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). To call those same books the Old Testament is already to read them in a particular way — as a first half that waits on a second.

The name and the claim it carries

The name itself is an interpretation. “Old Testament” presumes a “new” one that completes it, and so encodes a Christian reading from the first word; testament renders the Greek diathēkē, covenant, and the pairing announces that an older covenant has given way to a newer. The framing reaches back to the apostle Paul, who set the two covenants against each other, and was sharpened across the early centuries into the settled vocabulary of vetus testamentum and novum testamentum. Because the phrase is loaded, many scholars now prefer the more neutral “Hebrew Bible” precisely to set the Christian framing aside — though that term in turn slights the Greek and Aramaic that the church’s wider collection carried. There is no name for these books that does not take a side; “Old Testament” takes the church’s.

The relationship is therefore not one of two equal halves but of expectation and arrival. The church did not receive the older scriptures as a closed and self-sufficient book and then append a sequel; it received them as a book that pointed beyond itself, whose stories and laws and prophecies were read as gesturing toward something not yet given. On that reading the Old Testament is incomplete by design — a promise whose fulfillment lies outside its own covers. The whole architecture of the Christian Bible rests on that judgment.

The Christian rearrangement

The most visible mark of the Christian reading is structural. The Tanakh holds its books in three graded divisions and closes on Chronicles, a backward-looking chronicle of kings; the church inherited the same material but redistributed and reordered it into a fourfold scheme, and made it end on a forward-pointing note.

The four Christian divisions are the Pentateuch, the historical books, the poetic and wisdom books, and the prophets. The first is the Pentateuch — Genesis through Deuteronomy, the five books of Moses, which correspond exactly to the Jewish Torah and remain the foundation in both reckonings, holding the creation, the call of Abraham, the exodus, and the law given at Sinai. The second gathers the historical books — Joshua, Judges, the books of Samuel and Kings, Chronicles, Ezra–Nehemiah — that carry the story from the conquest of Canaan through the monarchy of David and his line into exile and return; these are the books the Jewish ordering splits between the Former Prophets and the late Writings. The third is the poetic and wisdom literature — Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs — the songs of praise and lament and the hard-won reflection on suffering and futility. The fourth and last is the prophets: the longer books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and the twelve shorter prophets the Jewish tradition counts as a single book.

What that fourth division does is the whole point of the rearrangement. By placing the prophets last and ending the Old Testament on Malachi — whose closing verses look ahead to a messenger and a coming day — the Christian order leaves the reader poised on the edge of an expectation that the opening of the Gospel of Matthew, only a page away, answers. The Tanakh, ending on Chronicles, turns the reader back toward the temple and the land; the Christian Old Testament, ending on a prophet, turns him forward toward Christ. The contents are largely shared; the trajectory is the tradition’s own, built into the order of the table of contents.

The canon question: which books belong

Where the Tanakh and the Protestant Old Testament hold the same books, the churches of Rome and the East hold more, and the difference is one of the sharpest dividing lines in the history of the Bible. It traces, at root, to a choice between two ancestral texts.

The Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria translated their scriptures into Greek across the third and second centuries BCE — the version known as the Septuagint — and that translation carried a wider set of books than the shorter Hebrew collection that later Judaism fixed as authoritative. Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, the two books of Maccabees, and longer Greek forms of Esther and Daniel stood inside the Greek collection but outside the Hebrew one. The early church, reading in Greek, inherited the larger set and used it without misgiving; the wider Septuagint canon became, in effect, the Old Testament of the first Christians, and the New Testament writers quote it far more often than the Hebrew. The decision about which text to follow was thus a decision about how many books the Old Testament held.

The arithmetic registers the split plainly. The Protestant Old Testament holds thirty-nine books, the same material as the twenty-four of the Tanakh, merely counted and divided differently. The Catholic Old Testament holds forty-six, adding the books the church calls deuterocanonical — “of the second canon.” The Eastern Orthodox canons run wider still, to as many as forty-nine, and prefer the gentler name anagignoskomena, the books “worth reading.” Behind each number lies a different verdict on the Septuagint’s surplus.

The dispute simmered for a thousand years before it boiled. Jerome, translating the Latin Vulgate in the late fourth century, noticed that several books carried in the Greek stood outside the Hebrew reckoning, and flagged them in his prologues as useful for edification but not for establishing doctrine — applying to them the word apocrypha. Augustine and the African synods of Hippo and Carthage, at the close of the same century, took the fuller list for granted, and through the Middle Ages the disputed books circulated bound with the rest, their borderline standing a matter for scholars rather than a line drawn in worship. The break came in the sixteenth century with the Reformation. The reformers returned to the Hebrew canon as their measure — siding, as it happened, with Jerome — and gathered the surplus books under the name Apocrypha, either dropping them or printing them in a section of their own, between the testaments, marked good to read but not equal to scripture. The Catholic Church answered at the Council of Trent, which on 8 April 1546 defined the deuterocanonical books as fully and equally canonical, anathematizing any who received them otherwise. Real doctrine turned on the cut: the practice of prayer for the dead, for one, rested on a passage in 2 Maccabees that the reformers, having set the book aside, no longer weighed the same way.

A second-order curiosity of the Reformation settlement is that the Protestant Bible kept the Christian order even while shedding the extra books. A Protestant Old Testament still opens with the Pentateuch and ends on Malachi, following the fourfold Greek-and-Latin arrangement rather than the threefold Jewish one — so that the most distinctively Christian structural gesture, the forward-pointing close, survived in the very Bibles that had returned to the Hebrew list for their contents.

The Christian reading: promise and fulfillment

If the structure makes the Old Testament point forward, the reading the church laid over it makes the older text speak, throughout, of what the New Testament would reveal. Two related practices carry the weight: typology and the doctrine of the fourfold sense.

Typology reads persons, events, and institutions of the Old Testament as types — figures, foreshadowings — fulfilled by their antitypes in Christ and the church. The vocabulary is the New Testament’s own: in Romans, Paul calls Adam a typos of the one who was to come, the first Adam answered by Christ as a “last Adam” who undoes the first man’s ruin. The pattern, once named, was found everywhere. The flood of Genesis was read as a figure of baptism, as the first letter of Peter makes explicit; the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah, the beloved son laid on the wood and spared by a ram caught in the thicket, was read as a figure of the crucifixion and of Christ as the lamb provided in his place; Jonah’s three days in the belly of the fish were read, on the authority of a saying attributed to Jesus himself, as a figure of the three days in the tomb. The sacrificial system of Leviticus, the Passover lamb, the bronze serpent lifted in the wilderness — each became, in the typological reading, a shadow whose substance was Christ. The Letter to the Hebrews makes the principle a theology: the law held only a shadow of the good things still to come, and the older rites were provisional sketches of a reality the Gospel discloses.

Typology shaded into the wider medieval doctrine of the four senses of scripture, by which a single passage could be read at once on four levels: the literal or historical, the allegorical (what it teaches of Christ and the faith), the moral or tropological (how the soul should live), and the anagogical (what it discloses of the last things and the soul’s final home). The framework descends from the allegorical method of Origen, who built a threefold reading on the model of body, soul, and spirit, and from John Cassian, who fixed the fourth sense; a much-repeated medieval couplet assigned to each sense its task. Applied to the Old Testament, the four senses turned its every chapter into a layered text in which the surface history was only the ground floor of a building that rose, story by story, toward Christ and the end of the age. The point throughout was the same: the older scripture meant more than it said, and what it meant was disclosed only in the light of the newer.

Against this stood a counter-tradition, never wholly suppressed, that insisted on the plain or literal sense and resisted reading the Old Testament as a cryptogram of the New. Jerome’s Hebraica veritas — his insistence on the Hebrew truth of the text — belonged to that current, as did the later Antiochene exegetes and, much later, the Reformers’ return to the grammatical sense. The history of Christian reading of the Old Testament is in large part the long argument between these two impulses: the text as figure and the text as plain word.

The Old Testament in Western esotericism

In Western esoteric thought the Old Testament has served less as devotional text than as quarry. The same conviction that the surface conceals a hidden order, by which the church built its typology and its four senses, was pressed much further by readers who held the text to encode powers and secrets the plain sense never named. In Judaism this reading reached its fullest form in Kabbalah, which treats the Hebrew letters of the Torah not as a record of events but as the very substance of creation, every stroke and crown bearing meaning. Renaissance magi, drawing on that material through the prisca theologia, mined Genesis and the divine names for hidden power, and Christian Kabbalists such as Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin read the Hebrew scriptures for a buried cosmology that confirmed Christian doctrine.

The figures of Adam, Enoch, Moses, and Solomon recur across the grimoire literature as bearers of secret wisdom, and the parabiblical books the canon left out — the Book of Enoch above all, with its fallen watchers and its tour of the heavens — became prized exactly because they had been excluded, read as a suppressed stratum of revelation the official canon was thought to have pruned away. Such readings press hard against the text’s plain sense, and were never how most who held it sacred understood it. But they belong to the long afterlife of a book that successive traditions have each claimed as wholly their own — the shared inheritance over which Jews, Christians, and the esoteric currents at their margins have all read the same words toward incompatible ends.

Texts, versions, and the scholarship

The two ancestral forms of the text stand behind the whole canon dispute. The Hebrew is transmitted in the Masoretic Text, the meticulously vocalized edition fixed by medieval Jewish scribes; the Greek Septuagint, the church’s first Old Testament, carries the wider collection and is the form the New Testament most often quotes — its formation and history are treated under Bible, where the great versions, the Vulgate of Jerome and the vernacular Bibles after it, are set out in full. For the disputed and parabiblical books, the standard English gateway remains R. H. Charles’s two-volume The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), hosted in the Library here (Charles, APOT), with his separate edition of the Book of Enoch (Oxford, 1912) likewise held (Charles, Enoch).

On the formation of the canon, John Barton’s The Old Testament: Canon, Literature and Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007; publisher record) gathers the leading work on how the Jewish and Christian lists hardened, and his A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths (London: Allen Lane, 2019; publisher record) gives the long view for a general reader. Roger Beckwith’s The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985; author record) argues the case for an early closure of the Hebrew canon. On the deuterocanon and the apocryphal literature, Bruce M. Metzger’s An Introduction to the Apocrypha (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957; publisher record) remains the accessible standard. For the Greek text whose breadth created the canon question, the critical Septuagint is the Göttingen edition, with Alfred Rahlfs’s hand edition the common working text (Septuagint overview); for the Christian reading that made the older scripture a book of figures, the practice of typology is surveyed in its own right (typology overview).

→ In the library: Charles — Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the OT (1913) · Charles — The Book of Enoch (1912)

→ Related: Bible · Torah · Tanakh · New Testament · Pentateuch · Apocrypha · Deuterocanonical Books · Jerome · Deuteronomy · Ten Commandments · Jewish Mysticism