Old Testament

Historicity

Early scholarship

Some of the stories of the Pentateuch may derive from older sources. Scholars such as Andrew R. George point out the similarity between the Genesis flood narrative and the Gilgamesh flood myth. Similarities between the origin story of Moses and that of Sargon of Akkad were noted by psychoanalyst Otto Rank in 1909 and popularized by 20th-century writers, such as H. G. Wells and Joseph Campbell. Jacob Bronowski writes that "the Bible is ... part folklore and part record. History is ... written by the victors, and the Israelis, when they burst through [Jericho (c. 1400 BC)], became the carriers of history."

Recent scholarship

In 2007, a historian of ancient Judaism Lester L. Grabbe explained that earlier biblical scholars such as Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) could be described as 'maximalist', accepting biblical text unless it has been disproven. Continuing in this tradition, both "the 'substantial historicity' of the patriarchs" and "the unified conquest of the land" were widely accepted in the United States until about the 1970s. Contrarily, Grabbe says that those in his field now "are all minimalists – at least, when it comes to the patriarchal period and the settlement. ... [V]ery few are willing to operate [as maximalists]."

In 2022, archaeologist Avraham Faust summarized recent scholarship arguing that while early histories of Israel were heavily based on biblical accounts, their reliability has been increasingly questioned over time. He continued that key debates have focused on the historicity of the Patriarchs, the Exodus, the Israelite conquest, and the United Monarchy, with archaeological evidence often challenging these narratives. He concluded that while the minimalist school of the 1990s dismissed the Bible's historical value more or less entirely, mainstream scholarship since then has taken a more balanced approach, recognizing that some biblical traditions align with archaeological findings, particularly from the 9th century BC onward.

Composition

The first five books—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy—reached their present form in the Persian period (538–332 BC), and their authors were the elite of exilic returnees who controlled the Temple at that time. The books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel and Kings follow, forming a history of Israel from the Conquest of Canaan to the Siege of Jerusalem c. 587 BC. There is a broad consensus among scholars that these originated as a single work (the so-called "Deuteronomistic History") during the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BC.

The two Books of Chronicles cover much the same material as the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic history and probably date from the 4th century BC. Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah were probably finished during the 3rd century BC. Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments contain two (Catholic Old Testament) to four (Orthodox) Books of the Maccabees, written in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC.

These history books make up around half the total content of the Old Testament. Of the remainder, the books of the various prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve "minor prophets"—were written between the 8th and 6th centuries BC, with the exceptions of Jonah and Daniel, which were written much later. The "wisdom" books—Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Song of Songs—have various dates: Proverbs possibly was completed by the Hellenistic time (332–198 BC), though containing much older material as well; Job was completed by the 6th century BC; Ecclesiastes by the 3rd century BC.

Themes

Throughout the Old Testament, God is consistently depicted as the one who created the world. Although the God of the Old Testament is not consistently presented as the only god who exists, he is always depicted as the only God whom Israel is to worship, or the one "true God", that only Yahweh (or YHWH) is Almighty.

The Old Testament stresses the special relationship between God and his chosen people, Israel, but includes instructions for proselytes as well. This relationship is expressed in the biblical covenant (contract) between the two, received by Moses. The law codes in books such as Exodus and especially Deuteronomy are the terms of the contract: Israel swears faithfulness to God, and God swears to be Israel's special protector and supporter. However, The Jewish Study Bible denies that the word covenant (brit in Hebrew) means "contract"; in the ancient Near East, a covenant would have been sworn before the gods, who would be its enforcers. As God is part of the agreement, and not merely witnessing it, The Jewish Study Bible instead interprets the term to refer to a pledge.

Further themes in the Old Testament include salvation, redemption, divine judgment, obedience and disobedience, faith and faithfulness, among others. Throughout there is a strong emphasis on ethics and ritual purity, both of which God demands, although some of the prophets and wisdom writers seem to question this, arguing that God demands social justice above purity, and perhaps does not even care about purity at all. The Old Testament's moral code enjoins fairness, intervention on behalf of the vulnerable, and the duty of those in power to administer justice righteously. It forbids murder, bribery and corruption, deceitful trading, and many sexual misdemeanours. All morality is traced back to God, who is the source of all goodness.

The problem of evil plays a large part in the Old Testament. The problem the Old Testament authors faced was that a good God must have had just reason for bringing disaster (meaning notably, but not only, the Babylonian exile) upon his people. The theme is played out, with many variations, in books as different as the histories of Kings and Chronicles, the prophets like Ezekiel and Jeremiah, and in the wisdom books like Job and Ecclesiastes.

Formation

The process by which scriptures became canons and Bibles was a long one, and its complexities account for the many different Old Testaments which exist today. Timothy H. Lim, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Edinburgh, identifies the Old Testament as "a collection of authoritative texts of apparently divine origin that went through a human process of writing and editing." He states that it is not a magical book, nor was it literally written by God and passed to mankind. By about the 5th century BC, Jews saw the five books of the Torah (the Old Testament Pentateuch) as having authoritative status; by the 2nd century BC, the Prophets had a similar status, although without quite the same level of respect as the Torah.

Greek

Hebrew texts began to be translated into Greek in Alexandria in about 280 BC and continued until about 130 BC. These early Greek translations – supposedly commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus – were called the Septuagint (Latin for 'Seventy') from the supposed number of translators involved (hence its abbreviation "LXX"). This Septuagint remains the basis of the Old Testament in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

It varies in many places from the Masoretic Text and includes numerous books no longer considered canonical in some traditions: 1 Esdras, Judith, Tobit, the books of Maccabees, the Book of Wisdom, Sirach, and Baruch. Early modern biblical criticism typically explained these variations as intentional or ignorant corruptions by the Alexandrian scholars, but most recent scholarship holds it is simply based on early source texts differing from those later used by the Masoretes in their work.

The Septuagint was originally used by Hellenized Jews whose knowledge of Greek was better than Hebrew. However, the texts came to be used predominantly by gentile converts to Christianity and by the early Church as its scripture, Greek being the lingua franca of the early Church. As a result, Greek renderings of Hebrew terms and passages influenced later Christian interpretation of the Old Testament. The three most acclaimed early interpreters were Aquila of Sinope, Symmachus the Ebionite, and Theodotion; in his Hexapla, Origen placed his edition of the Hebrew text beside its transcription in Greek letters and four parallel translations: Aquila's, Symmachus's, the Septuagint's, and Theodotion's. The so-called "fifth" and "sixth editions" were two other Greek translations supposedly miraculously discovered by students outside the towns of Jericho and Nicopolis: these were added to Origen's Octapla.

In 331, Constantine I commissioned Eusebius to deliver fifty Bibles for the Church of Constantinople. Athanasius recorded Alexandrian scribes around 340 preparing Bibles for Constans. Little else is known, though there is plenty of speculation. For example, it is speculated that this may have provided motivation for canon lists and that Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus are examples of these Bibles. Together with the Peshitta and Codex Alexandrinus, these are the earliest extant Christian Bibles. There is no evidence among the canons of the First Council of Nicaea of any determination on the canon. However, Jerome (347–420), in his Prologue to Judith, claims that the Book of Judith was "found by the Nicene Council to have been counted among the number of the Sacred Scriptures".

Latin

In Western Christianity or Christianity in the Western half of the Roman Empire, Latin had displaced Greek as the common language of the early Christians, and in 382 AD Pope Damasus I commissioned Jerome, the leading scholar of the day, to produce an updated Latin Bible to replace the Vetus Latina, which was a Latin translation of the Septuagint. Jerome's work, called the Vulgate, was a direct translation from Hebrew, since he argued for the superiority of the Hebrew texts in correcting the Septuagint on both philological and theological grounds. His Vulgate Old Testament became the standard Bible used in the Western Church, specifically as the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate, while the Churches in the East continued, and continue, to use the Septuagint.

Jerome, however, in the Vulgate's prologues, describes some portions of books in the Septuagint not found in the Hebrew Bible as being non-canonical (he called them apocrypha); for Baruch, he mentions by name in his Prologue to Jeremiah and notes that it is neither read nor held among the Hebrews, but does not explicitly call it apocryphal or "not in the canon". The Synod of Hippo (in 393), followed by the Council of Carthage (397) and the Council of Carthage (419), may be the first council that explicitly accepted the first canon which includes the books that did not appear in the Hebrew Bible; the councils were under significant influence of Augustine of Hippo, who regarded the canon as already closed.

Protestant canon

In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformers, following Jerome's position, insisted that the Church's Old Testament should contain only the books of the Hebrew canon. However, they achieved this by simply removing the additional books which had come from of the Greek canon, so that the Protestant Old Testament does not follow the order of the Hebrew Bible, but the order of the Septuagint, only without certain books.

Rome then officially adopted a canon, the Canon of Trent, which is seen as following Augustine's Carthaginian Councils or the Council of Rome, and includes most, but not all, of the Septuagint (3 Ezra and 3 and 4 Maccabees are excluded); the Anglicans after the English Civil War adopted a compromise position, restoring the 39 Articles and keeping the extra books that were excluded by the Westminster Confession of Faith, both for private study and for reading in churches but not for establishing any doctrine, while Lutherans kept them for private study, gathered in an appendix as biblical apocrypha.

Other versions

While the Hebrew, Greek and Latin versions of the Hebrew Bible are the best known bases of the Old Testament across traditions, there were others. At much the same time as the Septuagint was being produced, translations were being made into Aramaic, the language of Jews living in Palestine and the Near East and likely the language of Jesus: these are called the Aramaic Targums, from a word meaning "translation", and were used to help Jewish congregations understand their scriptures.

For Aramaic Christians, there was a Syriac translation of the Hebrew Bible called the Peshitta, as well as versions in Coptic (the everyday language of Egypt in the first Christian centuries, descended from ancient Egyptian), Ethiopic (for use in the Ethiopian church, one of the oldest Christian churches), Armenian (Armenia was the first to adopt Christianity as its official religion), and Arabic.

Christian theology

Christian interpretation refers to the "Old Testament" as such only because there is a "New Testament" to which it relates; the designation is therefore a Christian theological category rather than a Jewish one. The name "Old Testament" reflects Christianity's understanding of itself as the fulfillment of Jeremiah's prophecy of a New Covenant (which is similar to "testament" and often conflated) to replace the preceding covenant between God and Israel (Jeremiah 31:31). The emphasis, however, has shifted from Judaism's understanding of the covenant as a racially or tribally based pledge between God and the Jewish people, to one between God and any person of faith who is "in Christ".

Relating the Old and New Testaments, the Second Vatican Council outlines a Catholic theology wherein "God, the inspirer and author of both Testaments, wisely arranged that the New Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old be made manifest in the New". Dennis Hamm sees the Council's teaching as a counter to the "perennial temptation ... to dismiss the Old Testament as irrelevant for Christians".

Christianity draws from its belief that the historical Jesus is also the Christ, as in the Confession of Peter. This belief is in turn based on Jewish understandings of the meaning of the Hebrew term Messiah, which, like the Greek "Christ", means "anointed". The Hebrew Scriptures describes a king anointed with oil on his accession to the throne: he becomes "The LORD's anointed" or Yahweh's Anointed.

By the time of Jesus, some Jews expected that a flesh-and-blood descendant of David (the "Son of David") would come to establish a real Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem, instead of the Roman province of Judaea. Others stressed the Son of Man, a distinctly other-worldly figure who would appear as a judge at the end of time. Some expounded a synthesised view of both positions, where a messianic kingdom of this world would last for a set period and be followed by the other-worldly age or World to Come.

Some thought the Messiah was already present, but unrecognised due to Israel's sins; some thought that the Messiah would be announced by a forerunner, probably Elijah (as promised by the prophet Malachi, whose book now ends the Old Testament and precedes Mark's account of John the Baptist). Later parts of the Old Testament expect a descendant of David who will establish an ideal reign of peace, prosperity and righteousness. The story of Jesus' death, therefore, involved a profound shift in meaning from the Old Testament tradition.

General and cited references

• Bandstra, Barry L (2004), Reading the Old Testament: an introduction to the Hebrew Bible, Wadsworth, ISBN 978-0-495-39105-0
• Barton, John (1997), How the Bible Came to Be, Westminster John Knox Press, ISBN 978-0-664-25785-9
• ——— (2001), "Introduction to the Old Testament", in Muddiman, John; Barton, John (eds.), Bible Commentary, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-875500-5
• Berlin, Adele; Brettler, Marc Zvi, eds. (17 October 2014). The Jewish Study Bible: Second Edition. Oxford University Press. p. PT194. ISBN 978-0-19-939387-9.
• Berman, Joshua A. (Summer 2006). "God's Alliance with Man". Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation (25). ISSN 0793-6664. Retrieved 31 October 2019.
• Blenkinsopp, Joseph (1998), "The Pentateuch", in Barton, John (ed.), The Cambridge companion to biblical interpretation, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-48593-7
• biblicc6. (2021, November 3). Shabbat Lectures on the Torah: SELF ESTEEM. Biblical Research Institute. https://biblicalresearchinstitute.com/shabbat-lectures-on-the-torah-self-esteem/
• Boadt, Lawrence (1984), Reading the Old Testament: an introduction, Paulist Press, ISBN 978-0-8091-2631-6
• Brettler, Marc Zvi (2005), How to read the Bible, Jewish Publication Society, ISBN 978-0-8276-1001-9
• Bultman, Christoph (2001), "Deuteronomy", in Barton, John; Muddiman, John (eds.), Oxford Bible Commentary, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-875500-5
• Coggins, Richard J (2003), "1 and 2 Chronicles", in Dunn, James DG; Rogerson, John William (eds.), Commentary on the Bible, Eerdmans, ISBN 978-0-8028-3711-0
• Coogan, Michael David (1 November 2008). A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament: The Hebrew Bible in Its Context. Oxford University Press. p. 106. ISBN 978-0-19-533272-8..
• Crenshaw, James L (2010), Old Testament wisdom: an introduction, Westminster John Knox Press, ISBN 978-0-664-23459-1
• Davies, GI (1998), "Introduction to the Pentateuch", in Barton, John (ed.), Oxford Bible Commentary, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-875500-5
• Dines, Jennifer M (2004), "The Septuagint", Continuum, ISBN 978-0-567-08464-4
• Early Judaism, part 1 (video). (n.d.). Khan Academy. Retrieved November 20, 2025, from https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/world-history/ancient-medieval/judaism/v/overview-of-early-judaism-part-1
• Emerton, J. A. (1984). [Review of Review of Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study, by J. Barton]. Vetus Testamentum, 34(3), 370–370. https://doi.org/10.2307/1518027
• Farmer, Ron (1991), "Messiah/Christ", in Mills, Watson E; Bullard, Roger Aubrey (eds.), Mercer dictionary of the Bible, Mercer University Press, ISBN 978-0-86554-373-7
• Ferguson, Everett (1996). The Church of Christ: A Biblical Ecclesiology for Today. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-8028-4189-6.
• Gentry, Peter R (2008), "Old Greek and Later Revisors", in Sollamo, Raija; Voitila, Anssi; Jokiranta, Jutta (eds.), Scripture in transition, Brill, ISBN 978-90-04-16582-3
• Grabbe, Lester L (2003), "Ezra", in Dunn, James DG; Rogerson, John William (eds.), Commentary on the Bible, Eerdmans, ISBN 978-0-8028-3711-0
• Hasel, Gerhard F (1991), Old Testament theology: basic issues in the current debate, Eerdmans, ISBN 978-0-8028-0537-9
• Hayes, Christine (2006). "Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible): Lecture 6 Transcript". Open Yale Courses. Retrieved 31 October 2019.
• Herion, Gary A (2000), "Covenant", in Freedman, David Noel (ed.), Dictionary of the Bible, Eerdmans, ISBN 978-90-5356-503-2
• Jeon, J., & Jonker, L. C. (Eds.). (2021). Chronicles and the Priestly Literature of the Hebrew Bible. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110707014
• Jobes, Karen H; Silva, Moises (2005), Invitation to the Septuagint, Baker Academic
• Jones, Barry A (2000), "Canon of the Old Testament", in Freedman, David Noel (ed.), Dictionary of the Bible, William B Eerdmans, ISBN 978-90-5356-503-2
• Juel, Donald (2000), "Christ", in Freedman, David Noel (ed.), Dictionary of the Bible, William B Eerdmans, ISBN 978-90-5356-503-2
• Levine, Amy-Jill (2001). "Covenant and Law, Part I (Exodus 19–40, Leviticus, Deuteronomy). Lecture 10" (PDF). The Old Testament. Course Guidebook. The Great Courses. p. 46. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 March 2021. Retrieved 31 October 2019.
• Lim, Timothy H. (2005). The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• McLay, Tim (2003), The use of the Septuagint in New Testament research, Eerdmans, ISBN 978-0-8028-6091-0
• Miller, John W (2004), How the Bible came to be, Paulist Press, ISBN 978-0-8091-4183-8
• Miller, John W (1987), Meet the prophets: a beginner's guide to the books of the biblical prophets, Paulist Press, ISBN 978-0-8091-2899-0
• Miller, Stephen R. (1994), Daniel, B&H Publishing Group, ISBN 978-0-8054-0118-9
• Rogerson, John W (2003), "Deuteronomy", in Dunn, James DG; Rogerson, John William (eds.), Commentary on the Bible, Eerdmans, ISBN 978-0-8028-3711-0
• Sailhamer, John H. (1992), The Pentateuch As Narrative, Zondervan, ISBN 978-0-310-57421-7
• Schniedewind, William M (2004), How the Bible Became a Book, Cambridge, ISBN 978-0-521-53622-6
• Ska, Jean Louis (2009). The Exegesis of the Pentateuch: Exegetical Studies and Basic Questions. Mohr Siebeck. p. 213. ISBN 978-3-16-149905-0.
• Soggin, J. Alberto (1987), Introduction to the Old Testament, Westminster John Knox Press, ISBN 978-0-664-22156-0
• Stuart, Douglas (1987), Hosea-Jonah, Thomas Nelson, ISBN 978-0-8499-0230-7
• Würthwein, Ernst (1995), The text of the Old Testament: an introduction to the Biblia Hebraica, William B Eerdmans, ISBN 978-0-8028-0788-5