Chapter Two the Composition, Editing, and Transmission of the Bible
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Eiselein, Goins, Wood / Studying the Bible Chapter Two The Composition, Editing, and Transmission of the Bible Introduction: What is the Bible? The Bible is one of the most widely translated and available books in the world, with billions of copies in print. But what is the Bible? The question arises because of considerable variety in the contents and arrangement in Bibles of different faith traditions. A Protestant Bible has two main parts: an “Old Testament” and a “New Testament.” The Old Testament has four sections: the Pentateuch, Histories, Poetical and Wisdom; and the Prophets, fifty-six books in all. The New Testament has twenty-seven books. A Roman Catholic Bible includes additional books in its old testament: Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and Baruch. Eastern Orthodox Bibles include still more: Prayer of Manasseh, 1 and 2 Esdras, and others. Consulting a Hebrew Bible further complicates matters: here is nothing called a “testament,” old or new, and there are three subsections: Torah, Prophets (Nevi’im), and Writings (Ketuvim), with, depending on who is counting, between twenty-four and thirty-nine books. The Christian “Old Testament” ends with Malachi, but the Hebrew Bible concludes with 2 Chronicles. (See Fig. 2) How did the Bible come to have different authorized canons? And why do texts of different faith communities not agree? To answer this question fully requires a range of disciplines, including history, philology, archaeology, and comparative religion. The Bible is the culmination of at least twenty-five hundred years of writing, reproduction, discussion, and debate. It consists of multiple genres: poetry, legends, histories, genealogies, laws, epistles, visions, and proverbs. It was composed in multiple languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. It draws upon and adapts other nations’ myths and philosophical traditions, marking them with its own distinctive perspective. The word “Bible” is derived from the Latin word biblia, which means, simply, “book.” Derived from the Greek, ta biblia, “the books,” signifies “a collection of individual works,” according to scholars Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. The title “Bible” obscures the fact that it did not always exist as a codex—that is, as an object with pages bound between covers. In their earliest form, biblical books were written on individual scrolls. In its pre-codex form, therefore, “the” Bible did not exist, since almost every “book” comprised a separate scroll. Scrolls do not mandate a single order. Scroll length is limited by its material (parchment or papyrus) and by physical considerations. Long books can 7 Eiselein, Goins, Wood / Studying the Bible become quite bulky and may need a stand to support them while they are being read. Thus, the books of Isaiah or Jeremiah or Judges or Kings each constitute one scroll, while the works of the “minor prophets,” so called because of their length, not their importance, fit into one scroll comfortably. These physical factors may have contributed to the order of the Hebrew Bible when it was compiled into codex form, when questions of how to order the books emerged with more urgency. Further, collections of scrolls might vary, depending on the interests and priorities of the group adopting and storing them. Since the books were written at different times and for different purposes, consensus about which books ought to be included in the canon—the list of authoritative texts—also took time, and even now disagreements persist, as we see from Fig. 2. Whether it existed in scroll or codex format, for most of history, books of the Bible were hand-copied. Although developments in the ninth and tenth centuries CE placed new emphasis upon accuracy in copying, earlier versions varied significantly, either because of errors in transcription or because the copyists did not share the same sources. Only with the invention of the printing press did it become possible to reliably reproduce identical copies. Johann Gutenberg printed a Latin Vulgate Bible in the 1450s, and a Hebrew Bible soon followed in 1488 (Penkower 2082). Copies of the Bible proliferated. Today, online editions of the Bible provide another way of reading the Bible. Online texts encourage verse-by-verse rather than chapter-by-chapter or book-by-book reading. They make it easier than ever to search for key terms and compare translations without the bulky concordances students in previous eras relied upon. They make it easy to engage in the practice of “proof-texting”—providing a verse to support a position without considering that line in context. But online editions, accessed through small screens, may make it more difficult to see the Bible’s larger formal structures. Still, it is perhaps too soon to tell how this new technology will influence the reading of the Bible. The Hebrew Bible: Composition and Canonization The oldest part of the Bible, and the first in both Jewish and Christian traditions to be canonized is the Tanak(h), also known as the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament. Most modern scholars believe that the bulk of it was written, compiled, and edited between the eighth and the second centuries BCE, mostly in Jerusalem in the Kingdom of Judah (Barton 3). Because this text is not written exclusively in Hebrew, and because to call it an “Old Testament” defines it in Christian terms, the Jewish name for this collection of texts is Tanak(h), after the initial letters of the three sections of the Hebrew Bible: Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim. 8 Eiselein, Goins, Wood / Studying the Bible The Torah, sometimes translated as “the Law,” but more correctly rendered as “Teaching” or “Instruction,” consists of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Also called the “Pentateuch,” or the “Books of Moses,” the books and the order have not varied in recorded history, reflecting the central importance of this collection. According to rabbinic tradition of the first millenium CE, after Moses returned from forty days and forty nights of communion with God on the mountain, he carried both a written Torah and an oral Torah. Rabbis from the period between the second through ninth centuries CE believed that the Mishnah, a book of legal statements and guidelines, and the Talmud, rabbinic commentaries on the Mishnah and other religious matters, constitute that oral Torah, orally transmitted from Moses (Brettler “Torah” 3; Cohen 246-48). For Samaritan Jews, the Torah is the only unequivocally sacred text—their Pentateuch derives from a slightly different tradition from that eventually adopted by the Masoretes (see below, p. 19). Samaritans declined to add the Prophets and Writings to their sacred collection, perhaps because of these later books’ focus upon the Judahite dynasty of King David, and the centrality of the temple in Jerusalem. The second section, the Prophets or Nevi’im, includes what Christian Bibles call the histories (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) as well as the major prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve minor prophets. The earliest versions of Nevi’im describe it as eight books: Samuel and Kings are single texts, and the twelve minor prophets fit onto one scroll and count as one unit. Their order has been “relatively stable,” according to Marc Brettler (“Canonization” 2073). Although the Torah’s place is central, Nevi’im becomes almost as important by the Roman period. The Gospel of Matthew attests to their equal importance as Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets” (Matt. 5:17). Of all the texts in the Hebrew Bible, the Ketuvim, “Writings,” are the most miscellaneous and were the last to be standardized. Different manuscripts exhibit significantly different arrangements: though the collection most often begins with Psalms, some copies start with Ruth, and the earliest complete Masoretic text, the Leningrad Codex (1009 CE), begins with Chronicles (Sarna 99). Daniel, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Esther were among the last to be canonized (Beckwith 101), though the Septuagint includes them and other texts that were eventually rejected by Jewish scholars (see Fig. 2). 9 Eiselein, Goins, Wood / Studying the Bible Fig. 2. Canons of Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) or Old Testament. Adapted from Shaye J.D. Cohen, Open Harvard Courses, The Hebrew Scriptures in Judaism and Christianity Hebrew Bible Greek Septuagint Latin Vulgate Protestant or Tanakh (Eastern Orthodox) (Roman Catholic) ca. 950-1000 CE ca. 200-150 BCE ca. 390-400 CE ca. 1550s CE TORAH: THE LAW, or THE LAW, or THE LAW, or INSTRUCTION PENTATEUCH PENTATEUCH PENTATEUCH Genesis Genesis Genesis Genesis Exodus Exodus Exodus Exodus Leviticus Leviticus Leviticus Leviticus Numbers Numbers Numbers Numbers Deuteronomy Deuteronomy Deuteronomy Deuteronomy NEVI’IM: THE HISTORICAL HISTORICAL HISTORICAL PROPHETS BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS Joshua Joshua Joshua Joshua Judges Judges Judges Judges 1 Samuel 1 Ruth Ruth Ruth 2 Samuel 1 Samuel 1 Samuel 1 Samuel 1 Kings 2 Samuel 2 Samuel 2 Samuel 2 Kings 1 Kings 1 Kings 1 Kings Isaiah 2 Kings 2 Kings 2 Kings Jeremiah 1 Chronicles 1 Chronicles 1 Chronicles Ezekiel 2 Chronicles 2 Chronicles 2 Chronicles The Twelve: 2 [Prayer of Prayer of Manasseh Ezra Hosea Manasseh] 4 1 Esdras Nehemiah Joel 1 Esdras 5 2 Esdras Esther Amos Ezra Ezra Obadiah Nehemiah Nehemiah Jonah Tobit Tobit Micah Judith Judith Nahum Esther (with Esther (with Habakkuk insertions) insertions) Zephaniah 1 Maccabees 1 Maccabees Haggai 2 Maccabees 2 Maccabees Zechariah [3 Maccabees] Malachi [4 Maccabees] 10 Eiselein, Goins,