What is the Bible?
Part 1
For many this may seem
like a very simple question, even silly. Everybody knows what the Bible is,
right? Yet, it’s really not simple at all. In this series of posts it is my
hope to share the variety of answers that are legitimately possible to that
question.
If you are Jewish, the
Bible is a collection of 24 texts and is known as the Tanakh. There are
the five books of the Law (Torah): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,
and Deuteronomy. Then there are the eight books of the Prophets (Neviim):
Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Twelve (i.e.,
Minor Prophets). Finally, there are the eleven books of the Writings (Khetuvim):
Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther,
Daniel, Ezra/Nehemiah, and Chronicles. This equals the TaNaKH.
It is also referred to as the Hebrew Bible (HB).
The texts that make up
the HB are generally considered to have been written between eleventh or
tenth century BCE[1]
and the mid-second century BCE, though there are numerous reputable scholars
who would date these texts between the mid-seventh century BCE and the
mid-second century BCE.
The earliest manuscripts
we have of these texts were discovered in the mid-twentieth century CE in caves
mostly near the Dead Sea in Palestine. This was certainly the most important
discovery of the twentieth century, as these manuscripts predated the prior
earliest manuscripts we had of the HB by about one thousand years! While in
many ways these earlier manuscripts confirmed much of what we knew from the
later manuscripts, there are also some significant differences as well. This is
significant for reasons we will explore in a future post (or two or three) on
the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS).[2]
Timothy H. Lim notes
that there is no evidence of an official Jewish canon[3]
in either the Second Temple period[4]
or in early Rabbinic times.[5]
Rather, during those periods there existed “collections of writings that were
accepted and used by a particular Jewish or Christian community. These terms
refer not to fixed, official lists of books but to the [presumed] divinely
inspired nature of these writings. That these divinely inspired writings were
gathered in ‘collections’ is evidenced by the titular descriptors, such as ‘the
books of Moses,’ ‘the books of the Prophets’ or ‘the Psalms of David.’[6]
Rabbinic Judaism somewhat “closed” the Jewish canon somewhere between 150 and
250 CE, but debates continued about the “inspired” status of several books of
the Writings (e.g., Ecclesiastes, Esther, etc.).
What does this mean
for those of us who identify as Christians and who consider the contents of the
HB to be equivalent to our Old Testament, even though the order of the texts is
quite different? It means that in the early days of the Jesus movement (what
later became known as Christianity), there was no “Bible” per se. Certainly, the
texts we refer to as the New Testament make reference to various collections of
texts (e.g., “the law of Moses,” “the law and the prophets,” “the book of the
prophets,” “the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms,” etc.), but there
was nothing officially recognized that equates exactly to the texts of the HB
or the Christian Old Testament.
It is interesting to
note that among the DSS, 225 partial copies of every book of the HB—ranging from
small fragments to an almost complete scroll of Isaiah—except Esther and
Nehemiah. However, it is also important to note that there were many “non-biblical”
manuscripts discovered of texts that were considered authoritative (i.e.,
divinely inspired) by at least some groups among the Jews at the time and even
by Christians of the first century CE and later (e.g., Enoch, Jubilees, etc.). The Christian New Testament seems to
acknowledge some of these “non-biblical” groups as authoritative (e.g., Jude
quotes the book of 1 Enoch as a divinely inspired prophet).
When we say, as we Christians
are so prone to do, “The Bible says…” thus and such, we need to understand we
are referring to the Christian Bible—a collection of texts that was not
formally identified and “canonized” until the late fourth century CE. Even
then, as we shall see in future posts, the “Christian Bible” comes in various
formats, so that even today when a Christian says, “The Bible says…”, it is vital
that we know to which “Bible” she/he referring.
[1] BCE = Before the Common Era. This terminology is
preferred as opposed to BC (i.e., Before Christ). CE = Common Era.
[3] Canon is defined as “a general law, rule, principle, or criterion by which something is
judged” and thus when it comes to “the Bible” the word refers to “a collection
or list of sacred books accepted as genuine.”
[4] The Second
Temple period in Jewish history lasted between 516 BCE and 70 CE, when
the Second Temple of Jerusalem existed. The sects of
Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots and also the Nazarenes (early
Christianity) were formed during this period. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Temple_period.
[5]
Rabbinic Judaism was NOT the Judaism of the first century. That was Second Temple
Judaism, which was a time of a variety of Jewish sects, beliefs and practices. No
exact date can be given for the beginning of Rabbinic Judaism, but certainly
the movement towards Rabbinic Judaism gained strength in the second half of the
second century CE. The first major written collection of Jewish oral
traditions, the Mishnah, came together ca. 200 CE.
[6] See Timothy H. Lim, The Formation of the
Jewish Canon,” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013).
