Christian Old Testament and Hebrew Bible

The body of writings most commonly known as the Old Testament is perhaps unique in that it is revered as Scripture by two of the world’s great religions: Judaism and Christianity.

There is another important element in the anti- Jewish polemic which is implicit in the term ‘Old Testament’. The claim is often made that the Old Testament writings point beyond themselves in some way to a more complete fulfilment in the future, and that here Christ­ians have the advantage over Jews. For them, the fulfilment has been realised: the life, death and resurrection of Jesus are held to be the fulfilment of all that the Old Testament had been looking forward to. This would imply that Judaism is simply the religion of the Old Testament. Such an approach ignores the fact that for Judaism, as for Christianity, the promises of the Old Testament are in large measure seen as having been fulfilled. The voluminous collection of later writings which makes up the Mishnah and the Talmud provides the structure of Jewish religious observance, just as the New Testa­ment provides the structure of Christian belief.

One could indeed go further. It would be possible, and in many ways legitimate, for Jews to claim that they have remained loyal worshippers of the God who has revealed himself in the Old Testament, whereas Christians have in practice largely replaced devotion to God by devotion to Jesus Christ. Sometimes he is regarded simply as God; often it is stressed that there is no access to God save through Jesus. Assertions of this kind are deeply offensive to Judaism, which sees such devotion as replacing true commitment to God, the father and saviour of his people.

It is right to mention differences of this kind right at the outset, for the Old Testament writings are both the common heritage of Jews and Christians and a cause of their deepest misunderstandings. What is more, there can be no denying that Christians have been the worse offenders, not only in the appalling history of anti-Semitism, but also in their failure to take Jewish religious claims with due seriousness. However that may be, the fact remains that the writings of the Old Testament are regarded as holy both in Judaism and in Christianity. This fact remains true even though there are certain differences in detail both about the content of the material and in its arrangement.

For Jews, as already noted, the term Tenak denotes a threefold division: Law, Prophets and Writings. These three collections are best envisaged as three concentric circles. The innermost circle, the most holy part, is the Torah or Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Here, in books traditionally ascribed to Moses, is set down the guidance God has given to his people. Indeed, part of the meaning of Torah is ‘Guidance’: simply to render it ‘Law’ can convey a negative impres­sion, such as is found in the Christian polemic which has contrasted the freedom of the Gospel with the negative demands of the Law. Even where it has the character of law, it has been turned in many cases into prayer, as for example in the Shema (‘Hear, O Israel’) (Deut.

The second circle consists of the Prophets. This material is not confined to the books of the prophets in the sense understood by Christians. Rather, it consists of two sections, the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) and the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve Minor Prophets, Hosea-Malachi). In traditional Judaism these books are understood as commentary upon the Torah, and there are religious groups related to Judaism which have limited their Scrip­ture to the Torah; the Prophets, though revered, are only commentary. The Samaritans, who still survive as a small community in Palestine, are a case in point; for them the Torah alone is Scripture.

Finally, there is the third and most heterogeneous collection, simply called the Writings: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the five Megilloth or Festal Scrolls (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther), Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles. These are writings of much more varied origins, and though the Psalms in particular have played an important part in Judaism in general and in its worship in particular, they are on the whole of less significance for our understanding of Judaism.

The books listed in the preceding paragraphs are also those regarded by Protestant Christians as the Old Testament, though as we shall see in a moment there are differences of order which may be significant. All of these books were written, wholly or in part, in Hebrew. (Those parts not in Hebrew had as their original language Aramaic, a language closely akin to Hebrew, in which parts of Daniel and Ezra and a single verse in Jeremiah were written.) But Catholic Christians include in their Old Testament a number of other writings which were originally written in Greek or have survived in that language even if there was once a Hebrew original. The book called Ecclesiasticus, for example, was composed in Hebrew, but for a long period only survived in Greek and Latin translations; a Hebrew form of the greater part of this book has been discovered as a result of archaeological work within the last century.

For the most part the early Christian Church was a Greek-speaking body, and so its Bible was a collection of writings in Greek, and for a long time it seems as if no sharp differentiation was made between books originally written in Hebrew and those which had been composed in Greek. Eventually, however, there was dispute among the Church fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries whether the Church’s Old Testament should be limited to that which survived in Hebrew, or whether the larger Greek collection should be accepted. The latter view, upheld by the influential figure of St Augustine, prevailed.

Only at the Reformation in the sixteenth century did the dispute arise again in acute form, and from that time the Protestant usage has been to limit its Old Testament to the Hebrew canon, while the Catholic Church has accepted also those books which are commonly called the Apoc­rypha. The ambivalent status of these books has been recognised even in Catholic circles by the custom of referring to them as ‘Deutero-canonical’.

As a postscript to the above discussion it may be noted that in recent years, though no church has changed its official teaching, unofficial attitudes have changed. Many Protestant bodies now recognise the value of the Apocryphal books for study, even if not for formal doctrinal purposes, and so the use of such translations as the RSV Common Bible, the Jerusalem Bible and the NEB has meant the availability of these texts, though to speak of familiarity would certainly be an exaggeration.

But is not only with regard to the actual number of books that some Christian usage differs from that of Judaism; their order is also significant. Whereas in Judaism the appropriate model is, as we have seen, a series of concentric circles, the Christian Old Testament can more appropriately be pictured as a series of points on an extended line. That line runs from past to future. The first part of the Christian Old Testament has traditionally been understood as historical in character, beginning at the every beginning, with the account of Creation in Genesis 1, and then describing God’s dealings with his people in a succession of historical books down to Esther.

Such an outline may help to explain how the Old Testament came to reach its present shape. It will at once be obvious that much in our modern experience renders it no longer applicable. The advance of the physical and life sciences means that it is no longer possible, save by very special pleading, to accept Genesis 1 as an accurate account of the creation of the world; an increased historical awareness warns us against accepting at its face value much that is found in the remaining ‘history-like’ sections. Different, but just as serious, difficulties arise in taking the pro­phetic parts of the Old Testament as having a future reference. It is clear, therefore, that the lasting value of the Old Testament, whether in a Jewish or a Christian context, will to a large extent be dependent upon the contents of the books rather than upon any external principle of order which they may exhibit. Put another way, this means that any authority which may be granted to the Old Testament will now be based upon what it says rather than on any preconceived idea of divine inspiration. It is to the contents of the Old Testament that we must now turn.