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Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

What About the Original Old Testament?

Recently several readers have asked me about the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible; I talk a lot about the New Testament on the blog, but what about the Old Testament? Are there problems there too? Short answer, yes indeed. I'd say! Here's how I dealt with this in a post long ago, back in the days of my youth. Only one thing is different. I don't read from the Hebrew Bible every morning any more. I've gotten obsessed with classical Latin! Apart from that, everything here is still spot-on. Or at least what I would continue to say, which admittedly is not the same thing.... QUESTION: Bart, these issues you've found in the New Testament, have you studied and found similar issues in the Old Testament?" RESPONSE: Yes indeed! Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) was my secondary field in my PhD program, and I taught Introduction to Hebrew Bible at both Rutgers and UNC. A few years ago when I decided to write my Introduction to the Bible I decided that to do [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-02T14:44:25-04:00September 10th, 2019|Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

Does Isaiah 53 Predict Jesus’ Suffering and Death or Has Isaiah 53 Been Debunked?

Isaiah 53 is the ONE passage, above all others, that has been used over the centuries by Christians to be a prediction that the messiah will suffer and die for the sake of others. Every semester my students quote the passage to me and say "SEE! Jesus really *is* the messiah predicted by Scripture, centuries before he came!" I have been talking about how the view of a future resurrection of the body came from. This idea, that we would live forever in our bodies (if we were among the "righteous") was repugnant to just about everyone in the ancient world. But it became a widely held view among Jews, and was taken up with passion by the early Christians. These Christians appealed to the Jewish Bible for support of their view, even though "resurrection" is actually only clearly taught in one passage (Daniel 12:1-3). But they found other passages they claimed were relevant for the idea of resurrection. And most strikingly, they turned to Isaiah 53. Why do I call that striking? Because it [...]

BDEhrman2023-03-14T15:55:27-04:00August 23rd, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Historical Jesus|

Does Your Soul Go To Heaven?

In my previous post I discussed the beginnings of the Jewish idea of the “resurrection of the dead.” This view is a pretty much commonplace today: in every Christian church that recites a creed today, and in many conservative churches that do not use creeds, it is believed that at the end of time there will be some kind of judgment and people will be raised from the dead. At the same time, I have to be frank and say that it seems to me that most Christians – at least the ones I know (not just scholars, but most Christians) – don’t actually *believe* in a future resurrection. They think they die and go to heaven in their souls. Their souls may have some kind of physical attributes: they have all their sense of hearing, seeing, etc., and they can be recognized as who they were so you’ll be able to see your grandmother there. It’s true, even this has always caused problems for people who hold the idea. Which of my many bodies [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-02T14:46:28-04:00August 21st, 2019|Afterlife, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

An Alternative View of Suffering and the Idea of Resurrection

In yesterday’s post I was explaining why I do not think we need to point to Zoroastrianism as the source or reason for the views of “the resurrection from the dead” emerged within Judaism. This view could have arisen within Judaism itself, because of some internal dynamics. Here in this post I explain how it may have happened. I begin where I ended yesterday: in ancient Israel, as up to today, there have been people who think that the reason they suffer is because they have sinned and God is punishing them for it. Suffering comes from God, to penalize his people for not living as they should. This is sometimes called the “prophetic” or the “classical” view of suffering, because it was the view wide advanced by the Hebrew prophets in the Bible. Most people today, of course, realize it is never that simple. Do we really want to say that birth defects, the death of a child, Alzheimer’s, or any of the other mind-numbing forms of suffering in extremis are punishments from God [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-02T14:46:35-04:00August 20th, 2019|Afterlife, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Resurrection from the Dead: Were Jews Influenced by Zoroastrianism?

I often get asked if ancient Judaism was influenced by Zoroastrianism or other kinds of Persian thought – especially when it comes to the specific doctrine of the “resurrection of the dead” and, more generally, the whole category of “apocalyptic thought.” I used to think so! Now I’m not so sure. At all. I’ve talked about apocalypticism and resurrection on the blog before. Here I’ll discuss where these ideas came from, before, explaining more fully what they ended up looking like. This discussion is taken from an early draft of my forthcoming book Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. ********************************************************* After the period of the classical prophets, Jewish thinkers came to imagine that in fact there would be life for the individual who had died. For them, there was a possibility of life beyond the grave – real, full, and abundant life. But in the original Jewish conception, unlike widespread Christian views today, the afterlife was not a glorious eternity lived in the soul in heaven or a tormented existence in hell, attained [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-02T14:46:42-04:00August 19th, 2019|Afterlife, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

When Christians Went on the Attack Against Jews

I return now, for a couple of posts, to my thoughts on the rise of anti-Judaism in the early Christian tradition, and my thesis that it was largely driven by a different way of reading the Bible, that the Christians insisted the Jewish scriptures were looking forward to Jesus as a suffering messiah who would die for sins, and in doing so fulfilled all sorts of prophecies, and most Jews thought this entire view was nonsense, if not blasphemous. Here is where my thoughts move on from what I said in the last post on the matter. Should you need to refresh your memory, it is here: https://ehrmanblog.org/why-christians-needed-an-old-testament-pagan-attacks-on-the-faith/ An important point to stress is that Christians recognized that if their own interpretations of the Jewish Bible were correct, the Jews’ own interpretations were necessarily invalid. As I argued in Triumph of Christianity, the distinctive feature of early Christianity vis-à-vis all the other religions of the Roman world – including Judaism – was that Christians argued their views provided the way of salvation and the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-02T23:31:11-04:00July 3rd, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Jews and Christians in Antiquity|

Why Was the World Created in 4004 BC?

Why was the world created? We appear to be living in an age where science no longer matters. As you may know, the English word "science" comes from the Latin term "scientia," which means "knowledge.: People who reject "science," well, what is it they're rejecting? We live in dangerous times. Apart from the more obvious examples of this rejection that you can find in the newspaper every day (involving a human-induced apocalypse of biblical proportions), there are still, of course, a large number of "creationists" out there, who not only deny evolution (as a student now then will always tell me, with passion in his voice, "Hey, it's ONLY a theory!!") but who also subscribe to a young earth theory. The earth has just been around for about 6000 years. Really. When I was a fundamentalist I knew people who seriously claimed not only that dinosaurs and humans were walking around the earth together, but that fossils that appear to date to millions of years earlier were put into the geological record by Satan, who [...]

BDEhrman2022-06-28T13:37:30-04:00July 1st, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

Why Christians Needed an Old Testament: Pagan Attacks on the Faith

In my discussion why Christians claimed the Jewish Bible for themselves (and argued it no longer belonged to Jews), I’ve been focusing strictly on the relationship of Jews and Christians, for obvious reasons. But as it turns out, there is more to it than that. Here is an issue that is hardly ever talked about in the scholarship on the rise of anti-Judaism in early Christianity, let alone among lay people wondering about why mainstream Christianity became opposed to Jews and the religion they practiced in antiquity (leading to the anti-Judaism and then the antisemitism of later times.) This issue involves Christians’ relations not with Jews, but with pagans, and the rejection of the new Christian faith by the world at large. As is well known, apart from Jews and Christians, everyone in the Roman empire was pagan – that is, everyone followed one or more of the polytheistic religions of that world. I do not need to detail the various kinds of pagan religion found throughout the Roman Empire. But a couple of important [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-02T23:35:16-04:00June 23rd, 2019|Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Jews and Christians in Antiquity|

The Jewish Bible in the Gentile Churches

I continue here with my thoughts about how Christians came to claim the Jewish Bible for themselves, and to argue that it no longer belonged to Jews. I’ve already pointed out that the Jewish followers of Jesus (Many? Most? All?) (I suspect the answer is “Most”), within a short time after his death (months? a year?) began wonder why other Jews did not accept Jesus as the messiah. After all, they themselves “knew” he had been raised from the dead. It was a great miracle. It proved Jesus was God’s “anointed” one. Why wouldn’t others accept it? That was particularly perplexing and frustrating and eventually irritating and aggravating as they started finding indications in the Bible itself that this is what was supposed to happen to the messiah. It’s all there, in the prophecies of Scripture. Why don’t our fellow Jews – family members, friends, neighbors, fellow worshipers in the synagogue – why don’t they *see* it? Are they blind? Heard headed? Rebellious against God? Eventually it came to be thought among many of these [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-02T23:35:28-04:00June 21st, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Jews and Christians in Antiquity|

How “Jews” Became “Children of the Devil” in the New Testament

I have just started getting into the meat of the book proposal I have written for myself about The Battle for the Bible, on how it is that Christians claimed that the Hebrew Scriptures belonged to them rather than the Jews, and how this is what ultimately led to Christian opposition to Judaism and the Jews who practiced it. As the argument unfolds, I hope it will make increasing sense! Here’s the next bit, dealing with how the process began. ************************************************ As we saw in the previous post, Church Fathers in effect were arguing on two fronts, with Jews who did not see the virtues of an interpretation of the Bible that pointed to Jesus as the messiah and “heretics” who either overvalued Scripture , thinking its laws were still in force, or rejected altogether, claiming it was not a revelation of the true God. Jesus’ Followers and the Jewish Scriptures To understand these debates and their momentous historical consequences, we need to start at the beginning, with Jesus himself. Even though critical [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-02T23:36:41-04:00June 12th, 2019|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Jews and Christians in Antiquity|

Should the Old Testament Even Be in the Bible?

A week or so ago I started to describe how I’m thinking of one of my future books, that I’m tentatively calling The Battle for the Bible. The book (if I write it) will be about how Christians got the Old Testament and saw the Old Testament as *their* book rather than the Jews', who had misinterpreted it and given up (without their knowledge) any claim to it. My argument is that this dispute is what ultimately led to the history of anti-Judaism among Christians, which is eventually what led centuries later to anti-semitism. It will take a long time in the book to show how it worked – it’s a complicated issue. In my first two posts I stated the thesis in its bald terms, and I received several negative comments about it by readers who thought it can’t be that simple. And of course they are right. It’s not. But I haven’t started to explain how it all worked. You have to see the whole system before you can tell whether it works [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-02T23:36:48-04:00June 11th, 2019|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Jews and Christians in Antiquity|

Is the Old Testament a Christian Book?

Yesterday I started describing a trade book that I’m thinking about writing, tentatively called (in my head) “The Battle for the Bible.” Here is the next part of my self-reflections: ******************************************** A major part of my book will deal with one of the great puzzles in the history of religion: Why does the Christian Bible even have an Old Testament? And how did the early Christians, most of them gentiles, manage – in their own minds -- to wrest it from the Jews by and for whom it was originally written? If Christians chose not to keep the biblical laws and follow its customs, why did they retain the book? In my experience, many Christians still wonder about that. I frequently hear Christians claim there are essential differences between the Old Testament and the New Testament and the religions based on them: Jews have a religion of laws and judgment, but Christians have a gospel of grace and mercy; Jews think they have to earn their way into heaven on their own merits, but Christians [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-02T23:45:37-04:00June 3rd, 2019|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Jews and Christians in Antiquity|

Why Do Christians Have an Old Testament? Another Trade Book.

A month or so ago I posted a series of blogs about the next trade book I’m hoping to write, which I’m tentatively calling “Expecting Armageddon.” As I explained then when I decide what I want to write next, I do a lot of preliminary research to get my ideas together and then write up a kind of overview statement about why I’m interested in the topic, what I imagine the book would cover, why I think it’s both interesting and important, and how I would probably structure it (at least how I’m imagining I would – the end product is never what I anticipate at the outset). This kind of overview statement to myself ends up being the basis for what I send to my publisher as a Prospectus. The publisher takes the Prospectus, mulls it over, talks about it among themselves, and then decides whether they want to offer a contract on the book. If not, I take it somewhere else. If they do, then we enter into negotiations about the terms of [...]

BDEhrman2022-06-02T17:45:50-04:00June 2nd, 2019|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Jews and Christians in Antiquity|

Homosexuality in the Bible (and the Christian Church)

Here is a pressing question I was asked about a month ago, involving homosexuality and the Christian church. Since the question was asked, as you know (if you follow the news!), the Methodist Church has made its decision. I decided to ask a real expert to deal with the question, my friend Jeff Siker, PhD in New Testament who has just retired from a 30+ year career teaching biblical studies at Loyola Marymount, and who has edited two books that address Christian views of homosexuality, the one he mentions below in his answer (1994) and a more recent reference work, Encyclopedia of Homosexuality and Religion (2006). When it comes to this topic, he’s heard it all and is massively informed. These two posts, of course, represent simply a condensation of the relevant information and his views about them. Jeff has served as a guest poster twice on the blog before, and both times graciously answered questions and responded to comments. I’m not sure if he will be able to do so (I asked him just [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-06T00:34:21-05:00March 3rd, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions, Religion in the News, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

Yet Other Apocryphal Books

OK, this will be my last post for now on the apocrypha. Here is the final (and particularly intriguing) book accepted in the Roman Catholic church, and a few others accepted in Orthodox Christian circles. 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 and during the revolt, 2 Maccabees takes a more impassioned ... To see the rest of this post, you will [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T00:55:59-04:00October 22nd, 2018|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

More Apocrypha: A Letter of Jeremiah, (Fascinating) Additions to Daniel, and 1 Maccabees

Here is another installment on my discussion of the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books. The first of the three I discuss here is not well known, but the second and third are historically quite significant. ***************************************************** 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 Hebrew or Aramaic. Much of the book consists of a mockery of ... To learn more about these books, you'll need to [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T00:56:12-04:00October 19th, 2018|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

More Books of the Apocrypha: Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and Baruch

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 introduction to the Bible. 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 things. Here too Wisdom is said [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T00:56:21-04:00October 17th, 2018|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

Some of the Apocrypha: Tobit, Judith, and Additions to Esther

Yesterday I answered briefly a question about the Old Testament Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books. I’ve decided to go ahead and describe each of the ten. This will take several posts. These are very interesting books, well worth reading, and canonical Scripture for some parts of the Christian church. My summaries here are taken from my Introduction to the Bible. ********************************************************** Tobit Tobit is a work of historical fiction—by which I mean it is a fictional tale set within a real historical context. Originally the book was written in Aramaic, either in the late third century b.c.e. or the early second. The narrative is set in the eighth century b.c.e. in the city of Nineveh, where the hero of the story, Tobit, has been exiled from his town in Galilee during the conquests of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser. In other words, the account is allegedly taking place after the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel. The story involves two subplots that eventually come to be woven together. The first is about Tobit himself, who is [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T00:56:30-04:00October 16th, 2018|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

What Is the Apocrypha (of the Old Testament)?

Here is a recent question I have received about the “Old Testament Apocrypha.” QUESTION Bart, I hope you won’t mind me asking a totally unrelated question: At the beginning of the Christian Era – how many books of the Hebrew Old Testament did the Greek Septuagint translation contain? RESPONSE: This is indeed an important topic, one usually overlooked completely by Protestant readers of the Bible. Here is what I say about the apocrypha in my textbook on the Bible: ************************************************************* In addition to the canonical books we have examined so far, there was other literature written by Jewish authors that cannot be found in the Hebrew Bible but that is of great importance for anyone interested in it. Of these other Jewish books, none is of greater historical significance than a collection of writings that can be found in some Christian versions of the Old Testament. These are the deuterocanonical writings, as they are called in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions; Protestants typically designate them as the Apocrypha. The term [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T00:56:43-04:00October 15th, 2018|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

The Historical Significance of Contradictions

I have been talking about the contradictions in the Bible and why they matter – not simply to problematize assumptions about the inerrancy of the Bible (“See: there are contradictions!”) but also for other things. My overarching point is that they matter both for understanding the historical value of the biblical narratives and for appreciating their literary quality. In terms of historical value, many people read the Bible to know what actually happened in biblical times. But if the accounts are contradictory, how can we know what happened? I’ll later be pointing out how that is a difficult question for the New Testament, but I thought it might be useful to show how it is a fundamental problem with the Old Testament as well – right from the beginning, with the stories in Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch. It was the contradictions that made scholars originally come to think that the Pentateuch (i.e., the first “five books” of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) were not written by one person (Moses) [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:14:07-04:00July 5th, 2018|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

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