In my previous post I started to explain which manuscripts we have of the Hebrew Bible and broached the question of whether we know they were "accurate."  That is, if we read the stories of Genesis, or the book of Isaiah, or the Psalms, can we be sure we're reading what the authors originally wrote?  Or could things have been changed? In this post, I explain some of the complications of knowing what the original authors of the Hebrew Bible wrote, based on what we know about Jewish scribal practices over the centuries.  It turns out that what we know is not actually what we often hear, that Jewish scribes going all the way back to the beginning had ways of making sure they never changed a single letter of what they copied. We start with .... The Masoretic Text The text of the Hebrew Bible that is read today, and that is at the basis of all modern translations, is called the Masoretic Text. It is called this because the Jewish scholars [...]

When talking about “how we got the Bible,” there is obviously a lot more involved than understanding how and when the canon came to be collected and more or less fixed.  Knowing which books are in the canon is not the same thing as knowing what words were originally in the books. For that we have to move to the related question of the “textual tradition” of the books, of how they were copied for many centuries before the invention of the printing press. I have talked a good deal about that with respect to the New Testament on the blog, but far less about the Hebrew Bible.  Since I’ve just finished with some posts on the canon, now I can turn to the question of the text: what do we know about how it was copied?  Can we trust that we have what the authors wrote?  What are the complexities involved? This will take two posts.  I will be drawing from my discussion in my textbook, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd [...]

In my previous post I discussed the traditional view of when the Hebrew Bible became a fixed canon in stages, with the final decisions being made at the end of the first century CE at the "Council of Jamnia." Today scholars tend to present a somewhat fuzzier picture of when and why the canon came to be formed, although there do seem to be some fixed points. It is widely held that the five books of the Torah were accepted by nearly all Jews as a set canon by the fifth century BCE, in the early post-exilic period. One piece of evidence comes from the Bible itself, in a post-exilic book, Ezra. The scribe Ezra himself is described as being “skilled in the Torah of Moses that the LORD the God of Israel had given” (Ezra 7:6). This suggests that it was widely known that there was a “Torah of Moses” and that the educated elite were sometimes being trained in understanding and interpreting it. The Torah is and always has been the [...]

 How did we get the Bible, these 66 books in particular? Over the next couple of years I’m planning on reading massively on the Canon Part 2 (the New Testament), in particular on what we know about why certain books came to be included and yet others were left out, as the topic of my next book.  And I’ll be talking a good bit about what I’m thinking about that here on the blog. The topics that I’ll need to be covering  are so wildly varied that I’m guessing that about two-thirds of time it won’t even be obvious to blog readers that a post is even related to questions of canon.  We’ll almost certainly have to be dealing with such widespread issues as Roman imperial efforts to obliterate Christianity; teachings of universalist salvation in the early church; The Arian Controversy (think: the Council of Nicea); Paul’s confrontation with a talking lion he had earlier baptized; letters allegedly written by Jesus himself and…. and oh, there is so much to cover! I’ve decided that here [...]

Most of the so-called “minor prophets” (called that because their books are shorter than those of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel) are both terrific and terrifically under-read.  So I think maybe I should post a bit on each of them (there are twelve). (I started last week with Zechariah)  One of my favorites is Hosea, which tells a heart-wrenching story and delivers an unusually powerful message. The following is an edited version of my discussion in my book The Bible:  A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford University Press). ****************************** No prophet of scripture emphasizes the deep and profound love of God for his people, and his bitter sense of betrayal for their unfaithfulness, more than the eighth-century Hosea. Here God is portrayed as the lover of Israel, which has rejected his adoration and become a whore. Hosea was a contemporary of Amos and was prophesying in the north during almost the same time as Isaiah in the south during the reigns of kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah and of Jeroboam [...]

Here is another tidbit from the Hebrew Bible section of first edition of my textbook that covered Genesis to Revelation, book-by-book, now being edited for a third edition with Joel Baden. ****************************** Box 1.2: Woman Wisdom as God’s Consort? We have seen that in ancient Israel Yahweh was sometimes thought to have a divine consort, his “Asherah”  (Note: if you're interested in this topic, we have just published a one-lecture course on it by Dan McClellan: The Israelite Goddess Asherah.) This was never accepted by the strict henotheists who wrote the historical and prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, but in Proverbs, a book of Wisdom, there is a passage that some interpreters have thought represents a kind of modified or “tamed” view of Yahweh and his divine female companion from eternity past.  Here she is not Asherah, but Wisdom herself, shown to be speaking in Proverbs 8:   The LORD created me at the beginning [or “as the beginning”] of his work, the first of his acts of long ago Ages ago [...]

Here is another post on the Hebrew Bible from the blog in 2012, written while I was working on the first edition of my Bible Introduction.  It is an excerpt from my first rough draft of a discussion of an unusually important passage in the book of Isaiah. Brief context: at this point I was  discussing Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55), almost universally thought by scholars to be written by a different author from chapters 1-39 (themselves written by Isaiah of Jerusalem in the 8th c. BCE). Second Isaiah was writing after the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem (including the temple) in 586 BCE, while the leaders of the people and many of the elite had been taken into exile in Babylon, in what is known as the Babylonian Captivity. ****************************** No passage of Second Isaiah has intrigued readers and interpreters – especially among Christians – more than the four passages that are dedicated to describing a figure known as the “Suffering Servant.” Some scholars have called these passages “songs,” or “songs of [...]

Here is another tidbit from the original version of my Bible Introduction.  It may be old news for a lot of you, but it's fun to write this kind of thing up for college students, who have never heard of such a thing! ****************************** One of the most mysterious and even bizarre stories in Genesis happens right at the beginning of the flood narrative, where we are told that the “sons of God” looked down among the human “daughters,” saw that they were beautiful, and came down and had sex with them leading, to the Nephilim.  The word Nephilim means “fallen ones.”  According to Numbers 13:33, the Nephilim were giants.  So what is going on here in Genesis?  Apparently there were angelic beings (the “sons of God”) who lusted after human women, cohabited with them, and their offspring were giants.  It is at that point that God decides to destroy the world.  The situation was too weird even for him. This brief episode has parallels in other ancient mythologies.  It is common [...]

This will be my final post for now on the Old Testament apocrypha.  In it I discuss the final (and particularly intriguing) book accepted in the Roman Catholic church, and a few others accepted in Orthodox Christian circles. Again this all comes from my textbook, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford, 2018).   2 Maccabees The book known as 2 Maccabees is another account of the history of the Maccabean Revolt. Its author did not have 1 Maccabees as a source but was writing independently of it. His interest is principally with the events that transpired under the leadership of Judas Maccabeus, so that the book overlaps mainly with 1 Maccabees chapters 1–7. The author indicates that his work is in fact an abridgment of a much longer five-volume description of the revolt by someone named Jason of Cyrene. He has condensed Jason’s work into a single volume. Unlike 1 Maccabees, this account was originally composed in Greek. Whereas 1 Maccabees is a rather straightforward chronicle of what happened leading up to [...]

In this post I continue discussing the books of the Apocrypha, accepted as part of Scripture by Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.  These are important books, historically and culturally – but hardly known among Protestant readers.   Here are three more!  Descriptions are taken from my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction.   The Wisdom of Solomon The Wisdom of Solomon is a book of positive wisdom (recall Proverbs), which claims to be written by the great king of the United Monarchy. In fact it was written many centuries later, by a Jew in the Diaspora, possibly in the first century b.c.e. or the first century c.e. The book celebrates Wisdom as the greatest gift to humans and insists that it involves proper fear and adoration of God, which will lead to eternal reward. Those who lead ungodly lives, on the other hand “will be punished as their reasoning deserves” (5:10). The exaltation of wisdom recalls Proverbs 8, where Wisdom appears as a female consort with God at the beginning of all [...]

The OT Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books are truly fascinating, even if not widely read.  Few people outside of the Catholic and Orthodox traditions knows about the first one; the other two here though are better known and, in fact, historically significant. Some descriptions from my book The New Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction. ****************************** The Letter of Jeremiah This is one of the shortest books of Apocrypha—it is only one chapter long, and in the Latin tradition of the Roman Catholic Church it is included as the final chapter of the book of Baruch. The book is allegedly written by the prophet Jeremiah, sent to the Judeans bound for Babylonian exile. In exile they will be among people who worship other gods through idols. This book is nothing but an attack on pagan idolatry. The real historical context of the writing is a situation in which Jews around the world were surrounded by idol worship. It may have been produced in the aftermath of the Maccabean Revolt; it appears to have been composed in [...]

In my previous posts I've dealt with some of the critical problems with the New Testament that many students have to grapple with (often for the first time) when they take seminary courses on biblical studies during their ministerial training.  One of the big questions I address in my book Jesus Interrupted (HarperOne, 2009) is why pastors who learn such things in seminary don't say anything about them in their churches after graduation, not even in adult education classes.  Isn't one of the objectives of education to get educated?   In this post I continue with an excerpt from the book dealing with comparable problems in the Old Testament. **************************** These kinds of problems turn out to be even more common in the Old Testament, starting at its very beginning. Some people go to great lengths to smooth over all these differences, but when you look at them closely, they are very difficult indeed to reconcile. And why should they be reconciled? Maybe they are simply differences. The creation account in Genesis 1 is very different from [...]