The Hebrew Old Testament

It has been my experience that most churches today prefer to preach from the New Testament and almost totally ignore the Old. It is true that the material in the New Testament is more familiar to congregations and appears easier to handle than some Old Testament passages. But if it is barely ever mentioned in church (other than Sunday school), then the average Christian is also less likely to read it themselves. This means they miss out on having the stories and wisdom of the Old Testament explained to them and being able to engage with it in their own reading. After all, without it the New Testament makes little sense. 

I admit that the Old Testament can be intimidating and confusing as it is a diverse collection of books written across a period of about 1,000 years (which ended more than 2,000 years ago). And yet it has been preserved and translated so that it can be read by most people in the world. However, it did not always exist in the form we have it today.

Of great interest (at least to me) is how the Old Testament has been passed down to us throughout the centuries and what it looked like to the early church and New Testament writers in the first century AD. In this post, I want to look at the development of the Hebrew text and how it got to the form we have it in today. Then in my next post I will focus on the Greek translations which were used by the New Testament writers and how they should be understood and handled in relation to the Hebrew. 

The Old Testament Texts in Hebrew

Hebrew was the language that the Old Testament was originally written in (although there are some parts of Daniel which are written in the related language Aramaic). Most research done on the text of the Old Testament is done on the Hebrew text. Today if you want to buy a copy of the Old Testament in Hebrew, the most recommended edition is called BHS, which stands for Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia as it was published by the German Bible Society (first published in 1977 and then a revised edition in 1997). It is what is known as a diplomatic text. This means that it is a printed edition of one ancient manuscript, with additional notes added by the German Bible Society at the bottom of each page to explain any issues in the text or interesting differences in other manuscripts (it is these notes that were revised in the revised edition). (When a text is based on multiple ancient manuscripts and the differences between them have been weighed to determine which reading is most likely to be original, it is known as an eclectic text. The Greek New Testament is an eclectic text.) Thus, when discussing the history of the Old Testament it is best to start with this text and work backwards.

The Masoretic Text (MT)

The text which BHS is a printed edition of what is called the Masoretic Text (often abbreviated as MT) a hand written book containing the whole Old Testament dated to the 10th century AD. This manuscript was the work of a group of Jews known as the Masoretes, who went to great lengths to preserve their holy scriptures, during the 7th to 11th centuries AD. As Hebrew is a consonantal language, meaning it doesn’t have vowels, the Masoretes came up with a system called pointing in order to add the vowels into the text. Instead of inserting them into the text, they added them above and beneath letters, as they didn’t want to change the text of their Bible. The pointing system in the MT was refined to its current form by a Masorete named Aaron ben Moses ben Asher and it is considered to be very accurate to the vocalisation of Hebrew. Today this system is seen in the dots and lines above and below the consonants in the Hebrew Old Testament. Earlier Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament do not have these marks. For example the Hebrew for Abraham would be אַבְרָהָם in the MT and אברהם in an unpointed manuscript. It is because of the lengths that the Masoretes went to preserve the text that their work has become the basis of the Old Testament text that is used around the world. Any translation of the Old Testament that has been translated from Hebrew is based on the Masoretic Text.

However, the MT is by no means a perfect copy of the Old Testament. The scribes who copied the texts would often suggest emendations in the margins where the text didn’t make much sense. This is because the text handed down to the Masroetes was not without error. Throughout hundreds of years of transmission, spelling errors and corrections had crept into the text because it was copied by hand. When working with the MT it is necessary to take these suggested emendations and any additional scribal errors into account. Even the Masorete scribes would have made mistakes as they copied the text. This happens when any text is copied by hand. As a result, many biblical scholars spend time trying to rediscover what the original Hebrew text was. This original text is called the Hebrew Bible (abbreviated as HB).

The Hebrew Bible (HB)

At the moment the HB does not really exist as an book, but refers to the original text which passed through hundreds of years of scribal copying before it came to the Masoretes. However, it was this Hebrew text which was the basis for the earliest Greek translations, which is why I have mentioned it. 

For most of its history the HB would have been a collection of manuscripts. It existed before works were bound together in codices (books), so it would have existed as a collection of scrolls. It is unlikely that all the books that make up the Old Testament at the moment were all brought together until around 100 AD. This was because Judaism underwent huge changes in response to the destruction of the temple in 70 AD and the rise and spread of Christianity in the decades before. Judaism consolidated around the Rabbis and had to move away from being a sacrificial based system as they now had no temple. Christianity was seen as a threat because the Christians were using the Greek translations (to be discussed in the next post) to support their belief in Jesus as the resurrected Messiah. So some groups of Rabbis got together and established which Hebrew text was going to be the only one for them to use. Before this most of the texts likely existed in various forms as they would have had differing histories depending on how well they had been copied and preserved (this is seen among the numerous copies of all the Old Testament books amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls, found at Qumran, in the West Bank, dating from the 5th century BC to the 4th century AD). This text is believed to have been the text behind the MT (often called the Proto-Masoretic Text). 

It was also at this point that the books included in the HB reached its final form. The Hebrew Bible traditionally divides into three parts: the Torah (Genesis-Deuteronomy), the Prophets (Joshua-Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the 12 Minor Prophets) and the Writings (all the other books, including Psalms, Proverbs, Daniel, Esther, Ruth etc). Before 100 AD the Torah and the Prophets were considered to be authoritative scripture by all Jews. The Writings was a more diverse group and included books that are no longer part of the Old Testament. So by 100 AD this part of the Jewish Bible was also set firm by the Rabbis. They discounted books which were not written in Hebrew or no longer survived in Hebrew (such books as 1-4 Maccabees, Judith, Sirach, the Wisdom of Solomon). Thus the boundaries and text of what would become the Old Testament in Hebrew were set for the Jews. The Christians also came to the same boundaries a few hundred years later, but this will be covered in the next post.   

Click on the image below to enlarge.

Origins of the Hebrew Old Testament