The Lessons of Jesus

Understanding the Old Testament · Before the chapters

Before We Start: My Bible

The first thing you need to know about my Bible is that I never held one.

About 5 minutes

There was no book with a cover. There were scrolls, copied by hand on leather, rolled up and kept in a cupboard in the synagogue. A village like mine was lucky to own a few. When I stood up to read in the synagogue at Nazareth, the attendant handed me one scroll, the scroll of Isaiah. I unrolled it until I found the place, read it, rolled it back up and handed it back (Luke 4:16–20).

So when you picture me with the scriptures, do not picture a leather Bible with a ribbon in it. Picture a long roll of leather, one book at a time, and a room full of people who mostly knew the words by ear.

Three parts, not five

My people did not divide the scriptures the way your Bible does. We had three parts, and I named them myself once: all things which are written in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms, concerning me (Luke 24:44).

The Law, or Torah, was the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. This was the heart of it. Every Jew agreed on these.

The Prophets came next. That meant the history books, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which we counted as prophecy because they tell what happened when the people listened to God and what happened when they did not. Then came Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Then came the Twelve, the twelve short prophets, Hosea to Malachi, written on one scroll together.

The Writings were everything else: the Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah, and Chronicles. The Psalms were the biggest and best-loved book on that shelf, and many readers take the psalms, in my phrase, to stand for the whole of it, though some think I meant only the Psalms themselves.

Counted the Jewish way, with Samuel, Kings and Chronicles as one book each, Ezra and Nehemiah as one, and the Twelve as one, that comes to twenty-four books. Your Old Testament has thirty-nine. They are the same books, cut differently.1

My Bible ended with Chronicles

Here is something most Christians have never been told. In the Jewish order, the scriptures do not end with Malachi. They end with Chronicles. The oldest list of that order was written down a few centuries after me, but there is a good reason to think it was already that way in my time.2

You can hear it in something I said. I told the religious leaders that they would answer for all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zachariah (Luke 11:51; Matthew 23:35). Abel is the first murder in Genesis. The Zechariah stoned in the Temple courtyard is in 2 Chronicles 24. If Chronicles is the last book, that is the first murder in the scriptures to the last.3

Your Bible was arranged differently, and on purpose. Christians took their grouping mostly from the Greek translation, which put history first, then poetry, then the prophets. Latin Bibles then moved the twelve short prophets to the very end, after Daniel. That way the Old Testament ends with Malachi promising that Elijah will come back before the great day of the LORD, and you turn the page into Matthew. It is a good arrangement for a Christian. It is not the one I knew.

Not every shelf was settled

You may think that in my lifetime everybody agreed exactly which books were scripture. They did not.

The Law was settled, and so were the Prophets. The Writings were still being argued over. Jewish teachers were still debating, long after I died, whether the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes belonged.4 When the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, in caves near my own country, every book of your Old Testament turned up among them except one: Esther.5 The earliest Christian list of Old Testament books that survives, from a bishop named Melito around the year 170, leaves Esther out too.6

Nobody in my time owned a list. Nobody needed one. You knew what was read in the synagogue, and the edges were still soft.

The Greek Bible

There was also a second Bible in my world.

Two or three centuries before I was born, Jews in Alexandria, in Egypt, began translating the scriptures into Greek, because many of them no longer read Hebrew. That translation is called the Septuagint. The Greek Bibles that have come down to you, copied by Christians from the 300s onward, also include several books that were never in the Hebrew collection, such as Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon and the books of the Maccabees.7

Most of the New Testament writers quoted the Greek, not the Hebrew. Where the two differ, the gospels sometimes follow the Greek, and you will see that happen in these chapters.

I spoke Aramaic. The gospels show me reading from the scroll of Isaiah in Nazareth. It would normally have been Hebrew, though the words Luke gives follow the Greek. But much of what I said reached you through Greek, written down by men who quoted their scriptures in Greek.

The numbers in your Bible

One more thing, so it does not trip you up.

There were no chapter numbers on my scrolls, and no verse numbers. The chapters in your Bible were added around the year 1200 by an English churchman, Stephen Langton, who later became archbishop of Canterbury. The verse numbers came in the 1550s from a French printer working in Geneva, Robert Estienne.8

They are useful, and this book uses them. But they are not part of the scriptures. When a chapter break falls in the middle of a thought, it is because a man in the Middle Ages put it there.

How I will read these books with you

These were not old books to me. They were not an “Old Testament” at all. They were the scriptures. They were the only ones there were.

I quoted them constantly. I argued with people about them. Sometimes I set one verse against another. Sometimes I said, You have heard that it was said, and then said something else.

So in each chapter, I will tell you what the book is, who wrote it as far as anyone can tell, and what was going on when it was written. Then I will tell you what I did with it, using only what the gospels remember. Some books I quoted again and again. Some I never mentioned once, and I will say so.

You will notice that I keep coming back to the same few things: debt, land, the poor, the stranger, and the difference between a ruler who feeds on his people and one who feeds them. That is not me forcing those things into the books. They were in the books first. That is where I learned them.

Sources for this essay

Every numbered note in the text points here, so nothing has to be taken on trust.

  1. Josephus, Against Apion 1.37–41, written about AD 95, counts twenty-two books. 4 Ezra (2 Esdras) 14:44–46, about AD 100, speaks of twenty-four books to be made public. The difference is usually explained by Josephus counting Ruth with Judges and Lamentations with Jeremiah. ↩
  2. The earliest surviving statement of the order of the Prophets and the Writings is a baraita in the Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 14b, which ends the Writings with Chronicles but begins them with Ruth, not Psalms. Medieval manuscripts vary: the Leningrad Codex (AD 1008) puts Chronicles first among the Writings. Printed Hebrew Bibles end with Chronicles. ↩
  3. The Zechariah stoned in the Temple court is the son of Jehoiada (2 Chronicles 24:20–22). Matthew 23:35 calls him “son of Barachiah,” apparently confusing him with the prophet Zechariah son of Berechiah (Zechariah 1:1). Since Zechariah son of Jehoiada is not the last martyr in chronological order (Uriah, in Jeremiah 26:20–23, is later), the saying is usually read as running from the first book of the scriptures to the last. This is an inference, not a certainty. ↩
  4. Mishnah Yadayim 3:5 (compiled about AD 200) records disagreement over whether the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes “render the hands unclean,” the rabbinic way of saying a book is holy scripture, and Rabbi Akiva’s defense of the Song. See also Mishnah Eduyot 5:3. ↩
  5. No fragment of Esther has been identified among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The identification of a small fragment of Nehemiah is debated, but Ezra and Nehemiah were one book, and Ezra is attested (4Q117), so the combined book is usually counted as present. ↩
  6. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 4.26.13–14, preserves Melito of Sardis’s list of “the books of the old covenant.” It does not include Esther. Lamentations and Nehemiah are probably counted under Jeremiah and Ezra. ↩
  7. The Letter of Aristeas tells the legend of seventy-two translators of the Law at Alexandria. The Law was probably translated in the third century BC and the other books over the following two centuries. The complete Greek Bibles that survive, Codex Vaticanus, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus, are Christian manuscripts of the fourth and fifth centuries, and they do not agree exactly on which additional books they contain. ↩
  8. Stephen Langton introduced the chapter divisions into the Latin Bible in the early thirteenth century, while teaching at Paris, before he became archbishop of Canterbury in 1207. Robert Estienne (Stephanus) printed verse numbers in his Greek New Testament of 1551 and in his complete Latin Bible of 1555, both printed at Geneva. Hebrew manuscripts already marked verse endings, without numbers. ↩