Introduction to the old testament part 10

You have the three major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and then the twelve minor prophets, which in the Hebrew Bible get counted together as one book, because those twelve are very small. The final section of the Bible is referred to as Ketuvim in Hebrew, which simply means "Writings," and that's probably about 50% of the Hebrew you're going to get in the whole course, so please don't be scared. You know, I've got two or three other terms that'll be useful along the way, but there's really no need to know Hebrew. I just want you to understand why Tanakh is the word that's used to refer to the Bible. So the Ketuvim, or the Writings, are really a miscellany. They contain works of various types, and the three parts correspond very roughly to the process of canonization or authoritativeness for the community.

The Torah probably reached a fixed and authoritative status first, then the books of the Prophets and finally the Writings. And probably by the end of the first century, all of this was organized in some way. If you look at the other handout, you'll see, however, that any course on the Bible is going to run immediately into the problem of defining the object of study, because different Bibles served different communities over the centuries.

One of the earliest translations of the Hebrew Bible was a translation into Greek known as the Septuagint.

It was written for the benefit--it was translated for the benefit of Jews who lived in Alexandria--Greek-speaking Jews who lived in Alexandria, Egypt in the Hellenistic period somewhere around the third or second century BCE.

The translation has some divergences with the traditional Hebrew text of the Bible as we now have it, including the order of the books, and some of these things are charted for you on the chart that I've handed out.

The Septuagint's rationale for ordering the books is temporal. They've clustered books Genesis through Esther, which tell of things past; the books of Job through the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon contain wisdom that applies to the present; and then the prophetic books, Isaiah to Malachi, contain or tell of things future. Some copies of the Septuagint contain some books not included in the Hebrew canon but accepted in the early Christian canon. The Septuagint, the Greek translation, became by and large the Bible of Christianity, or more precisely it became the "Old Testament" of the Hebrew Bible. The church adopted the Hebrew Bible as a precursor to its largely Hellenistic gospels. It was an important association for it, with an old and respected tradition. Our primary concern is the Bible of the ancient Israelite and Jewish community--the 24 books grouped in the Torah, Prophets and Writings on that other sheet--which is common to all Bibles. Whether Jewish or Christian, those 24 are the baseline common books. So those are the 24 that we're going to focus on.Because the term "Old Testament" is a theologically loaded term, it sort of suggests the doctrine that the New Testament has somehow fulfilled or surpassed or antiquated the Bible of ancient Israel, you're going to hear me refer to the object of our study as the Hebrew Bible.

To be continued in Part 11.