Old Testament

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The Old Testament is the Christian name for the older and larger part of the Bible: the collection of Hebrew scriptures inherited from ancient Israel, set before the New Testament and read by Christians as the first movement of a revelation that the Gospels complete. The same writings, in a different order and without that framing, are the scriptures of Judaism, where they are not “old” at all but simply the Bible — most often called the Tanakh, an acronym for its three divisions: Torah (the Law), Nevi’im (the Prophets), and Ketuvim (the Writings).

The name itself carries a claim. “Old Testament” implies a “new” one that fulfills it, and so encodes a Christian reading from the start; many scholars now prefer the neutral “Hebrew Bible” precisely to set that framing aside. The texts were composed over many centuries, largely in Hebrew with some Aramaic, and reached something like fixed form in the centuries around the turn of the era. What counts as included has never been single. Jewish and Protestant canons hold the same books; Catholic and Orthodox Bibles add a set of further writings — Tobit, Wisdom, the Maccabees, and others — that Protestants set apart as the Apocrypha. The disagreement traces in part to whether the church followed the Hebrew text or its Greek translation, the Septuagint, which carried the wider collection.

Within its pages the Old Testament holds law, narrative, prophecy, and poetry: the creation and the flood, the covenant with Abraham, the exodus from Egypt and the law given at Sinai, the kingdom and its prophets, the lament of Job and the songs of the Psalms. Judaism and Christianity read this material toward different ends. The rabbinic tradition reads it through the lens of Torah and ongoing interpretation; the church has long read the older text as prefiguring Christ, treating its histories as figures of things to come.

In Western esoteric thought the Old Testament has served less as devotional text than as quarry. Kabbalists read the Hebrew letters of the Torah as a coded structure of creation; Renaissance magi mined Genesis and the divine names for hidden power; the figures of Adam, Enoch, Moses, and Solomon recur across the grimoire literature as bearers of secret wisdom. Such readings press against the text’s plain sense, and were never how most who held it sacred understood it — but they are part of the long afterlife of a book that successive traditions have each claimed as wholly their own.

→ In the library: Charles — Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the OT (1913)

→ Related: Torah · Apocrypha · Deuteronomy · Ten Commandments · Jewish Mysticism