Introduction to the old testament part 9

Sometimes they're not even aware that that's what they're doing, and I want you to understand that on those occasions I'll most likely respond by inviting you to consider the article of faith that lies behind that question and is creating that particular problem for you. I'm not going to be drawn into a philosophical or theological debate over the merits of that belief, but I'll simply point out how or why that belief might be making it difficult for you to read or accept what the text is actually and not ideally saying, and leave you to think about that. And I see those as wonderful learning opportunities for the class. Those are in no way a problem for me.

All right, so let's give a few sort of necessary facts and figures now about the Bible and then I need to talk a little bit about the organization of the course. So those are the last two things we really need to do. An overview of the structure of the Bible.

So you have a couple of handouts that should help you here. So, the Bible is this assemblage of books and writings dating from approximately 1000 BCE--we're going to hear very diverse opinions about how far back this stuff dates--down to the second century: the last book within the Hebrew Bible was written in the 160s BCE. Some of these books which we think are roughly from a certain date, they will contain narrative snippets or legal materials or oral traditions that may even date back or stretch back further in time, and they were perhaps transmitted orally and then ended up in these written forms. The Bible is written largely in Hebrew, hence the name Hebrew Bible. There are a few passages in Aramaic. So you have a handout that breaks down the three major components.

It's the one that's written two columns per page. Okay?

We're going to talk in a minute about those three sections, so you want to have that handy.

These writings have had a profound and lasting impact on three world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For the Jewish communities who first compiled these writings in the pre-Christian era, the Bible was perhaps first and foremost a record of God's eternal covenant with the Jewish people.  So Jews refer to the Bible as the Tanakh. It's the term you see up here.

It should be also on that sheet, Tanakh, which is really the letter "t", "n" and "kh", and they've put little "a's" in there to make it easy to pronounce, because kh is hard to pronounce, so Tanach. Okay? And this is an acronym.

The T stands for Torah, which is a word that means instruction or teaching.

It's often translated "law"; I think that's a very poor translation. It means instruction, way, teaching, and that refers to the first five books that you see listed here, Genesis through Deuteronomy. The second division of the Bible is referred to as Nevi'im, which is the Hebrew word for "prophets." The section of the Prophets is divided really into two parts, because there are two types of writing in the prophetic section of the Bible. The first or former Prophets continues the kind of narrative prose account of the history of Israel, focusing on the activities of Israel's prophets.

All right? So, the Former Prophets are narrative texts. The Latter Prophets are poetic and oracular writings that bear the name of the prophet to whom the writings are ascribed.

To be continued in Part 10