The Hebrew Bible for Beginners: A Jewish & Christian Introduction

By Dr. Joel N. Lohr and Dr. Joel S. Kaminsky

Jews call the Hebrew Scriptures the “Tanakh” and Christians call them the “Old Testament.” It doesn't take long to see that Jews and Christians view the same set of books differently and interpret these scriptures in unique and at times conflicting ways. The Hebrew Bible for Beginners introduces students to the tremendous influence the Hebrew Bible has had on western society for over two millennia and explores the complexities of reading ancient religious literature today. The book also addresses how certain modern critical approaches may initially be alarming, indeed even shocking, to those who have not been exposed to them, but it tackles the conversation in a respectful fashion. Avoiding jargon and convoluted prose, this highly accessible volume provides textboxes, charts, a timeline, a glossary, and regularly includes artistic renderings of biblical scenes to keep lay and beginning readers engaged.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781426775642

Book preview

What Does Bible Mean? How Many Bibles Are There?

The term Bible is derived from the Greek word biblia, a word that actually means books, not book in the singular. This small fact is an important one, highlighting one of the greatest impediments that one must overcome if a student hopes to understand what the Bible is. The Bible is not a book, but rather a library of books, which contains a wide array of different materials. In fact, many single biblical books are themselves also composite in nature—that is, they contain multiple stories or writings from different authors brought together into one—and thus Genesis, for example, contains creation and flood stories, ancestral tales, blessings, genealogical lists, laws, and so on.

But there is a further impediment in any attempt to understand exactly what the Bible is. The fact is that there is not a single, agreed upon set of scriptures shared by all Christians, let alone by all Christians and Jews. When Jews today speak of the Bible, they mean the Jewish Bible, containing only the books found in the (Protestant) Christian Old Testament, and even then the Jewish order of books differs significantly from that found in Christian Bibles. Furthermore, even among Christians there is not full agreement on what books are considered part of the Bible. Catholic and Orthodox Christians treat the books in what is called the Apocrypha section of many Bibles as scripture, while Protestant Christians do not generally consider these books scriptural, even if they view them as useful in filling in perceived gaps in narratives (as in the Additions to Esther) or filling in an historical narrative for the intertestamental period (as in 1–2 Maccabees). Thus when someone claims that, The Bible says . . . we need to ask ourselves which Bible they are referring to and which communities recognize the authority of the scriptural texts they are citing.

In this book, which is intended to introduce readers to the Hebrew Bible, a body of texts recognized by both Jews and Christians as sacred scripture, we will regularly highlight how certain biblical texts function differently within Jewish and Christian contexts. In some ways this is one of the greatest strengths of this particular introduction, written by two scholars, one with ties to Judaism and the other to Christianity, a point to which we’ll return in a moment. For now, however, let us say that this is by no means to imply that all Jews, let alone all Christians, read every biblical book in a single way. But it is important for the reader to begin by first grasping the most fundamental distinctions between how Jews tend to read their scriptural books as opposed to how Christians read these same books. Christians believe the books Jews use as Jewish scripture make up only one half of a two-part Christian Bible. Thus the Christian Bible is composed of the Old Testament and another set of documents Christians call the New Testament, a collection of books that were produced at a later point in history. It is worth emphasizing that Jews do not refer to their scriptures as the Old Testament.

As briefly mentioned already, although they contain all the same books with the same content, the names of these books are at times different and the books in the Jewish Bible are at times arranged in a different order than in the Christian Old Testament. The best way to grasp this distinction is by unpacking a common Jewish acronym for the Jewish Bible: the Tanakh, or TaNaK. The three consonants in the term TaNaK stand for Torah, a word meaning instruction, teaching, or law (Genesis–Deuteronomy); Nevi’im, the Hebrew word for Prophets (Joshua–2 Kings and Isaiah–Malachi); and Ketuvim, or the Writings (all the other books of the Jewish Bible). The most significant difference in the Christian order of the Old Testament is that the section containing the materials that run from Isaiah–Malachi occurs last in the Old Testament. To see just how different the Jewish Bible is from the Christian Bible, imagine the following. You go to a friend’s house to watch a lengthy movie, which comes on a series of three DVDs. Before you begin watching, your friend says, pay careful attention to the first DVD, it’s the most important part of the movie. Then you watch the three DVDs in sequence. The following night, your brother goes to watch what he thinks is the same movie at his friend’s house but he is told that the fourth DVD, one you did not even see, is the most important. He then watches all of DVD one, half of DVD two, then DVD three, then the last half of DVD two followed by the new fourth DVD. Did the two of you see the same movie? Not exactly.

Thus Jews and Christians often talk past each other because they each mean very different things by the term the Bible. For Jews, the first five books of the Bible, the Torah—which consists of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—sit at the very center of all Jewish tradition. These books influence Jewish perceptions of all the biblical books that follow the Torah and all later authoritative Jewish traditions are viewed as a further unfolding of the meaning and the message of the Torah. For many Christians, the center of the Bible is the four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Everything preceding them is read as foretelling the coming life, death, and resurrection of Jesus told in these Gospels. The New Testament books that follow are seen as the unfolding of the gospel message in the early church. It is often said within Christianity that the New interprets the Old; that is, the Old Testament can only be understood in the light of the New Testament. Or, as the fourth-century church father St. Augustine once said, The New Testament lies hidden in the Old, and the Old is unveiled in the New. This is something upon which Jews and Christians obviously disagree.

The fact that these very different biblically based communities share certain books in common creates difficulties when trying to describe that shared set of books. Thus in this introduction we will at differing times use each of the following terms, depending on the context, to describe those books of the Bible that were originally written in Hebrew. Sometimes we will speak of the Hebrew Bible, a somewhat neutral scholarly term used to describe this collection; at other times when we wish to communicate a Jewish view of the text we will speak of the Tanakh, Jewish Bible, or Jewish Scriptures; and when speaking of the first half of the Christian Bible, in reference to Christianity, we will use the term Old Testament.

This brings us to the question of why this introduction to the Hebrew Bible is unique. Most introductory textbooks to the Bible are written from a narrow vantage point, whether Jewish, a specific segment of Christianity, or an often artificially defined, academic, and supposedly faith-neutral island. In this book, however, we present an introduction written by a Jew and a Christian. Scholars sometimes portray themselves as purely academic or neutral in issues of faith, and this may be appropriate in certain contexts. But when dealing with the Bible, a collection of books that various communities read as inspired by God and authoritative for faith and practice, it is inevitable that one’s faith background—whether strong, minimal, previously important or even nonexistent—will affect one’s interpretation. We’ve decided to be transparent about our religious backgrounds as we explore the Hebrew Bible with you. We have learned a great deal about the Bible from our own teachers, who have had various perspectives, and by collaborating as authors from different backgrounds. In the same way, we hope that you, too, will benefit from this endeavor. However, although we have an interest in showing the continuing value of the Bible, this introduction is not an attempt to persuade readers to adopt a particular religious viewpoint or academic approach toward the Bible. Our purpose is to describe and explain what the Hebrew Bible is, how it has been interpreted in the past and might be productively read in the future, and why this set of documents has been so influential religiously, socially, and historically.

This brings up a related issue, which we might call the ethics of interpretation. As interpreters of the Bible, we have attempted to strike a balance between reading the text sympathetically and at the same time critiquing aspects of the text that are indeed problematic from a contemporary viewpoint. At times reading this ancient literature is difficult. Although in places we provide strategies for approaching problematic sections in the Bible in thoughtful ways, we are also aware that certain aspects of the biblical text will (rightly) remain troubling to a contemporary audience.

What follows is an attempt to shed light on the Hebrew Bible in a manner that is accessible and engaging to contemporary readers. The book assumes no previous knowledge of this literature, hence its title, The Hebrew Bible for Beginners: A Jewish and Christian Introduction. Our emphasis throughout is on introducing this literature to beginners. We invite you along for what should be a fascinating journey.

A Few Basics

Although it might be obvious to some, we should first note that the books of the Hebrew Bible were not composed in English. Rather, the books of the Jewish Tanakh (or Christian Old Testament) were written in Hebrew, aside from approximately three hundred verses from Daniel and Ezra that are in Aramaic, or ancient Syrian. Because language is so important to communication, and these languages differ from English in important ways, in this section we introduce some basics about the language, manuscripts, versions, and growth of various parts of the Hebrew Bible and the Apocrypha.

Hebrew

As we noted, aside from a few Aramaic passages in two later books, the Hebrew Bible was composed and preserved in the language of the Israelite people in antiquity: Hebrew. What difference does this make?

There are two important matters to keep in mind here, the first of which applies to any translation. First, what we read in an English translation of the Hebrew Bible will always be one step removed from the original. This does not mean that we cannot understand or make use of such a translation, but given that at times the Hebrew Bible contains highly stylized language and in places poetic material, it is difficult to appreciate many of its nuances in translation. We might say this compares to trying to read Shakespeare in German. Second, Hebrew presents some interesting challenges because in antiquity its written form included only consonants without vowels (the vowels were implied), making some words open to ambiguity. We will discuss both of these points, along with others, in the next section.

Scrolls, Language, and Versions

Recently, archaeologists discovered a silver amulet dating to the sixth century BCE, which contains an excerpt of Numbers 6:24-26, often called the Priestly Blessing. This significant archaeological find shows not only the importance of this passage but also just how early such texts were being used and circulated. In this case the text was worn by a person, and probably functioned like modern-day texts or proverbs that are framed and put on the walls of our homes, that is, as memory aids or charms. Our oldest known manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, however, date to the second century BCE and are part of an interesting story. In the late 1940s a collection of biblical, parabiblical, and sectarian documents was found in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea. This cache of documents, dating between 200 BCE and 70 CE, came to be called the Dead Sea Scrolls. Found by two Bedouin shepherds, these scrolls eventually changed hands, appeared for sale in 1954 in the Wall Street Journal, and were purchased by a party interested in their publication (they are now housed in the Shrine of the Book Museum in Jerusalem). It took many years, however, along with much controversy, before they were published and made available for scholars and others to examine.

Figure 1. One of several caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Courtesy James Elgin.

The Dead Sea Scrolls contain fragments from every book in the Hebrew Bible except Esther and they are now the oldest existing biblical manuscripts. Like contemporary Torah scrolls, these ancient biblical books were composed using Hebrew consonants without vowels and were written in ink on parchment, that is, animal skins that have been cleaned, stretched, and dried. These biblical texts show some differences when compared with the Hebrew Bible manuscripts that Jews had preserved through the centuries (which are based on the Masoretic tradition; see sidebar The Masoretes and the Masoretic Text on pp. 8–9), though the variants are generally minor or provide clarifications on well-known textual difficulties. The variations between manuscripts, however, suggest that one should think of biblical manuscripts as existing in families, families that share much in common with each other but may, at least in places, represent unique forms of various biblical books.

Figure 2. Dead Sea Scrolls fragment of Genesis 39:11–40:1, which narrates Joseph’s encounter with Potiphar’s wife. Courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority.

Let us reemphasize that these differences in manuscripts generally involve only minor variations, mostly the occasional word change or incorrect letter, not huge inconsistencies or changes in the Hebrew Bible’s stories or commandments. However, it is often in the minor variants that scholars find interesting historical developments or theological slants. The science of determining the original wording of the text is called textual criticism, and this discipline uses a variety of biblical manuscripts in its task, Hebrew and non-Hebrew. For instance, in places in this book we will refer to the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that dates before Jesus’s time (between the third and first centuries BCE). There are Samaritan, Syriac, and Aramaic editions of the Torah and other parts of the Hebrew Bible as well.

The point to grasp here is that, before one even begins to translate the books from Genesis through 2 Chronicles (the whole Tanakh), one needs to recognize that no matter how true one wants to be to the Hebrew, there are variations within the ancient manuscripts that contemporary scholars consider when making their translations. Some of this variance relates to the fact that all manuscripts are copies of copies of even more ancient copies. Further, even the Hebrew in any single manuscript is open to a certain level of interpretive difference because, as mentioned, ancient manuscripts like those found among the Dead Sea Scrolls contain no vowels, may lack a full space between words, or may not contain punctuation or periods at the end of sentences. The lack of vowels (small Hebrew markings under and above consonants) can be seen in comparing the following versions of Genesis 1:1: This lack of vowels in early manuscripts sometimes allows for a single word to be vocalized in two or more different ways. One need only think of the letters ctlg, which can be vocalized in English as catalog or cytology or even cat leg/cut log if there was meant to be a space between letters. Of course, the act of translation itself always introduces additional elements of interpretation as one must decide whether to translate more literally or to translate more dynamically, aiming to capture the spirit of the Hebrew text. For this reason, the reader might wish to consult different translations, such as the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), the Common English Bible (CEB), the New Jewish Publication Society version (NJPS), or, for those wishing to get a sense of the actual Hebrew of the Torah, we recommend the recent literary translations by Everett Fox and Robert Alter. If you are in doubt about which translation of the Bible to buy, it might be worth asking your professor about the strengths and weaknesses of various translations.

Figure 3. Unpointed and pointed Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1.

The Masoretes and the Masoretic Text

The manuscript tradition that has long been regarded as the most reliable, at least until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, is called the Masoretic Text. This title is derived from the group of scribes called the Masoretes who meticulously preserved this tradition in the sixth to tenth centuries CE. These scribes are regarded as having developed the now-common markings and vowel system around the consonantal text, seen in the pointed Hebrew excerpt (figure 3). However, it is believed that these markings attempted to preserve older, often oral traditions of vocalizations and cantillations (markings indicating how the text is to be sung liturgically), as well as alternate spellings or other details such as how the reader should divide each verse. Particularly interesting is the care these scribes used in maintaining the Hebrew text through the centuries. Because there were no printing presses and the transmission of texts was done entirely by hand through careful checking and rechecking, these scribes devised a counting system in which every word and even every letter of each book and each larger section of the Hebrew Bible was accounted for and tracked. For instance, according to their calculations, the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, contained 400,945 Hebrew letters and the letter at the middle of the Torah was a vav, in the middle of the word gakhon (meaning belly), found in Leviticus 11:42. Or, as we discuss later, the books we call Ezra and Nehemiah were considered in antiquity to be one book, something seen in the fact that the Masoretes determined that the middle of the book was at Nehemiah 3:32. Such a system allowed scribes to count forward or backward from the start or end of a book to its middle, thus ensuring that not one letter was missing. It is not surprising, therefore, that when the Dead Sea Scrolls were compared to these much later manuscripts, very few errors or changes were found.

From Scrolls to Scripture

One needs to keep in mind that ancient Israel was primarily an oral, not a writing, culture. This means that texts were likely somewhat fluid for hundreds of years before they achieved their final or canonical form. While written texts may well have existed even as early as the time of King Solomon, scribes thought it perfectly fine and even quite appropriate to add in clarifications, expansions of stories or laws, and even new traditions when writing out fresh copies of scrolls that inevitably aged and wore out over time. Most scholars believe that the Torah was the first collection of biblical books to achieve a fixed form and be granted the authority of scripture, something that likely occurred by the fifth century BCE. The second century BCE prologue to the book of Sirach (found in the Apocrypha) suggests that much of the material in the Prophets, the second section of the Hebrew Bible, was read as scripture by this period. The last part of the Hebrew Bible to achieve a fixed form was the Writings. It should be noted that some of the materials contained in this section are quite old, like particular psalms, and some are quite young, like portions of Daniel. Daniel 7–12, for example, though set as taking place in sixth century BCE Babylon during the rule of Nebuchadnezzar II, is now widely thought to be written in the wake of events that happened in the 160s BCE. The evidence thus suggests that the Writings could not have achieved a fixed form until sometime after these events.

All of this, however, is rather oversimplified because scholars agree that certain materials in the later sections of the Hebrew Bible may well be older than the latest materials in the Torah. For example, parts of Amos and Hosea are recognized as predating much of the Torah and at times preserving alternate traditions. Thus Amos 5:25 implies that Israel did not offer any animal sacrifices to God during the forty years Israel wandered in the wilderness (between the exodus and the conquest of Canaan), while the Torah itself asserts that Israel offered sacrifices during this time.

For our purposes the reader need only grasp the following facts: (1) The process by which the books of the Hebrew Bible achieved their final, canonical form took hundreds of years, and (2) this involved an ongoing process in which new generations participated by contributing to the traditions of the past and making them speak to new historical contexts. Unlike the American Constitution, in which official amendments can be added subsequently but are to be acknowledged as such, the ancient Israelite community simply incorporated these amendments as if they were part of the original texts. However, at times certain scribal practices or clear shifts in tone and language indicate that new materials have been grafted into an older text. Deciphering when and how this occurred has become an important part of the scholarly study of the Bible. This information can tell us a lot about when the text was written, who might have written it, for what purpose, and so on. We will take up this last point at length later in this book.

The Apocrypha

We will cover the Apocrypha more fully in our chapter dedicated to this collection (see pp. 275–84). Here we introduce it briefly, indicate how and when it developed, and discuss its status as canonical scripture.

The Apocrypha is the collection of additional books (seven to thirteen, depending on how these are counted) found in Roman Catholic Bibles but not in Jewish or most Protestant Bibles. This collection includes narratives like Tobit and Judith, wisdom-oriented books like the Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus (also known as Sirach or the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach or Ben Sira), and books that narrate various historical periods from a religious or philosophical angle such as 1 and 2 Maccabees. The Apocrypha were produced by Jews and included in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Septuagint, and then in subsequent Latin versions of the Christian Bible. Jerome (a fourth- to fifth-century church father who produced an important Latin translation of the Bible called the Vulgate) wrote that the extra books found in the Apocrypha were read by the church to provide examples and inspiration for Christian living, but were not used to form doctrine. In 1534, when Martin Luther, the figure who set off the Protestant Reformation, published a complete Bible for Christians, he decided to place these extra books between the Old Testament and the New Testament. This editorial decision made a statement saying: These books are extra; they’re not in either the Old or New Testament. Ultimately, the Council of Trent, a sixteenth-century Catholic council, responded to Luther and claimed that these books were definitely to be included in the Catholic Church’s scriptures.

The books in the Apocrypha at times fill in the gaps in certain narratives of the thirty-nine books of the Hebrew Bible. Thus the apocryphal material called the Additions to Esther adds the name of the God of Israel to the story of Esther (something otherwise absent) and provides narrative bridges and theological commentary to help readers understand all that is going on in the Hebrew version. The Apocrypha also provide readers with a great deal of useful social and theological information about ancient Jewish life both inside and outside the land of Israel. Those Christians who accept the Apocrypha as integral to their Old Testament tend to regard more of this testament as wisdom literature than those with the leaner Protestant Old Testament. This is because a significant section of the Apocrypha is fully rooted in the wisdom tradition—the books of Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, and Tobit.

The Tanakh and Old Testament as Sacred Scripture

While historians and biblical scholars are naturally quite interested in the books of the Hebrew Bible as artifact or literature, the truth is that the books found in the Bible were carefully preserved over the centuries because they are considered to be sacred writings to Jews and Christians. Because of their status as scripture, various books in the Bible have received a great deal of interpretive attention from thinkers in both traditions and have deeply influenced each community’s religious life. Of course each tradition reads their collection of sacred scripture through unique interpretive lenses and the material they share, the Hebrew Bible, is also read in a particular way—Judaism through the vast array of rabbinic teachings, and Christianity through the New Testament and classical Christian tradition. In short, for Jews the larger canon of Judaism contains not only the Tanakh, but also the Mishnah, Talmud, and midrash, collections of ancient rabbinic writings. For Christians, their canon includes the Old and New Testaments (the latter of which Jews do not recognize as scripture) as well as the traditions and creeds of the church. In this chapter, we will spend a bit of time showing how each tradition interprets and liturgically employs elements of this seminal text.

Traditional Jewish Interpretation of the Tanakh

Within Jewish tradition, the Torah occupies such a central space that the term has come to take on two meanings. The first simply refers to the opening five books of the larger Jewish Bible, or Tanakh. But in its more expansive meaning, the term Torah can refer to any part, or all, of the vast trove of Jewish law and lore from antiquity to today. This dual usage is grounded in a larger rabbinic theory of the Dual Torah. The ancient rabbis, teachers of Jewish law and lore who lived during the first few centuries of the Common Era, believed that Moses actually received two Torahs from God on Mount Sinai. One Torah was considered to be written (the Pentateuch and in some sense the whole Hebrew Bible) and the other was thought to be oral (or Oral Torah, the rabbinic traditions such as those found in the Mishnah and Talmud).

The centrality of the Torah can also be seen in how Jews understand the Torah’s relationship to the larger Jewish Bible as well as in the disproportionate amount of commentary that later Jewish tradition produced on the first five books of the Bible. Within Judaism, the Torah is understood to contain God’s direct revelation to his prophet Moses. The Torah itself asserts that Moses’s place as one who speaks for God is preeminent. While the whole Hebrew Bible is viewed as sacred scripture, Judaism sees the Prophets and Writings as containing stories, prophecies, wisdom, and prayers of post-Mosaic Jews who sought to live their life according to the Torah of Moses. In fact, it is interesting to note that these other two sections of the Tanakh (the Prophets and Writings) begin with strong injunctions to meditate on the Torah day and night (see Joshua 1:7-8 and Psalm 1:2).

The disproportionate attention that postbiblical Jewish tradition lavished upon the Torah further supports the central place of the Torah within the biblical canon. The fact is that Jewish tradition has come to see the Torah as the blueprint for Jewish life. Much of the Torah is filled with God’s mitzvot, or commandments, concerning how one should live one’s life, and in turn the rabbis spend a great deal of energy trying to apply these commands to ever-new life situations. The most important of these discussions are found in the Mishnah and Talmud (both are early collections of rabbinic legal debates; the Mishnah from around 200 CE, the Talmud building on the Mishnah composed between approximately 200 and 700 CE). The ancient rabbis in these collections thus understand their own activities of interpreting and applying the Torah to new situations as simply making manifest aspects of the Oral Torah that Moses received at Sinai.

The Oral Torah was also seen as containing much of the backstory that helps one understand the often cryptic narratives found throughout the Tanakh and enables one to unpack their meaning. This is done primarily through something called midrash, a verse-by-verse commentary that brings verses from across the Tanakh to illuminate a given passage, and which brings forth traditional rabbinic teachings about characters and events in the biblical text to expand upon and explain it. The ancient rabbis derived their interpretive insights from a very careful reading