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THE LITERATURE
OF
OLD TESTAMENT

CHAPTER I

THE CANON OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

The early Christians received the Sacred Books of the Jews as inspired Scripture containing a divine revelation and clothed with divine authority, and till well on in the first century of the Christian era the name Scriptures was applied exclusively to these books. In time, as they came to attach the same authority to the Epistles and Gospels, and to call them, too, Scriptures (2 Pet. iii. 16), they distinguished the Christian writings as the Scriptures of the new dispensation, or, as they called it, the "new covenant," from the Scriptures of the "old covenant" (2 Cor. iii. 6, 14), the Bible of the Jews. The Greek word for covenant (diathéké) was rendered in the early Latin translation by testamentum, and the two bodies of Scripture themselves were called the Old Testament and the New Testament respectively.

The Scriptures of the Jews were written in Hebrew, the older language of the people; but a few chapters in Ezra and Daniel are in Aramaic, which gradually replaced Hebrew as the vernacular of Palestine from the fifth century B.C. The Sacred Books comprise the Law, that is, the Five Books of Moses; the Prophets, under which name are included the older historical books (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) as well as what we call the Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve, i.e. Minor Prophets); a third group, of less homogeneous character, had no more distinctive name than the "Scriptures"; it included Ruth, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Daniel, Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles. The Minor Prophets counted as one book; and the division of Samuel, Kings, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles each into two books was made later, and perhaps only in Christian copies of the Bible. There are, consequently, according to the Jewish enumeration twenty-four books in the Bible, while in the English Old Testament, by subdivision, we count the same books as thirty-nine.

The order of the books in the Pentateuch and "Former Prophets" (Joshua-Kings) is fixed by the historical sequence, and therefore constant; among the "Latter Prophets" Jeremiah was sometimes put first, immediately following the end of Kings, with which it was so closely connected. In the third group there was no such obvious principle of arrangement, and consequently there were different opinions about the proper order; that which is given above follows the oldest deliverance on the subject, and puts them in what the rabbis doubtless supposed to be a chronological series. So long as the books were written on separate rolls of papyrus, the question of order was theoretical rather than practical; and even when manuscripts were written in codex form (on folded leaves stitched together like our books), no uniformity was attained.

At the beginning of the Christian era, lessons from the Law were regularly read in the synagogues on the sabbath (the Pentateuch being so divided that it was read through consecutively once in three years), and a second lesson was chosen from the Prophets. The title of these books to be regarded as Sacred Scripture was thus established by long-standing liturgical use, and was, indeed, beyond question. Nor was there any question about the inspiration of most of the books in the third group, the "Scriptures." There was a controversy, however, over Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs; some teachers of the strictest school denied that either of them was inspired, while others accepted only one of them. The question was voted on in a council of rabbis held at Jamnia about the beginning of the second century of our era, and the majority decided for the inspiration of both books. There were also, even down to the third century, Jewish scholars who did not acknowledge Esther as Sacred Scripture. On the other hand, some were inclined to include among the Sacred Books the Proverbs of Ben Sira, which stand in the English Bible among the Apocrypha under the title Ecclesiasticus.

It is thus evident that, while there was agreement in general, there was, down to the second century A.D., no authoritative list of the "Scriptures," and that about some of the books there were conflicting opinions among the learned of the most orthodox stamp. An interesting confirmation of this is the fact that in the first half of that century it was thought necessary to make a formal deliverance that the "Gospel and other writings of the heretics" are not Sacred Scripture. There are other indications that in that generation Jewish Christianity had a dangerous attraction for some even in rabbinical circles, and there was evidently ground for apprehension that the inspiration which the Christians claimed for the Scriptures of the New Covenant might impose upon well-meaning but uninstructed Jews. In the same connection it was decided, further, that Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) was not Holy Scripture, and that no books written from his time on (about 200 B.C.) were inspired, in accordance with the theory, found also in Josephus, that inspiration ceased in the age of Ezra and Nehemiah.

By such decisions, recognizing the inspiration of books that had been challenged and excluding others for which inspiration had been claimed, the canon of the Scriptures, that is, the authoritative list of Sacred Books, was defined. The oldest catalogue we have, containing the titles of all the books, dates probably from the latter part of the second century, and is not concerned with the point of canonicity—which it takes for granted—but with the proper order of the Prophets and the Scriptures.

The Jews had for centuries been widely distributed through the lands that had been included in the kingdoms of Alexander's successors. There were large numbers in Babylonia and the neighbouring provinces of the Parthian empire, and still more in the countries around the eastern end of the Mediterranean, in Syria and Asia Minor, in Egypt and Cyrene. In Alexandria the Jews had a whole quarter of the city to themselves, and Philo estimates their numbers in Egypt in his time (ca. A.D. 40) at a million.

In cities like Alexandria, where Greek was the common speech of a population recruited from many races, the Jews soon exchanged their mother tongue for the cosmopolitan language. The ancient Hebrew of their Sacred Books was unintelligible, not only to the masses, but even to most of the educated, who had learned