Was Born Again Part of Old Testament Culture
From Hebrew Bible to Christian Bible: Jews, Christians and the Give-and-take of God
In his pedagogy, Jesus often quoted the Jewish Scriptures; afterwards his death, his followers turned to them for clues to the meaning of his life and message. Biblical scholar Mark Hamilton discusses the history of these ancient texts and their significance for early Christians and their Jewish contemporaries.
Marker Hamilton is currently writing a PhD dissertation at Harvard Academy called 'The Body Majestic: Kingship and Masculinity in Ancient State of israel.' His article "The Past every bit Destiny" will appear in the October result of the Harvard Theological Review
The Origins of the Hebrew Bible and Its Components
The sacred books that make upwards the anthology modern scholars phone call the Hebrew Bible - and Christians telephone call the Old Testament - developed over roughly a millennium; the oldest texts appear to come from the eleventh or tenth centuries BCE. War songs such as Exodus 15 and Judges v are very archaic Hebrew and celebrate Israelite victories from the time preceding the Israelite monarchy nether David and Solomon. However, most of the other biblical texts are somewhat later. And they are edited works, collections of various sources intricately and artistically woven together.
The five books of Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy), for example, traditionally are ascribed to Moses. Only by the eighteenth century, many European scholars noticed issues with that assumption. Non just does Deuteronomy end with an account of Moses' death (a tough assignment for any writer to describe his or her own demise), merely the entire Pentateuch shows anomalies of fashion that are hard to explain if only one author is involved.
By the nineteenth century, most scholars agreed that the Pentateuch consisted of 4 sources woven together. This notion of four sources came to be known every bit the Documentary Hypothesis, and, in diverse forms, it has been the prevailing theory for the past ii hundred years. State of israel thus created four independent strains of literature most its ain origins, all drawing on oral tradition in varying degrees, and each developed over fourth dimension. They were combined together to form our Pentateuch one-time in the sixth century BCE.
By this time, many of the other biblical books were coming together. Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings grade what scholars telephone call a "Deuteronomistic History" (because the work's theology is heavily influenced by Deuteronomy), a history of the Israelite states over a five-hundred-yr catamenia. This piece of work contains much of historical value, but it also operates on the footing of a historical and theological theory: i.due east., that God has given Israel its state, that State of israel periodically sins, suffers penalty, repents, and and so is rescued from foreign invasion. This cycle of sin and redemption shapes the work's manner of writing history and gives information technology a powerful religious dimension, and then that even when the sources backside the biblical books are "secular" accounts in which God is far in the groundwork, the theology of the overall work places history in the service of theology. The terminal edition of the Deuteronomistic History, the one in our Bible, comes from the sixth century BCE, the time of the Babylonian Exile. In this context, it offers an explanation for Israel's poor condition and implicitly a reason to hope for the future.
Another department of the Hebrew Bible consists of the prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the twelve "minor," i.east., brief, prophets). Hither over again, information technology's of import to understand how these adult. In the book of Isaiah, from which Jesus quotes, the original Isaiah of Jerusalem lived in the eighth century BCE in Jerusalem, and much of Isa half-dozen-10 conspicuously reflects the political and social events of his time. Another part of the volume, however, comes from a prophet who lived two hundred years later: Isaiah 40-55, famous in the New Attestation (early on Christians thought the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 was Jesus) and prominent in Handel's Messiah, speaks of the Persian rex Cyrus the Smashing (d. 530 BCE), and and so the text must come up from that fourth dimension. Other parts of the book of Isaiah are even later, and the entire book was carefully edited together, peradventure past the fifth or 4th century BCE. The extraordinary poetry of the book offers the reader promise in a God who controls historical events and seeks to return his people State of israel to their own state.
In addition to the prophets, the Hebrew Bible contains what Jews often call the "Writings," or the Hagiographa, hymns and philosophical discourses, honey poems and charming tales. These include Psalms, Chore, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes (or Qoheleth), Vocal of Songs, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles. These books were the final completed and the concluding to be received every bit Scripture, although parts of them may exist very ancient indeed. The books of Psalms, for case, contains many hymns from Israelite temple worship from the monarchic period, i.due east., earlier the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BCE; songs such as Psalm 29 may exist borrowed from the Canaanites, while Psalm 104 closely resembles Egyptian hymns. In its current form, the 150 psalms fall into five "books," modeled on the five books of the Pentateuch.
Proverbs also has many one-time parts, including one apparently translated from the 2nd-millennium BCE Egyptian text the "Instructions of Amenemope" (Proverbs 22). The remaining books in this part of the Bible are somewhat later: the latest is probably Daniel, which comes from the mid-second century.
From Many Books to the One Book
How did these various pieces come up to be regarded every bit Scripture by Jewish and, later, Christian communities? There were no committees that saturday down to decree what was or was not a holy book. To some degree, the process of Scripture-making, or canonization as it is often chosen (from the Greek word kanon, a "measuring rod"), involved a process, no longer completely understood, by which the Jewish community decided which works reflected most clearly its vision of God. The antiquity, real or imagined, of many of the books was conspicuously a factor, and this is why Psalms was eventually attributed to David, and Proverbs, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes (forth with, by some people, Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha) to Solomon. Yet, mere age was not enough. There had to be some way in which the Jewish community could identify its own religious experiences in the sacred books.
This occurred, at to the lowest degree in part, through an elaborate process of biblical interpretation. Only reading a text involves estimation. Interpretative choices are made even in picking upward today'due south newspaper; one must know the literary conventions that distinguish a news report, for instance, from an op-ed slice. The challenge becomes much more intense when one reads highly artistic texts from a unlike time and place, such as the Bible.
The earliest examples of interpretation nosotros have appear in the Bible itself. Zechariah reinterprets Ezekiel, Jeremiah often refers to Hosea and Micah, and Chronicles substantially rewrites Kings. These reinterpretations are in themselves evidence that the older books were already becoming authoritative, canonical, even as the younger ones were still beingness written.
But some of the oldest all-encompassing reinterpretations of our Bible come from the tertiary or second centuries BCE. For instance, the book of Jubilees is a rewriting of Genesis, now bundled in 50-year periods ending in a twelvemonth of jubilee, or a fourth dimension for forgiveness of debts. A related work is the Genesis Apocryphon, too a rewriting of Genesis. Ezekiel the Tragedian wrote a play in Greek based on the life of Moses. And the Essenes, the sect that produced the Dead Body of water Scrolls, composed commentaries (peshers) on diverse biblical books: fragments of those on Habakkuk, Hosea, and Psalms survive. From the start century BCE or so, come additional psalms attributed to David and the Letter of Aristeas (well-nigh the miraculous translating of the Bible into Greek), among others. And during the life of Jesus himself, Philo of Alexandria wrote extensive allegorical commentaries on the Pentateuch, all with a view toward making the Bible respectable to philosophers influenced past Plato.
Despite their great variety of outlook and interests, all of these works shared certain common views. They all believed the author of the Bible was God, that it was therefore a perfect book, that information technology had strong moral agendas and that it was abidingly relevant. Interpretation had to show how it was relevant to irresolute situations. They likewise thought the Bible to be cryptic, a puzzle requiring piecing together. The mental gymnastics required to make the onetime texts ever new is one of the bang-up contributions of this era to the history of Judaism and Christianity, and therefore Western civilisation itself.
An instance of interpretation: Genesis xi
Genesis xi is the story of how humans soon after the Flood built a metropolis centered around a belfry "with its top in the heavens." The purpose of the Tower of Boom-boom was to allow its builders to "brand a proper name" for themselves. God, in a pique of anger, alters the builders' languages so that they cannot sympathise each other. In its original form, the story is an explanation of why non everyone speaks Hebrew, as well as a annotate on the huge temple-towers (ziggurats) of Mesopotamian cities.
For later interpreters, notwithstanding, this story cried out for explanation. Why was God afraid of these people? How high was the tower? Who led the construction, and did anyone vocalism objections? What did the builders expect to exercise when they reached the heavens? What moral lessons should 1 learn from the story?
To answer these questions and others, Jubilees 10 says that the builders worked for 43 years (fifty years of the Jubilee period minus the mystical number seven) and built a structure ane and a half miles high! Their purpose was to enter into heaven itself. Pseudo-Philo's Biblical Antiquities (commencement century CE) adds a story most Abraham, a model of backbone, refusing to cooperate with the builders and so being thrown into a fiery furnace, much like the three immature men in Daniel 3. God sends an earthquake to destroy the furnace, and then he changes both the builders' languages and their appearance, so that no one can recognize even his or her ain brother. Other traditions think that the builders of the belfry were either giants (Pseudo-Eupolemus), or were humans led by the mighty hunter and city-builder Nimrod mentioned in Genesis ten (Josephus). Each interpreter imaginatively builds on some chance discussion or phrase in the biblical text to try to reply reasonable questions near information technology. Meanwhile, the first-century philosopher and biblical interpreter writes an unabridged book on this affiliate, which he interprets as an allegory almost human morality: the builders stand for greed and venality.
The Book and the In one case and Coming Messiah
Like their Jewish predecessors and Jewish contemporaries, early Christians believed that the Hebrew Bible was God'south book, and therefore a book that should cast light on current events and moral conundrums. For Christians, of course, the most important issue was the true import of Jesus and the story of his life, death, and resurrection. Since they believed him to be the messiah ("anointed ane"), God'south savior and the harbinger of a new and perfect historic period, they sought to find mention of him in the Hebrew Bible itself. This is why so much of the story of Jesus in the gospels quotes the Bible.
This move was not without precedent. The Dead Sea community likewise believed that the prophets had predicted their movement and their leader, the Teacher of Righteousness, as well as the political events of their time. They go so far as to claim that the prophets did not know what they were saying, but God, the true author of the text, used them to speak of the (to them) afar future.
Christians, even so, had a unlike set of questions than the Dead Sea sect, and so they found different texts to cite. Whatsoever texts that refer to a fourth dimension of a future deliverance, or the coming of a future rex, were off-white game. So the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 becomes the suffering Jesus of the gospels. And Luke'southward quotation from Isaiah 61 becomes a reference to Jesus'due south ministry of healing and reconciliation. Yet in every case, equally far as we can tell, the Christian reading comes after the fact. That is, they first believed in Jesus and and then tried to discover his life in Scripture. They then could shape their telling of stories about his life to fit the scriptures. This procedure may seem very circular, but given their assumptions -- namely, that Jesus is central to God'due south program, that God spoke through prophets who might non sympathise their ain words, and that the Bible was a cryptic puzzle needing solving -- this belief in prophecy and fulfillment is not incomprehensible. And then Luke can have Jesus say, "Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your presence!" Jesus saw himself as the deliverer that the prophets had foreseen long before. When his followers drew the same conclusion, they could then retain the aboriginal Scriptures, transforming them into something new, a Christian Bible.
Bible Etymology
The English word "Bible" is from the Greek phrase ta biblia, "the books," an expression Hellenistic Jews used to draw their sacred books several centuries before the time of Jesus. Christians adopted the phrase "Old Attestation" to refer to these sacred books they shared with Jews.
Jews called the same books Miqra, "Scripture," or the Tanakh, an acronym for the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible: T orah ("instructions" or less accurately "the law"), N eviim ("prophets"), and K ethuvim ("writings," including Psalms, Proverbs, and several other books). Modern scholars oft use the term "Hebrew Bible" to avoid the confessional terms Erstwhile Testament and Tanakh.
As for the New Testament, its current twenty-seven book form derives from the fourth century CE, even though the constituent parts come from the first century. Christians did non concur on the verbal extent of the New Testament for several centuries.
For Farther Reading
Brueggemann, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997).
Charlesworth, James H., ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. (2 vols.; Garden City: Doubleday, 1985).
Kugel, James. The Bible every bit It Was. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Idem. In Potiphar's Business firm: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts. (Cambridge: Harvard Academy Printing, 1990).
Leiman, Sid. The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture. (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1976).
Levenson, Jon. Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible. (San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 1985).
Noth, Martin. A History of Pentateuchal Traditions. (1948; trans. by Bernhard Anderson; Atlanta: Scholars, 1981).
Vermes, Geza, ed. The Dead Sea Scrolls in English. (3d ed.; New York: Penguin, 1987).
Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/first/scriptures.html