Summary: Bible - Old Testament

The GIST

The Old Testament is the first division of the Bible as Christians arrange it. It has no single author. It is a library of many distinct books by various writers, produced over centuries, and based primarily on the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, the ancient religious writings of the Israelites in Hebrew and, occasionally, Aramaic. One scholar quoted in the research sums it up as a collection of authoritative texts of apparently divine origin that went through a human process of writing and editing.

It matters because almost everything else in the Bible stands on it. Here are the law, the history of Israel from the conquest of Canaan to exile in Babylon, the poetry that wrestles with suffering and justice, and the prophets who warn what happens when a people turns from God. It is also a book with more than one shape. Jews and Christians read the same texts in different orders and with different expectations, and Christian churches do not even agree on how many books it contains.

What It Says

Four great sections

Christians traditionally divide the Old Testament into four parts, and going through them in order is the simplest way to see what the collection holds.

The Pentateuch. The first five books are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, which correspond to the Jewish Torah. Their order is the one thing every denomination of Judaism and Christianity agrees on. They contain the stories of the flood, of the Patriarchs, of Moses and of the Exodus, together with the law codes found in books such as Exodus and, above all, Deuteronomy. Scholars hold that these five books reached their present form in the Persian period, between 538 and 332 BC, and that their authors belonged to the elite of the returned exiles who then controlled the Temple.

The Historical books. Next comes the story of the Israelites from their conquest of Canaan to their defeat and exile in Babylon. Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel and Kings carry the account down to the siege of Jerusalem around 587 BC. There is broad agreement among scholars that most of this originated as one continuous work, known as the Deuteronomistic History, composed during the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BC. The two books of Chronicles go over much of the same ground and probably date from the fourth century BC, and Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah were probably finished in the third. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles add between two and four books of the Maccabees, written in the second and first centuries BC. Taken together, these history books make up about half of the whole Old Testament.

The Poetic or wisdom books. Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Psalms and the Song of Songs explore human experience, morality and divine justice. Their dates vary. Job was complete by the sixth century BC and Ecclesiastes by the third, while Proverbs may not have been finished until the Hellenistic period, though it holds much older material.

The Prophetic books. Last come the prophets, who warn of the consequences of turning away from God: Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and the twelve "minor prophets." Most were written between the eighth and sixth centuries BC. The exceptions are Jonah and Daniel, which scholars place much later. The book of Malachi now closes the Christian Old Testament.

One God, and a people bound to him

Across this variety certain convictions hold steady. God is consistently presented as the creator of the world. He is not always described as the only god who exists, but he is always the only God whom Israel is to worship, the one who alone is Almighty.

The second constant is the special relationship between God and his chosen people, Israel, though the texts also include instructions for those who join from outside. That relationship takes the form of a covenant, received by Moses. On one reading, the law codes are the terms of a contract: Israel swears faithfulness to God, and God swears to be Israel's special protector and supporter. The Jewish Study Bible, as the research reports, disputes the word "contract." In the ancient Near East a covenant was sworn before gods who would enforce it, but here God is himself a party to the agreement and not a mere witness, so that commentary prefers to speak of a pledge.

A demanding moral vision

The Old Testament places strong emphasis on both ethics and ritual purity, and it presents God as requiring both. Its moral code calls for fairness, for stepping in on behalf of the vulnerable, and for those in power to administer justice rightly. It forbids murder, bribery and corruption, dishonest trading, and many sexual offences. All morality is traced back to God as the source of all goodness.

Yet the collection argues with itself. Some of the prophets and wisdom writers seem to question the stress on purity, insisting that what God wants above all is social justice, and perhaps that he does not care about purity at all. Other recurring themes include salvation, redemption, divine judgment, obedience and disobedience, faith and faithfulness.

The problem of evil

One question runs underneath a great deal of the writing. If God is good, he must have had just cause for bringing disaster on his own people, and the disaster the writers have most in mind is the Babylonian exile. The theme is worked out, with many variations, in books as different as the histories of Kings and Chronicles, prophets such as Ezekiel and Jeremiah, and wisdom books such as Job and Ecclesiastes.

The hope of an anointed king

The Hebrew scriptures describe a king anointed with oil when he takes the throne, who becomes the LORD's anointed. The Hebrew word for this is Messiah, and the Greek "Christ" means the same thing. Later parts of the Old Testament look forward to a descendant of David who will establish an ideal reign of peace, prosperity and righteousness.

Why It Matters

How the collection came together

The path from scriptures to a fixed canon was long, and its twists explain why several different Old Testaments exist today. By about the fifth century BC, Jews regarded the five books of the Torah as authoritative. By the second century BC the Prophets had a similar standing, though not quite the same level of respect.

Translation shaped everything that followed. Beginning around 280 BC in Alexandria, Hebrew texts were rendered into Greek. The result was called the Septuagint, from the Latin for "seventy," after the supposed number of translators. It was first used by Greek-speaking Jews, and then became the scripture of the early Church and of Gentile converts, so that its Greek wording influenced later Christian interpretation. It differs in many places from the Hebrew Masoretic Text and includes books such as Judith, Tobit, the Maccabees, the Book of Wisdom, Sirach and Baruch. Most recent scholarship holds that the differences come from early source texts that were not the same as those the Masoretes later used. The Septuagint remains the basis of the Old Testament in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

In the West, Latin replaced Greek. In 382 AD Pope Damasus I commissioned Jerome, the leading scholar of his day, to produce an updated Latin Bible. His Vulgate was translated directly from the Hebrew, which he considered superior, and it became the standard Bible of the Western Church. Jerome described some portions found in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Bible as apocrypha. Church councils at Hippo and Carthage, under the influence of Augustine, accepted a canon that included those additional books.

There were other versions too: the Aramaic Targums, made to help Jewish congregations understand their scriptures, the Syriac Peshitta, and translations into Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian and Arabic.

Why the numbers differ

In the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformers, following Jerome, insisted that the Old Testament should contain only the books of the Hebrew canon. They removed the additional books but kept the Septuagint's order, so a Protestant Old Testament typically has 39 books arranged differently from the Hebrew Bible. Rome then formally adopted the Canon of Trent in 1546, and the Catholic canon contains 46. The Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches include up to 49. Catholics call the disputed books deuterocanonical, Greek Orthodox Christians use a name meaning "that which is to be read," and some Anglican and Lutheran Bibles place them in a separate section called the Apocrypha.

How Jews and Christians read it

The very name "Old Testament" is a Christian theological category. It exists only because there is a New Testament, and it reflects Christianity's understanding of itself as the fulfilment of Jeremiah's prophecy of a new covenant. Christian interpretation has often read these books in the light of the New Testament. Jewish interpretation does not treat them as part of an "old" covenant that has been superseded. The Second Vatican Council, as cited in the research, taught that the New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old is made manifest in the New, a teaching one commentator sees as a guard against dismissing the Old Testament as irrelevant for Christians.

By the time of Jesus, Jewish expectations about the Messiah were varied. Some looked for a flesh-and-blood descendant of David who would set up a real kingdom in Jerusalem. Others emphasised an other-worldly figure who would appear as judge at the end of time, and some combined the two. Some expected a forerunner, probably Elijah, as promised by the prophet Malachi.

What historians make of it

Early histories of ancient Israel and Judah leaned heavily on the biblical accounts, but their reliability has been increasingly questioned. The main debates concern the Patriarchs, the Exodus, the conquest and the United Monarchy, where archaeological evidence often challenges the narratives. Scholars have also noted resemblances between the Genesis flood story and the flood in the Gilgamesh tradition. Mainstream scholarship today takes what the research calls a skeptical but balanced approach, recognising that some biblical traditions line up with archaeological findings, particularly from the ninth century BC onward.

Who Should Read It

Read the Old Testament if you want to understand the foundation on which Judaism and Christianity both stand, and the source of much of the moral vocabulary still in use. It suits readers who enjoy range, since it offers law, epic history, poetry and fierce prophetic speech in one collection, and it rewards anyone curious about how sacred books are written, translated, argued over and handed down.