Introduction to the Old Testament

The manuscripts

The Old Testament in the Bible (the Jewish TaNaKh) is a compilation of numerous ancient writings, written in Hebrew, the language of the ancient nation of Israel.  The original writings were most likely written on scrolls of animal skin and have long since decayed to dust.  But these writings, because they were viewed as sacred, were meticulously copied by Jewish communities across the ages. 

The Masoretic text(s) consists of copies of the Hebrew Old Testament which were copied (recopied) in the seventh to tenth centuries AD by the Masoretes, a collection of Jewish scholars living in the middle-east.  The Masoretic text was then the main text for the Jewish scriptures and most modern translations of the Christian Old Testament also translate the Masoretic text.

Since copies of the Masoretic text come from the middle ages, well over a thousand years after the original Hebrew documents, there have been numerous attempts to find and use ancient texts which are older and thus closer to the original documents.  The Septuagint is a copy of the Old Testament scriptures translated into Greek before the time of Christ.  The Septuagint, although in Greek, not Hebrew, offers a guide to the status of the Hebrew documents of that time, a full one thousand years before the Masoretic text.  The Septuagint is important for a number of reasons, not the least that New Testament Christians, including Paul, often quoted the Septuagint when they quoted Old Testament passages.  The Septuagint was the "Old Testament" of the young Christian church!

There are other ancient copies of the Hebrew scriptures.  The Peshitta was a copy of the Old Testament translated into Syriac around the second century AD.  Jerome, around 400 AD, wrote some commentaries on some Old Testament books and translated some books, supposedly, from the Hebrew, not the Septuagint.  If so, this provides some insight into the Hebrew scriptures of Jerome's day.  The commentaries I have been reading in my Psalms study occasionally use one of these alternate texts when a certain Hebrew phrase seems unclear or corrupted.

Another source of Hebrew scriptures appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls, copies of the Hebrew Old Testament that date back before the time of Christ.  These copies are incomplete but include, for example, a full scroll of Isaiah.

It is not easy to tie down the "original" documents for the Psalms or other Old Testament books.  But the documents we have now seem to be close to the ancient documents.  Disputes between the Septuagint, Peshitta and Masoretic texts are generally minor, editorial, occasionally replacing one rare sequence of Hebrew letters with another.  Where we have different copies, the texts are not identical but most discrepancies easily fall within the translation "noise" we experience in trying to translate the Hebrew into English.

In this study, I will use the New International Version (NIV) translation of these ancient writings.  When the ancient manuscripts (Masoretic, Peshitta, Septuagint) differ, the NIV will remark on the difference in its footnotes. As I copy in the NIV text (in blue italics), I will try to point out those distinctions.

Resources

Since the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, it is valuable to have access to commentaries by Hebrew scholars, scholars who attempt to translate the ancient writings as carefully as possible. Most modern English Bible translations are translations by a small committee of scholars.  The NIV (see Wikipedia here), for example, is a careful translation created by a committee of fifteen scholars of Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament.)  

In addition to using the NIV and its notes, I use a variety of other sources such as commentaries at BibleGateway.  For individual books of the Bible, I have access to commentaries written by Hebrew scholars such as Derek Kidner, Robert L. Hubbard and others.  The authors of these commentaries are scholars who would identify as orthodox (or evangelical) protestant Christians; their commentaries represent the traditional, historical view of the Old Testament.  In addition to these scholars, I also rely on the exceptional translations by Robert Alter.  Robert Alter is a Jewish scholar with a deep love for the ancient Hebrew writings and has translated most of the Old Testament into English, emphasizing the rhythm and emotion carried by the ancient texts.  

There is a Torah class taught by Tom Bradford on Youtube.  The first video emphasizes the value of the TaNaKh for the Christian.

The Bible Project

The Bible Project (see here) is an exceptional resource for anyone who wishes to get the "big picture" of the Bible and its individual books.  Here is a short Bible Project video on why we should begin this study!

I will say more on these various resources later... but let's dig in to the book of Genesis next!