 The Old Testament (sometimes abbreviated OT) is the first section of the two-part Christian Biblical canon, which includes the books of the Hebrew Bible as well as several Deuterocanonical books. Its exact contents differ in the various Christian denominations.
The Protestant Old Testament is, for the most part, identical with the Hebrew Bible. The differences between the Hebrew Bible and the Protestant Old Testament are minor, dealing only with the arrangement and number of the books. For example, while the Hebrew Bible considers Kings to be a unified text, the Protestant Old Testament divides it into two books. Similarly, Ezra and Nehemiah are considered to be one book in the Hebrew Bible.
The differences between the Hebrew Bible and other versions of the Old Testament such as the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Syriac, Latin, Greek and other canons, are greater. Many of these canons include books and even sections of books that the others do not. For a full discussion of these differences, see Books of the Bible. An important difference, as well, can lie in the translations of various words from the original Hebrew.
Most scholars agree that the Old Testament was composed and compiled between the 11th century BC and the 2nd century BC, though parts of it, such as parts of the Torah and the Song of Deborah (Judges 5), probably date back much earlier. The books of the Old Testament, upon which Jesus and his disciples' deeds and teachings are based, were completed before Jesus' birth. (The accounts of Jesus and his disciples are recorded in the Christian New Testament). The scriptures used by Jesus were, according to Luke 24:44–49, "the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms ... the scriptures".
Historicity of the Old Testament
Current debate concerning the historicity of the Old Testament can be divided into several camps. One group has been labeled "biblical minimalists" by its critics. Minimalists (e.g., Philip Davies, Thomas L. Thompson, John Van Seters) see very little reliable history in any of the Old Testament. Conservative Old Testament scholars, "biblical maximalists," generally accept the historicity of most Old Testament narratives (save the accounts in Gen 1–11) on confessional grounds, and noted Egyptologists (e.g., Kenneth Kitchen) argue that such a belief is not incompatible with the external evidence. Other scholars (e.g., William Dever) are somewhere in between: they see clear signs of evidence for the monarchy and much of Israel's later history, though they doubt the Exodus and Conquest. The vast majority of scholars at American universities are somewhere between biblical minimalism and maximalism; there are still many maximalists at conservative/evangelical seminaries, while there are very few biblical minimalists at any American universities. Notably, both Kitchen and archaeologist Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University are not the only scholars from the maximalist and minimalist camps who are sufficiently trained to address these questions with the necessary sophistication but both are experts in their fields — and both come to different conclusions.
Some contemporary Israeli archaeologists have now rejected much of the Deuteronomistic history of the Old Testament. Notably, Finkelstein and Neal Asher Silberman have written popular books detailing their view that many of the best-known Biblical stories are incompatible with the archaeology of the region. Conversely, in 2003 Kenneth A. Kitchen published the 662 page book On the Reliability of the Old Testament, which defended the Bible's reliability throughout. Although some archeologists have argued that many Biblical accounts should be rejected due to a lack of corroborating archaeological evidence, opponents point out that this is a return to the 19th century idea that anything not confirmed by current archaeology should be dismissed, a methodology that had once led some to question the existence of major empires such as Assyria.
Julius Wellhausen, using source criticism, claimed to have isolated four strands of tradition behind the Pentateuch (JEDP)(see the documentary hypothesis). The Wellhausen School assigned dates for these strands (and their later editing) from the 10th–5th centuries BC.
Because the composition of the Pentateuch according to Wellhausen was so much later than the events it described, some who accept Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis tend to regard the narratives of the Pentateuch as largely fictional, while others argue that Wellhausen's method is not valid given that so many of our surviving copies of historical documents date from a much later time period: e.g., the earliest extant copies of Julius Caesar's famous "Commentaries on the Gallic War" are medieval copies dating from the 9th century, nearly a thousand years after Caesar wrote the original.
The most important issue would seem to be the length of the period between the actual events and the setting of them down in writing. Internal evidence in the books themselves suggests that events of the Hebrew monarchies period were set down by royal scribes soon after they happened, and the writer(s) of the Book of Kings had direct access to these writings and quoted extensively from them — whereas earlier events, such as the Exodus and the Conquest, might have spent centuries as oral traditions before a written account of them was set down, which might make the written account considerably different from any actual events that gave the original basis to the tradition.
Umberto Cassuto wrote The Documentary Hypothesis, challenging Wellhausen's theory.
|
