The Biblical World

John Barton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781134272198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Biblical World is a comprehensive guide to the contents, historical settings and social context of the Bible. It presents the fruits of years of specialist study in an accessible form, and is essential reading for anyone who reads the Bible and would like to know more about how and why it came to be.

Written by an international collection of experts, the volumes include a fulloverview of the full range of biblical material, before going on to more detailed discussions of myth and prophecy to poetry and proverbs.

Explorations of the historical background are complemented by the findings of archaeology, and the book explores language, law, administration, social life and the arts as well. Major figures of the Bible - including Abraham, Jesus and Paul - are studied in detail, as are the main religious concepts it contains, such as salvation and purity.

Also includingan examination of how theBible is viewed today, this monumental work will be an invaluable resource for students, academics and clergy, and for all to whom the Bible is important as a religious or cultural document.

PART I

THE BIBLE

CHAPTER ONE

THE OLD TESTAMENT/ HEBREW BIBLE

Rex Mason

The fact that this article appears under a dual heading reveals that there has been disagreement about the title, the extent, and, to some degree, the function of the Old Testament. ‘Old Testament’ is a Christian name for the sacred writings of Judaism, writings already venerated and regarded as authoritative by the time of Jesus of Nazareth, a veneration continued by most early Christians and encouraged by the reported respect for them of Jesus himself. In spite of the objections of some that they had been superseded by the new revelation God had made of himself in Jesus, it became the firm conviction of the early church that they remained a valid and authoritative set of texts, a valued part of its Jewish heritage. Nevertheless, such veneration was often achieved by exegetical methods of reading the Old Testament books that saw them as in some way ‘prophetic’ of the coming of Jesus, a valuable, but preparatory, pointer to the ‘New Testament’, which God had established with both Jews and Gentiles through the life and work of Jesus ‘the Christ’ (‘Messiah’). Christian ways of reading and understanding the ‘Old Testament’, at both consciously theological and popular levels, have therefore often differed markedly from Jewish understanding. For this reason many Christian scholars now tend to avoid the term and to speak and write more often of ‘the Hebrew Scriptures’.

However, this raises the issue of the extent of just what it is we mean when we speak of the ‘Old Testament’. We know remarkably little about the process of how certain writings came to be vested with ‘canonical’ status in either the Jewish or the Christian communities. It seems, however, that the first five books of the Old Testament, the ‘Torah’ (meaning ‘law’ or ‘instruction’), were accepted as supremely authoritative in the post-exilic Jewish community by perhaps as early as the fourth century BCE, although such a view would have resulted from a cumulative appreciation and use of them developed over a long period. There is some evidence that the prophetic books, both ‘former’ and ‘latter’ prophets (see below), had established themselves as similarly authoritative by the end of the third century BCE (although ‘Torah’, then and later, was always regarded as the supremely important authority). The others, known as ‘the Writings’, including Psalms, the Wisdom literature and Daniel, because many of them were mainly of later date (at least in their present form) than the other collections, were regarded as more marginal. Nevertheless, as with all writings that achieve ‘canonical’ status, they must have been widely used and admired.

All these works which thus made up the Jewish ‘Scriptures’ by the beginning of the Common Era were written in Hebrew, except for a few excerpts in the ‘Writings’ (Ezra 4:8–6:18; 7:12–26; Daniel 2:4–7:28), which were in Aramaic. By this time, however, Hebrew had become mainly only the ‘classical’ language of the Scriptures. Most Jewish people in Palestine actually spoke Aramaic, which had become the vernacular language throughout the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires, while many Jews living abroad, in such places as Egypt, spoke Greek, the vernacular language of the Greek and, to some extent, the Roman empires. A number of popular works therefore appeared in Greek, and many of these were included in a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, a translation made in Egypt from about the third century BCE onwards, known as ‘the Septuagint’ (LXX). This was the form of the Hebrew Scriptures known mainly to the writers of the New Testament, and it is therefore no surprise that a number of those additional Greek works it contained, such as ‘The Wisdom of Solomon’ and ‘Ecclesiasticus’, achieved considerable popularity among Christian communities.

In course of time Judaism decided to accept only those works written in Hebrew as authoritative, but the Christian church, in spite of the objections of some, accepted also the works that existed only in Greek, sometimes known as ‘the deuterocanonical books’. However, at the time of the Reformation, Protestants asserted their belief that only the Hebrew works were truly authoritative, and this has remained their position since, while the Roman Catholic Church still includes the Greek works. (The Orthodox Churches have always taken a similar view of the ‘deutero-canonical’ works, even including a few that do not figure in the Catholic canon.) Thus the term ‘Old Testament’ raises not only questions of the nature of the texts between Jews and Christians, but questions of content between different branches of the christian church. (For the books in the various ‘canons’, see the lists as the end of this chapter.) To call it ‘the Hebrew Bible’ is thus not entirely satisfactory, since, however defined, it is also part of the ‘Christian’ Bible. Perhaps, when referring more narrowly to ‘the Hebrew Scriptures’, the Jewish term TANAK is preferable. This is an acronym formed from the Hebrew names for the three main parts of the canon, Torah (law), N^ebi’im (prophets), and K^ethubim (writings).

Whatever title we give it, and whatever canon we accept, it is clear that the ‘Old Testament’ (the name used here for convenience) was a long time in reaching its present form. Few of the individual books that comprise it can be thought of as the work of a single author. Even where, as is probably the case with most of the prophetic books, an individual’s thoughts and teaching lay behind it, the books that bear the name of those individuals have resulted from a long process of oral and written tradition, and have been subject to editing processes designed to make the ‘message’ of the prophet relevant to people of later times. The same may be said of many of the other books, even where tradition may, or may have not, have associated them with a specific historical figure. It is true of the Pentateuch (Torah), traditionally assigned to Moses, and the so-called history books. The Psalter, linked in tradition with David, contains many compositions from times later than his, while the Wisdom literature, again traditionally associated with Solomon, contains work from many hands continuing late into the post-exilic period.

While, therefore, the composition of the books of the Old Testament was a complex, continuing process stretching over centuries, modern biblical scholarship sees in general three main stages to its emergence. It is clear that Yahwism became the State religion of the pre-exilic kingdom of Judah, and a good deal of literature, while containing, as it did, much ancient material, was produced in the period of the monarchy to bolster claims for the divine origin and sanction of the royal house of David that ruled over it. In the manner of those days, the tie between the divine world and the royal house, which was thought to rule in the name of the gods and as their representative, was seen to be a very close one. Much in the Pentateuch, therefore, especially the so-called Yahwistic strand (see below), which, in spite of some contemporary scholarly disagreement, still seems most likely to have originated in the Judean court during the monarchic period, is designed to show how the emergence of the nation of Israel, under the leadership of the Davidic kings, was in the mind and purpose of God from the very earliest times. All is presented as the ‘story’ of Israel, a story that runs through the Pentateuch and continues in the books of Joshua and Judges. The climax to it all comes in the books of Samuel and the early chapters of Kings, which tell how God chose David and his line to rule over this people and made a covenant with him assuring him of the everlasting nature of the dynasty. This covenant was sealed with the building by Solomon of the temple of Jerusalem, the city David had captured, thus ensuring God’s presence at the heart of the national life, a presence that guaranteed the eternal security, not only of the Davidic dynasty, but of the city of Jerusalem itself. Such a ‘theology’ of royal house and temple is also enshrined in a number of Psalms (e.g. 2, 21, 89, 110, 132), which no doubt had their liturgical origins in the worship of the temple. All of this is entirely in line with the way other nations at that time saw the status and security of their identity as a result of a pact between the gods and their royal representatives on earth. The actual historical process by which ‘Israel’ emerged as a national identity and came to occupy the area we now know as Palestine is shrouded in uncertainty. But the ‘story’ presented in this first level of the Old Testament Scriptures was the one by which self-understanding and self-confidence was established and expressed.

Such confidence came to be severely shaken, however, as this tiny nation was threatened by the expansionary aims of powerful neighbours, in particular first from the Assyrians in the eighth century, and then from the Babylonians in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. Under the latter, Jerusalem was destroyed, the royal Davidic line removed and many society leaders deported into exile. It is remarkable that such a shattering of the whole royal ideology did not mark the end of Yahwism as a living religion. That it did not is due in part to those who put a much heavier emphasis on the ethical implications of Yahwism, already a strong feature of the ‘covenant’ obligations by which Israel was seen to be bound to Yahweh as his ‘special’ people, than on its political ramifications. Foremost among these were the prophets who, in the name of the very Yahwism by which the rulers claimed their power and vested interests, challenged them with its obligations of justice and compassion. From Amos in the eighth century BCE onwards, there was a strong prophetic challenge to what were seen as abuses of power.

Such prophetic voices claimed that God had given power to kings, priests and other leaders in the community, in order to establish a society in which the rights and interests of the poor and weakest members were safeguarded. Such prophetic complaints were taken up by those scholars referred to as ‘the Deuteronomists’, so called because they not only produced our book of Deuteronomy, but also edited the ‘history’ books and some of the prophetic books from their own particular theological stance and in their own distinctive language. They stressed that the ‘covenant’ relationship between God and Israel, and between God and the royal house of David, had always been conditional upon their keeping the terms of the ethical laws of the covenant. Further, they believed that that same covenant demanded of king and people the worship of Yahweh alone, and they strongly attacked every form of what they saw as syncretism, that is, the worship of both Yahweh and other gods. In their hands this became a powerful tool with which to criticize the foreign policy of many kings who sought military and political alliances with other nations, alliances that presumably, at least in their eyes, involved acknowledgement of those nations’ tutelary deities. Thus they were able to explain why the apparent breaking of God’s promise to David and the nation was not due to either the fickleness or the powerlessness of Yahweh. The religious and moral conditions of the covenant had been broken. That is why God allowed this disaster to come upon the nation. It was judgement on them for sin. The same belief, however, enabled them to hold out hope for the future. If only the nation would return to the conditions of the covenant, then they might hope, in the grace of God, to experience again its blessings. This is the message that has informed the Deuteronomistic editing of the ‘historical’ and prophetic books of the Old Testament, much of the book of Deuteronomy and some prophetic books like Jeremiah. These ‘Deuteronomists’, then, strongly influenced by much pre-exilic prophecy, are the ones responsible for this second stage of the development of the Old Testament.

The third stage is that which followed the exile and the partial restoration of the community in Jerusalem and Judah under the Persians. In spite of early hopes there was no restoration of the Davidic monarchy, and Judah was now a subservient part of the Persian empire. What did Yahwism mean now that it was no longer the religion of a nation state? This was the time when priests came more and more to the fore in the conduct of the community’s life and, with the rebuilding of the temple, they established what may best be described as a ‘theocracy’. It was the people’s status as a people of God that mattered now above all else, and this status was more and more defined in obedience to the law and the proper observance of the worship of God in the temple. Here, through the correct observance of the sacrifices and religious festivals, God dealt with the sins of his people and so maintained that vital level of communication between deity and people by which they could experience his grace and know his presence. This outlook prevails in all those long sections of the Pentateuch that deal in great detail with the various sacrifices and correct forms and observances of the temple worship, sections making up what scholars call ‘the Priestly Code’ (see below), and it also finds expression in the final form of the book of Ezekiel, the post-exilic prophets and in the books of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. This ‘third’ stage of the emergence of the Old Testament Scriptures thus represented a brave attempt to redefine Yahwism and make it a living force and reality for the post-exilic community. It was the need to keep their life and identity distinctive that, no doubt, led to as great an emphasis on laws of ritual cleanliness and observance as on those that relate to what we would call ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ matters, thus presenting a strange contrast to the pre-exilic prophets who emphasized the far greater importance of the latter.

Included in this ‘third’ stage of development have to be those Wisdom writings (Job, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom) that wrestled more and more with the problems of suffering and injustice in human affairs; stories that urged people living under foreign rule to keep the faith (e.g. Esther, Tobit); and books that express more far-reaching ‘apocalyptic’ hopes for a time when God would intervene once again drastically to deliver his people (e.g. Daniel). Yet, as we have seen, all the works of the Old Testament, even those that had their origin before the exile, bear evidence of all three stages in the final edited form in which we now have them.

To turn in more detail to the various components of the Old Testament ‘canon’ it is natural to begin with Torah. This section of the canon comprises five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. They include some generally identifiable broad sections. Genesis 1–11, often referred to as ‘the Primeval History’, tells of the creation of the world and of humankind, the threat to that creation through the sin of human beings that brings the judgement of the flood, the salvation of Noah and his family and enough animals to restart creation, yet of persistent sin symbolized by the building of the tower of Babel with the resultant division of languages between nations. These chapters draw on myths and traditional material that in some form or other were widely known in the ancie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Index of biblical references
• Index of modern authors
• Subject index