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Class notes CHRTC 100
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Class notes for the class CHRTC 100. Available in pdf and .dox format.
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Lesson 1: Understanding the Bible: What is it?1. Bibles and Texts
The Bible is a term that can actually refer to quite varied collections of texts.
1. The Jewish or Hebrew Bible consists of 24 books and often called the TaNaK (sometimes,
Tanakh), which is an acronym for its internal divisions: Torah (“Law/Instruction”), Nevi’im
(“Prophets”), and Ketuvim (”Writings”).
2. Christians refer to these texts as the Old Testament, separate them into 39 books and
organize them into the Pentateuch (”Five Books”), Historical Books, Wisdom, and Prophets.
3. Orthodox, Catholic, and some other Christian groups, most notably, Coptic Christians,
accept various apocryphal or deuterocanonical books and additions, most of which come
from the Septuagint (LXX), a collection of Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible and other
Greco-Jewish literature.
4. The New Testament, accepted by all Christians, consists of 27 books and is generally
divided into the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Pauline Epistles, the General Epistles,
and Revelation.
So, when you say the Bible, it could refer to the Jewish Bible or the Christian Bible, or just the Old
Testament or the New Testament, and the number and order of the books, and even the chapters
included within those books, can vary quite considerably.
According to Wycliffe Bible Translators, the Christian Bible (Old and New Testament) "is now
available in 717 different languages, ... [t]he New Testament [alone] is available in another 1,582
languages... [and] [s]elections and stories are available in a further 1,196 other languages."
Review this two-page handout with tables showing the books that constitute the Hebrew Bible, or
Old Testament, and the New Testament among different religious groups. Although you should try to
familiarize yourself with all the names of the books in the various canons, knowing the books that
comprise the Torah and the Gospels is especially important. In the two testaments, the Torah and
the Gospels respectively are the most venerated of the books.
We tend to think of the Bible as a book but it is more accurately a collection of documents, a rather
eclectic collection of documents at that, which greatly exceeds the number of books. Watch this
video in which Dr. Timothy Beal discusses the question, "What is the Bible?"
Transcript:
I think if you ask people what image comes to mind when you say, “The Bible”, most folks are going to tell you, are
going to imagine something like a big, black, leather-bound book; and it’s probably going to have gold leaf; and it’s
probably going to be closed. Most people imagine the Bible as a book. In fact, most people imagine the Bible as
‘The Book’, even ‘The Book of Books’, even ‘God’s Book’; and that’s understandable. Bible means book; it looks like
a book, most versions of it that we see around these days; but, in fact, it’s really not a book at all.
Show Full Transcript
,With a book, you start on page one and you read to the end. With a book, you have something written by a single
author that’s univocal, that’s of one voice with itself. It’s bound and closed and self contained; and each copy of it is
the same as the next, right? So, the Bible isn’t like that at all, with the Bible, you don’t start on page one and read to
the end; you read around in it. Often, reading very small snippets and pieces and fragments; and it doesn’t start on
page one and go to the end. It doesn’t tell a single story that starts one place and finishes another place. In fact, it’s
not of one voice with itself; it’s a polyvocal, collection of writings. So, I like to think of it not so much as a book, but as
a library, a collection, a place to raise questions, a place that hosts questions and makes us think about things in
different ways.
Sometimes I describe the Bible as an accidental book. That’s because it wasn’t always a book and it’s not always
going to be a book. In fact, early Christians for centuries used and engaged and circulated scriptures that we now
think of as the Bible in scrolls and little notebooks called codices for centuries, before there even was such a thing as
the technology that we now think of, the media technology, that we now think of as a book.
Scriptures existed for centuries before there was such a thing as a book big enough to hold them all in a single
volume. I think now we are moving into an age where the era of the book is in its twilight years and we’re going to
see scriptures circulating and being engaged and being used in very different forms that don’t look bookish at all. So,
the bookishness of the Bible, is really an accident of media history.
2. The Biblical Story
The biblical story is not a single thread that is easy to unpack. In many respects, the Bible, because
it is a collection of documents, some recounting the same events from different perspectives, resists
the idea of a singular story in favour of "little stories."
Any attempt to schematize the biblical story invariably privileges certain events and ideas over
others. Nevertheless, a simple introduction to some key events and even themes should help you to
understand the complex world of this enduring and important collection of texts.
At its most basic level, the Bible is the story of the divine-human relationship and the nation of Israel
contextualized within a period of human history extending roughly from the dawn of civilization in the
Near East, then especially focused and detailed on stories set within the second and first millennium
BCE and, for Christians, continuing into the early Roman period and the first century CE with the
story of Jesus and his followers. Although the Bible is not a history book, it does tell a story set within
these specific historical contexts. You will need to have some familiarity with the story and the
historical periods. Keep and review this chart of the biblical story in the Old Testament or Hebrew
Bible. I also recommend reading this article by Marc Zvi Brettler, "A Brief History of Israel," in How to
Read the Bible or "Cultural Contexts," in the New Oxford Annotated Bible (pp. 2290-2307) for a
review of the historical background to the Bible; and, you can check out this video of an interactive
map of the ancient Near East.
The biblical story reflects on the creation of the world through conceptions of its last days, and on
worlds below and above. The stories of Genesis through Deuteronomy include the creation of the
world, the early development of the human family, a flood destroying much of humanity, another
phase in the development of the human family, the dispersion of that family, God's call of a single
man, Abram/Abraham, his wife, Sarai/h, and through their descendants, a nation, Israel, whose
national or tribal story takes them into captivity in Egypt from which God frees them to become a
holy people, called to live in covenant, according to divine laws. The promise of Genesis through
,Deuteronomy is that Israel will receive a land and much of the rest of the Hebrew Bible concerns the
efforts to secure and maintain life in the land according to the promises to Abraham and his
descendants and the covenant through Moses. There is a story of conquest or partial conquest of
the land at the time of Joshua, a period of oppression and hardship under various judges, the
emergence of a kingdom of Israel, first under Saul then under David, the division of that kingdom
into Israel and Judah, the destruction of Israel by Assyrians, the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem
by the Babylonians, a period of exile in foreign lands (especially Babylon), and a modest return to
the land and the reconstruction of Jerusalem when the Persians ruled the Near East.
For Christians, the biblical story continues with the birth of Jesus who is presented in the New
Testament as the fulfillment of hopes and expectations for a perfect ruler and intercessor who can
guide Israel and the nations into a right relationship with God. For Catholics and Orthodox
Christians, an interlude between the Hebrew Bible and New Testament forms a part of the canon too
and includes as its key elements stories about the hardships of the Jewish people and their fight for
independence in the Hellenistic Greek Period. The birth, baptism, ministry, death, and resurrection of
Jesus and the subsequent evangelism of the apostles, particularly of Paul, in the early Roman
period are the key events of the New Testament.
Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament contain visions of idyllic and utopian futures in which
God's relationship with humanity is unmediated and direct, and brings about peace and security for
Israel specifically and the nations more generally.
A Brief History of Israel
This book attempts to understand the Bible as it was understood in the periods in which its books
were first written and read, from approximately the twelfth century B . C . E . (the Song of Deborah in
Judges 5) through the second century B . C . E . (the Book of Daniel). 1 Thus, we need to know
some basic facts about history before exploring biblical texts. 2 But we would run a strong risk of
being misled if we simply opened a history book and believed everything we read there. Because of
relatively recent reassessments in the field of history, some of the most popular and well-known
histories of the biblical era are now obsolete. Consequently, we must first pause briefly to assess
historians’ assumptions and methods, taking note of the importance of point of view. History as It
Used to Be Told Writing a history of the biblical era may sound like a simple venture, and until the
latter part of the twentieth century, it was. Many books with the words History of Israel in their title
were available, and they all more or less told the same story. 3 These works differed somewhat
concerning the earliest history of Israel. However, from the period of David onward they were quite
similar— typically paraphrasing the biblical story, removing the language of divine causality that is
found throughout the Bible, and putting the biblical account within the context of ancient Near
Eastern texts and cultures. Starting in the mid 1970s, this began to change. Two main shifts
happened that disturbed this consensus. In the first part of the twentieth century, a large number of
cuneiform tablets were unearthed and published. Several scholars discovered in these tablets,
especially those from the periphery of Mesopotamia, descriptions of various institutions that seemed
to confirm details of the biblical account. For example, E. A. Speiser suggested that 19
Brettler, Marc Zvi. How to Read the Bible, Jewish Publication Society, 2005. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ualberta/detail.action?docID=3039352.
, file:///home/sasha/Documents/
The_New_Oxford_Annotated_Bible_with_Apocrypha_(Pg_2290,%202307).pdf
3. The Earliest Witnesses
The First Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible, Tanakh, or Old Testament, was originally
written in Hebrew with small portions written in Aramaic. The Deuterocanonical or Apocryphal books
were originally written in either Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, depending on the specific text. The
Second or New Testament was originally written in Koine (or "common") Greek. Read this article
entitled, "What was the Original Language of the Bible?," by Nicola Denzey Lewis.
What Was the Original Language of the Bible?
by Nicola Denzey Lewis
In third-century B.C.E. Alexandria, Egypt, one of the last of the pharaonic rulers—Ptolemy Philadelphus II—wanted
his Jewish subjects to have access to their own holy books. Because of the far-reaching conquests of Alexander the
Great, Greek had become the language of the eastern Mediterranean, and Egypt was no exception. Those who
identified themselves as Jewish could no longer read their own Scriptures, and Philadelphus was keen to help. More
importantly, he wished to collect a compilation of these writings, in Greek, for Alexandria’s famous library, which
boasted a copy of every book in the known world. Calling together seventy of his best scholars, he charged them with
a massive undertaking: each one was to work independently, carefully translating Hebrew texts to Greek.
And then, according to legend, an extraordinary thing happened. When Ptolemy compared the seventy different
translations, he found that each copy was precisely like the next. There could be no explanation other than that God
himself directed the translators in their work. This new Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, known as the
Septuagint (from the Greek for seventy), was perfect, authoritative, useful, and—above all—divinely inspired.
Is this legend true? Some maintain that it is. Many scholars, however, prefer to consider this story not for its factual
merit but for what it tells us about the historical moment. For one thing, it reveals anxieties over the issue of words
and texts and their relationship to ideas of holiness. Does the Bible “mean” something different in its original language
than it does in translation? This story about Ptolemy Philadelphus II suggests the opposite: in whatever language, the
Bible is still a holy book because God directs the work of the translators.
Most of the Hebrew Bible was written in Hebrew, including all of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. But
around 250 Bible verses (of a total of 23,000)—primarily portions of the Book of Daniel (Dan 2:4-7:28) and fifth-
century B.C.E. official court documents embedded in Ezra (Ezra 4:8-6:18, Ezra 7:12-26)—are in a related language,
Aramaic. At different times in history, Aramaic transformed from an international language that united people living in
different parts of the Assyrian Empire, to the dominant language of Jews living in the Babylonian captivity, to the
official language of the western half of the Persian Empire (500 B.C.E.).
During this time, Hebrew was used less and less frequently until it came to be almost exclusively a religious or sacred
language. Still today, Jews study and memorize the Torah in Hebrew while worshiping in the synagogue; Hebrew is
the language of the liturgy, and no synagogue is complete without at least one Torah scroll, painstakingly hand
copied in Hebrew and kept carefully protected at the front of the congregation. Although Jews may read the writings
of the Torah in English as part of the Hebrew Bible or Tanak—it is only in its original Hebrew that the text is
particularly sacred.
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