. But they also had their own, unique literature that they seemed to have treated with similar reverence. For instance, in some the books peculiar to the Dead Sea Scrolls, they make use of the divine name, YHWH, and they write it in the Paleo-Hebrew script exactly as they do in their copies of Torah.

Another clue are the arguments preserved in rabbinic literature long after the Christian era began. In Tractate Yadayim of the Mishnah there is a dispute over the sanctity of Song of Songs. Much later, in the Babylonian Talmud, there is a really interesting story about an attempt to exclude Ezekiel from the Canon.

Rab Judah said in Rab’s name: In truth, that man, Hananiah son of Hezekiah by name, is to be remembered for blessing: but for him, the Book of Ezekiel would have been hidden, for its words contradicted the Torah. What did he do? Three hundred barrels of oil were taken up to him and he sat in an upper chamber and reconciled them.

Babylonian Talmud, Sabbath, 13b

How did the Deuterocanon Become Hidden (Apocrypha) to the Jewish People?

All this raises the question: why were the Deuterocanonical books eventually abandoned by the Jewish people entirely? Most likely, the biggest factor has to do with the extent to which the Septuagint was adopted as the Old Testament of the new Church. After the Septuagint came to be associated with Christianity, it fell out of favor with the rabbis. In fact, around 90 AD some of the rabbis hired a convert to Judaism named Aquila to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek all over again. We only have fragments of this translation left today. What we have left is difficult to read, because Aquila used a strange system in which he assigned each Hebrew word to only one Greek word in translation. This means that he does not allow for nuance and figures of speech. For instance, in Hebrew et might mean “with,” but it is also used as a direct-object marker for words governed by the article. This second meaning is impossible to translate into an Indo-European language like Greek But Aquila always renders it as syn, “with,” even when that is clearly not the word’s meaning.
Aquila’s method ensured that his translation would not become popular. But at the time, it weaned Greek-speaking Jews away from the Septuagint and gave them alternative interpretations of passages that for Christians had strong Messianic overtones. One of the most dramatic examples is Isaiah 7:14. In the Hebrew, “an almah (young maiden) will conceive and give birth to a son.” When you read the context of that verse, you realize that Isaiah was not thinking of the Messiah at all, but giving Ahaz a contemporaneous sign; a young lady that he knew of would have a child, and before it was very old, his enemies would no longer be a threat to him. But in the Septuagint version of Isaiah, something interesting happened. There, the young lady has become a parthenos, i.e., strictly speaking, a virgin. This does indeed more strongly suggest a miraculous conception. And so we find that this is exactly how Matthew uses the Septuagint text in Matthew 1:23 when he proclaims that Jesus’ virginal conception in the womb of Mary fulfilled this verse from Isaiah. Aquila’s counter-translation is revealing. He uses the Greek word neaniska. This word means “young woman,” without any reference to virginity.

So when the rabbis blacklisted the Septuagint, they essentially blacklisted these Deuterocanonical books with them, because they were recognized as a part of the Septuagint by this time.

The Christian “Apocrypha”

For the most part, the Christian Church, which was mostly Greek-speaking for the first few centuries of its existence, used the Septuagint and its broader Canon without any critical reflection about whether or not they were in fact using the inspired Old Testament. They simply accepted that this was the case. But there are a few exceptions among the Fathers, and for the most part, we can recognize their reticence towards the Deuterocanon as a symptom of their proclivity for the original Hebrew Old Testament.

When Protestants refer to the Deuterocanon as the “Apocrypha,” they are actually using the terminology of a Catholic saint and doctor of the Church, St. Jerome, the Church Father responsible for giving us the Vulgate, the official translation of the Bible for the Latin Rite Catholic Church. Jerome learned Hebrew for this undertaking, and he was perplexed to discover that the Hebrew Bible that he used as the basis for his translation did not have these books in them. He called them “apocrypha,” the Greek word meaning “hidden,” because they were “hidden from the Jews.” He questioned their status as inspired Scripture, and at first he was not going to even include them in his Vulgate. Pope Damasus compelled him to do so, and thus they have always been included in the Vulgate.

Martin Luther found Jerome’s skepticism towards the Vulgate ready at hand when he was compelled to abandon the Deuterocanon for various doctrinal reasons. He offers some of these in one of his Table Talks.

I am so great an enemy to the second book of the Maccabees, and to Esther, that I wish they had not come to us at all, for they have too many heathen unnaturalities.

“Of God’s Word: XXIV”. The Table-Talk of Martin Luther, trans. William Hazlitt. Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society)

I am not sure what “heathen unnaturalities” Luther found in Esther, but two instances in 2 Maccabees loom large, it seems to me. The first of these is in Chapter Twelve, where Judas Maccabeus takes up a collection for sacrifices to be offered for fallen soldiers in Jerusalem.

If he was looking to the splendid reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Therefore he made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin.

2 Maccabees 12:45

This story would have served as a proof-text for Catholics defending the practice of offering the Sacrifice of the Mass for the dead. By denying the very canonicity of the account, Luther undercut the Catholic appeal to Scripture.

The second instance that probably struck Luther as “heathen” is in 2 Maccabees 15, where Judas has a vivid dream of two deceased saints, the former high priest Onias III and Jeremiah the prophet interceding for the Jewish people in the afterlife. Since Luther wanted to diminish the role of the cult of the saints in the Church, this text was also bothersome to him.

The fact of the matter is that the Catholic Church did not produce a dogmatically definitive list of the Books of Canon until the Council of Trent in 1546 AD. This is not to suggest that no one knew what belonged in the Bible. Rather, it wasn’t defined because it wasn’t widely disputed until the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. And there were older, local listings of the Books of Canon. One of the earliest examples is from the Council of Carthage in 397. The Old Testament set forth there is precisely the same list that was later ratified in 1546.

In the end, quibbling over the Canon is somewhat pointless. First of all, it makes the most sense to just accept the Bible that the ancient Church used. Appealing to the Hebrew Bible is just silly. If we were going to restrict ourselves to the Canon of the Jews, we’d have to leave out the New Testament, after all. On the other hand, as beautiful and enriching as the books of Deuterocanon are, they don’t really contribute much doctrinally. The Bible that Catholics share with Protestants is much more substantial than the little bit that is disputed.