1.A 00. The Making of The Old Testament

THE MAKING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT To THE JEWS the Scriptures were indeed the Holy Scriptures. They expressed this special holiness in a very curious way. "All the Holy Scriptures," says the Mishnah, "render the hands unclean’* (Yadaim 3:5). When a man had touched an unclean thing he had to go through a process of the most meticulous cleansing and washing of his hands to remove all possible defilement. The law was that he must do exactly the same after he had touched any of the rolls which contained the books of Scripture. The intention of that strange regulation was to make it very difficult to handle the rolls of Scripture at all; they were so holy that they must be fenced about with rules and regulations which made it difficult even to take them within the hands. The process by which the Old Testament came to contain the books which it does to-day contain is a long story. It began with the emergence of the Book of Deuteronomy in 621 B.C. and finished with the decisions of the Council of Jamnia in AD. 90 Or thereby. It took seven hundred years and more to build up the divine library of the Old Testament; and it is the story of that long process which we are to study. The Three Sections As the Jews regarded it, the Old Testament fell into three sections the Law, the Prophets and the Writings, the Torah, the Nebiim, ancTthe Kethubim, That division goes at least as far back as about 180 B.C., when the Greek translation of Ecclesiasticus was made. The original author of the Hebrew version of that book was Jesus ben Sirach, and the Greek version was made by Ms grandson. In the Prologue to the Greek translation the grandson speaks of the many good things which were given to Israel for wisdom and instruction by the Law, the Prophets, and by the others who followed in their steps; and he tells how his grandfather gave himself much to the reading of the law and the prophets and the other books of our fathers.

These are the earliest references to the threefold division of Scripture which became so familiar to the Jews. The Law consisted of the first five books of the Old Testament Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. The Prophets fell into two sections. First, there were the Former Prophets, which we reckon rather as historical books- Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. The last two books were generally, but not always, reckoned as two books and not four, as in our reckoning. Second, there were the Latter Prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and The Twelve. The Twelve, which we sometimes call the Minor Prophets, were reckoned as one book. It ought always to be remembered that when we speak of the Minor Prophets, the word does not imply any kind of inferiority in wisdom or quality or authority, but simply means that the books of these twelve prophets were shorter than the books of the great prophets. The Writings were a much more miscellaneous and loosely connected group, and were composed of Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, Daniel Of these eleven books, five were known particularly as the Five Rolls because they were specially connected with certain great Jewish festivals at which they were always read. The Song of Solomon was read at the Passover, and allegorically interpreted to tell of the exodus from Egypt. Ruth, the harvest idyll, was read at the Feast of Weeks, which was a harvest-thanksgiving festival. Lamentations was read on the ninth day of the month Ab, which was the day of fasting in memory of the destruction of the Temple. Ecclesiastes was read at the Feast of Tabernacles, because, as Cornill puts it, "it preaches a thankful enjoyment of life, united with God and consecrated by the fear of God, as the ultimate aim of wisdom." Esther was read at the Festival of Purim, for the existence of which it was the warrant and authority.

Jewish practice did not enumerate the books as we do, nor did it always enumerate them in the same way. The commonest method of enumeration, which is usual in the Talmud, is to number the books as twenty-four. In the Talmud the Old Testament is frequently called the twenty-four holy Scriptures, or the twenty-four books. In 4 Ezra (2 Esdras), an apocryphal book written towards the end of the first century A.D., there is an imaginary story of how Ezra the scribe restored from memory the books of Scripture, when they had been lost, and how he received other books from God along with them; and the story finishes with God’s command: "The twenty-four books that thou hast written publish, that the worthy and unworthy may read therein; but the seventy last thou shalt keep, to deliver them to the wise among the people" (4 Ezra 14:45-46). The twenty four books were made up exactly according to the list that we have already given five books of the Law, four books of the Former Prophets and four books of the Latter Prophets, and eleven books of the Writings. This may be said to be what we might call the official enumeration.