The Hebrew Bible

A Critical Companion

John Barton, John Barton, John Barton

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400880584
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Crítica e interpretación bíblicas

A comprehensive and accessible guide to the Hebrew Bible This book brings together some of the world's most exciting scholars from across a variety of disciplines to provide a concise and accessible guide to the Hebrew Bible. It covers every major genre of book in the Old Testament together with in-depth discussions of major themes such as human nature, covenant, creation, ethics, ritual and purity, sacred space, and monotheism. This authoritative overview sets each book within its historical and cultural context in the ancient Near East, paying special attention to its sociological setting. It provides new insights into the reception of the books and the different ways they have been studied, from historical-critical enquiry to modern advocacy approaches such as feminism and liberation theology. It also includes a guide to biblical translations and textual criticism and helpful suggestions for further reading.Featuring contributions from experts with backgrounds in the Jewish and Christian faith traditions as well as secular scholars in the humanities and social sciences, The Hebrew Bible is the perfect starting place for anyone seeking a user-friendly introduction to the Old Testament, and an invaluable reference book for students and teachers.

Part I

The Hebrew Bible in Its Historical and Social Context

1

The Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament

John Barton

What is traditionally known as the Old Testament is a collection of the main books that were regarded as sacred Scripture in Judaism by the last few centuries BCE. The majority were written in the kingdom of Judah (which later became the Persian province of Yehud) and indeed in its capital, Jerusalem, between the eighth and the second centuries. But there is material in the books that may be much older: some think that there are texts here that go back into the tenth or eleventh century and thus are older than Homer in Greece.¹ So far as actual manuscripts are concerned, the earliest are those found at Khirbet Qumran by the Dead Sea in the twentieth century, normally known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which contain at least fragments of almost all the biblical books. These manuscripts are in most cases no older than the first century BCE, and thereafter we have nothing before the great codices of the early Middle Ages, the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad/St. Petersburg Codex. So whereas for the cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt we possess actual manuscripts from as far back as the third millennium BCE, in the case of the literature of ancient Israel we are dependent on much later texts. It is clear, however, that the contents of the books do in many cases go back into a much earlier period than the extant manuscripts.

The Old Testament is often rightly referred to as a library of books rather than a single book, since it consists of a large variety of texts of different kinds, reflecting different periods in the history of ancient Israel. Though there are stories in the early books that tell of leaders and heroes such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Joshua, it is not until the eleventh century at the earliest that we can really speak of Israel as a nation, under the reigns of David and Solomon: many biblical scholars think that even these figures are mostly legendary. After the death of Solomon, in the mid-tenth century, “Israel” divided into two, the larger northern kingdom (known variously as Ephraim and, confusingly, Israel) and the smaller southern kingdom of Judah; these kingdoms continued to exist until the 720s, when the northern state was conquered by the Assyrians and became an Assyrian province, and the early sixth century, when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar and many of the population of Judah were deported to Mesopotamia. It is widely believed that many books in the Old Testament came into being during the eighth and seventh centuries: one or two, such as Hosea and Amos, in the north, but far more in the south, where Jerusalem was probably a center of scribal culture. The major ancient traditions about Moses and his predecessors, now in the Pentateuch (“five books of Moses”—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), may have begun to take shape during this period, though they were certainly also worked on after the exile.

The Babylonian Exile of the Judaeans never ended, in that there was a sizable Jewish presence in Mesopotamia from the sixth century onward; but nevertheless a substantial number of the exiles (or their descendents) succeeded in returning to the land once the Babylonians were conquered by the Persian king Cyrus, and Judah was reconstituted as a small Persian province under a native governor, so that Jewish life continued in the homeland. The sixth century, which was so disastrous politically for the Jews, was also an era in which writing seems to have flourished, with significant collections of prophetic texts such as parts of the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel taking shape, alongside a major edition of the history of Israel from the settlement under Joshua down to the exile itself, in what are usually called the “historical” books (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings). The postexilic age also saw many important writings, with the collections Psalms and Proverbs (though parts of those books may be older), the book of Job, and large sections of the Pentateuch being written at this time.

In the fourth century Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire. Under him and his successors Jewish life continued quietly until the political upheavals of the second century, when Judaism began for the first time to be persecuted by the Syrian king Antiochus IV, provoking revolt by the freedom fighters known as the Maccabees. It is from this “Hellenistic” period, when Greek customs and thought began to make inroads into Jewish life, that we have the book of Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth in Hebrew) and the book of Daniel, as well as a number of what are nowadays often referred to as “Jewish novels,” such as Ruth and Esther. Even more important, the Hellenistic age saw the codification of Jewish scripture into a coherent collection, so that something recognizable as the collection we now possess had come into being.

OLD TESTAMENT OR HEBREW BIBLE?

This book is called The Hebrew Bible, but so far I have freely used the term Old Testament, which is the name by which the collection of books just described is usually known in Western literary culture. It is obvious, however, that it is in origin a Christian term, since it contrasts with the “New Testament,” which tells of the acts and words of Jesus in the Gospels and contains an account of the early church in the Acts of the Apostles, as well as early Christian letters and the book of Revelation. We first hear the Jewish scriptures described as books “of the old covenant” in the work of Bishop Melito of Sardis, who died about 190 CE. By this it is meant that God has entered into a new kind of relationship with the human race through Jesus Christ—the “new” covenant, as described in Hebrews 10; and the books of Jewish scripture are witnesses to his previous, or “old,” covenant with his people in pre-Christian times. (Testamentum is simply the Latin translation of covenant.)

From a Christian perspective this would have seemed a merely factual point, but it is easy to see that from a Jewish point of view it might not sound so innocent. The Letter to the Hebrews describes the new covenant in Christ as superseding the old one, so that old is not just a temporal but in a sense an evaluative term: “He abolishes the first in order to establish the second” (Heb. 10:9); “In speaking of a ‘new covenant,’ he has made the old one obsolete. And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear” (Heb. 8:13). So in Christian usage, as heard, at least sometimes correctly, by Jews, old can have the sense of “superannuated,” surpassed, superseded. Hence in modern times many Jews, and Christians sensitive to such matters, have come to think that the term Old Testament is somewhat anti-Jewish in tone. It is of course not common on Jewish lips anyway: Jews tend to refer to the collection simply as “the Bible,” since for them the “New Testament” is not part of their Bible anyway. (In Israeli universities people who teach the “Old Testament” are called professors of Bible, and the departments in which they work are called departments of Bible, entirely logically.)

In academic circles a popular response to this problem has been to call these books “the Hebrew Bible” (sometimes “the Hebrew Scriptures”). This avoids the problem of the “supersessionism” felt to be implicit in the term Old Testament. There are, however, at least three problems about it—not necessarily reasons not to adopt it but revealing, once probed, some important aspects of the books in question. First, “Hebrew Bible” is not strictly accurate, since parts of the collection are in fact in Aramaic rather than Hebrew. Second, “Old Testament” scholars have traditionally been very interested in the Greek and Latin translations of these books, which produces the odd result that there are “Hebrew Bible” scholars who in fact work mainly on Greek or Latin texts. And third, not all of what at least some Christians have included in their Old Testament is part of the scriptures of Judaism, and that includes some texts that never existed in Hebrew or even Aramaic but were in Greek from the beginning. We shall go on next to examine these difficulties.

Meanwhile, however, it is fair to note that the term Hebrew Bible does resolve the “supersessionist” difficulty, and in North America it is now the normal term of choice in academic discussion of the Bible. In Britain the usage is more patchy, but “Hebrew Bible” is gaining ground. Within the Christian churches “Old Testament” seems likely to persist on both sides of the Atlantic, though even in Christian liturgy some prefer to speak of “readings from the Hebrew Scriptures.” The shift has slightly affected the term New Testament, too, since there is little point in that once the term Old Testament is abandoned; and it too can sound supersessionist. But there is as yet no agreed alternative. “Early Christian writings” is accurate but does not convey the sense of a fixed canon of texts that is implied in the term New Testament.

Some call the two parts of the Christian Bible the “First” and “Second” Testaments, which sounds suitably neutral from a religious perspective, though it is not clear why one should still use the word Testament at all in these formulations, given that the reference to two covenants has been abandoned. I think that it will be some time before there is any resolution of these issues. On the face of it the substitution of “Hebrew Bible” for “Old Testament” seems easy and innocent, but as just pointed out it runs into a certain amount of difficulty once we start to think about it more carefully. The next three sections will explore the difficulty from the three points of view mentioned above: the language of the texts, the existence of ancient translations, and the question of the exact contents of the collection.

THE LANGUAGES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

Most of the “Old Testament” is in Hebrew. Hebrew belongs to the Semitic family of languages, of which the major example in the modern world is Arabic, though there are other important Semitic languages still in use, such as Maltese and the various kinds of Ethiopic. There is a subgroup of Semitic languages called Northwest Semitic, and it is here that Hebrew belongs, along with now-defunct tongues such as Moabite, Phoenician, and Ugaritic. It is the local ancient language of the southern Levant, the area now containing the state of Israel and the Palestinian territories. Of course, Hebrew is not defunct but is the national language of Israel and is also spoken where there are groups of Israelis elsewhere in the world, such as in parts of the United States. Modern Hebrew is a deliberate revival of the ancient language, enriched with grammatical and syntactical borrowings from various European languages and vocabulary from all over the world. But Hebrew had not in fact totally died out even before modern Israel revived it. After the Bible was complete, some rabbis continued to write (and possibly to speak) Hebrew, in the form now known as Mishnaic Hebrew—that is, the language in which the Jewish collection of laws from the first few centuries CE known as the Mishnah is written. Throughout the Middle Ages there continued to be Hebrew speakers both in the land of Israel and in the diaspora communities of Mesopotamia—the descendents of the exiles from the sixth century—as well as in Egypt, where there had long been a Jewish community. Alongside this active use of later forms of Hebrew, the Bible has continued to be read and studied intensively in Hebrew. There has never been a time when Hebrew “died out.”

Even within the Bible itself, however, there is some evidence that the Hebrew language developed over time. There are differences between the main narrative books such as Samuel and Kings and the considerably later Chronicles, while Ecclesiastes (probably third century BCE) shows signs of changes that would become more apparent in Mishnaic Hebrew. Linguistic shifts such as these can be of some help in dating the biblical books, though there is a danger of circular arguments, since sometimes it is precisely the supposed dates of the books that enable us to trace the linguistic changes. But there is widespread consent that Hebrew literature written after the exile did begin to show differences from earlier works—not only in its vocabulary, with borrowings from Persian and, eventually, from Greek, but also in its grammar and syntax.

But, as pointed out above, one problem in calling the Old Testament “the Hebrew Bible” is that parts of it are not actually in Hebrew at all. Several sections of the books of Daniel and Ezra are written in Aramaic,² which uses the same script as Hebrew but is a distinct language. Because Aramaic had supplanted Hebrew as the language of everyday speech by the second century BCE, and Jesus and his disciples certainly spoke it, it is sometimes thought that Aramaic is a “late” language—even that Hebrew “turned into” Aramaic. But this is not the case. Historically, Aramaic, also a Northwest Semitic language, is a more important language than Hebrew and just as ancient. As Akkadian, the East Semitic chief language of Mesopotamia, declined as an international language in the eighth to seventh centuries BCE, Aramaic came to take its place: Persians communicated with Egyptians through the medium of Aramaic as they had once done via Akkadian and would come to do, from the third century onward, in Greek. Imperial Aramaic, as this lingua franca is known, is close to the “biblical Aramaic” found in Ezra and Daniel.

Hebrew and Aramaic are not mutually comprehensible, but they are very closely related, and anyone who knows one can readily learn the other: they are about as close as German and Dutch, or Spanish and Italian. Once you know which letters in one language correspond to which letters in the other—for example, that words with a z in Hebrew will often have a d in Aramaic—you can quickly learn to read them both. (Thus “gold” is zahab in Hebrew and dehab in Aramaic.) Puzzling as it is that Daniel switches from one language to the other in the middle of a chapter, the original readers were probably bilingual and would have had no trouble with the shift. Even the names of the two languages were often confused: when the New Testament refers to words being “in Hebrew” (Greek hebraisti), it means “in Aramaic.” But the title “Hebrew Bible” is certainly somewhat misleading in seeming to imply that the collection of books is in one language only and that that language is what we call Hebrew. We ou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• List of Contributors
• Part I. The Hebrew Bible in Its Historical and Social Context
• Part II. Major Genres of Biblical Literature
• Part III. Major Religious Themes
• Part IV. The Study and Reception of the Hebrew Bible
• Index of Scripture
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Subjects