Tuesday after Pentecost 5
July 3, 2012
The Lord be with you
We are considering
how a certain set of Jewish documents, which were written before Jesus was
born, came to be recognized by Christians as the inspired and authoritative
word of God. This is the second post on the topic. For our purposes, we will
divide time into pre-exile and post-exile segments. This is in reference to the
Babylonian captivity of the Old Testament people of God. (Though there is debate
about exactly what year the captivity began, typically sometime around 587 bc
is accepted.)
Prior to the
Babylonian captivity the Hebrews spoke and wrote in Hebrew. Those books that
were written prior to the Babylonian captivity were, therefore, written in
Hebrew. Many, but not all, post-exile writings were in Hebrew also. The Hebrew’s
text is actually most of the Old Testament. (Historians actually call this the Neo-Babylonian
Empire, but only history buffs know that.)
Babylon was the empire that replaced the Assyrian
Empire as the world superpower. The Assyrians were an exceptionally cruel
empire. Among other things, they are the ones who first crucified people. They
conquered and deported the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Those Hebrews had
basically abandoned God. The Assyrians spread the Israelites out over the
Assyrian Empire and the deportees assimilated, losing their identity as
Hebrews. Today they are often referred to as the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
Some of the Hebrews
in the Northern Kingdom were not happy with the pagan practices of
the majority. They took seriously the words of the prophets God had sent to Israel. They wanted to worship God in the way God
had prescribed and live in harmony with God’s revealed word. So they migrated
to the Southern Kingdom of Judea prior to the fall of Israel to the Assyrians. Some of them brought with
them copies of the writings of the prophets and, historical documents, which
provided source information for books like 1 & 2 Kings and 1 & 2
Chronicles.
When Babylon conquered the Jews, they deported them and
destroyed Solomon’s Temple. However, instead of spreading them throughout the empire as the
Assyrians did with the Israelites, they kept them separated from the rest of
the people. The Babylonian Empire’s time as the world superpower was short
(from an historical point of view). The Medo-Persian Empire (often simply
called the Persian
Empire) soon rose
and conquered the Babylonians. After 70 years in captivity, the Jews were
allowed to return to their homeland and were charged by the Persian King Cyrus
with the rebuilding of the temple. (The term “Jews” comes from the name “Judea.” Technically the citizens of the northern
kingdom were Israelites, not Jews. Today the terms are practically used
interchangeably. The term “Hebrews” refers to both the northern and southern
kingdoms.)
During the captivity
many of the Hebrews began using a cognate language called today “Biblical
Aramaic.” Portions of Daniel and Ezra, books from this time period, are written
in this language. There are a few, very small, other examples. Another language
that creeps in is Chaldean. It is also a cognate language of Hebrew.
When the Persians
let the Jews return home, not all of them did so. Many had made a good life for
themselves. The Persians allowed them to worship God according to their
consciences and observe their religion, so the pressure to return just wasn’t
there. These Jews became known as the Diaspora.
The average man in the street eventually lost a good command
of Hebrew and so the Rabbis provided translations into the common language (Aramaic).
These surviving translations are called today “targumim” (singular: “targum”). The targumin were spoken
paraphrases, explanations, and expansions of the Old Testament and today provide
a valuable witness to what was accepted as the word of God at this time.
In the 300s bc,
Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire (and
more). Though his empire broke apart with his death, the successor kingdoms
were thoroughly Greek in their culture. This brought the Jews under Greek
cultural influence. While the Jews in Palestine
maintained the Hebrew language in their worship life, the Jews of the Diaspora
adapted again, using the Greek language. (The Palestinian Jews also learned
Greek as that was the language that could be understood anywhere you went and
was the language of commerce, replacing Aramaic. The Palestinian Jews now
typically knew three languages: Hebrew for worship; Aramaic for home life;
Greek for business.)
In Egypt,
there was a large population of Jews who didn’t know Hebrew. According to
tradition, for them Ptolemy II sponsored a translation into Greek of the first
five books of the Bible (the books of Moses). This happened in the 3rd
century bc. Over the subsequent
century or so, the other books were also translated, being completed well over
a hundred years before Jesus was born. This translation is called the
Septuagint, based on the story of how the Pentateuch was translated.
“King Ptolemy once gathered 72 Elders.
He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without
revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one’s room and said:
‘Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher.’ God put it in the heart of
each one to translate identically as all the others did.”
Septuagint means “70.” (I guess they rounded off the number
of translators.) This translation is often abbreviated simply as LXX. The LXX
became the scriptures of the Jews of the Diaspora. It contained significant
material that was not originally written in Hebrew, and not commonly used as
scripture by the Jews in Palestine.
These books and portions of books have been called apocryphal, or
deutero-canonical, depending on whom you talk to. They include books like 1
& 2 Maccabees, Baruch and Judith.
Finally, there is a whole segment of books written after the
Jews returned from exile and into the early Christian era called
Pseudepigrapha. The name refers to the fact that the authors of these books
give a false name for the authorship of the book. They select some notable
person from the past and pretend that that person actually wrote the book. While
these books provide valuable insight into the religious mindset of the author
and the time period they were written, they were never seriously considered as
scripture by anyone in the ancient/classical world.
So everything that has been, or is, considered “Old
Testament Scripture” by Christians today was written at least 100 years before
Jesus was born.
In the next post we will consider how these books came to be
accepted as scripture by Christians, and how it is that different Christian
traditions differ on which of these books should be included in the Old
Testament. Until then, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching
and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and
spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16).
Blessings in Christ
Pastor John Rickert
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