The Literature of the Old Testament

The early Christians received the Sacred Books of the Jews as inspired Scripture containing a divine revelation and clothed with divine authority, and till well on in the first...

For the religious apprehension of Jews and Christians the Old Testament is a body of Sacred Scriptures, containing the Word of God as revealed to the chosen people. The revelati...

The Old Testament begins with a comprehensive historical work, reaching from the creation of the world to the fall of the kingdom of Judah (586 B.C.), which in the Hebrew Bible...

monarchy. In the seventeenth century such anachronisms were bandied about a good deal, but, inasmuch as they were all brief clauses which might well be notes or glosses by scrib...

Of the four main sources of the Pentateuch and Joshua, two are easily recognizable, and may be distinguished with certainty in almost any combination. The Book of Deuteronomy, t...

In the early chapters of Exodus the narrative is chiefly a combination of J and E; the first considerable extract from P is Exod. vi. 2-vii. 13, recalling the covenant with Abra...

Deuteronomy purports to contain the laws under which Israel is to live in the land of Canaan. It deals with the conditions of an agricultural people, settled in towns and villag...

Deuteronomy is a fixed point, by reference to which the age of other strata in the Pentateuch may be determined, at least relatively. Thus in P the patriarchs never offer sacrif...

In all the sources of the Pentateuch the possession of Canaan is the goal toward which the whole history moves, from the call of Abraham to the last exhortations of Moses in the...

The Book of Judges falls into three parts, namely, (1) Judg. i. 1-ii. 5, which intrudes, as has already been observed, between the close of Joshua and its immediate sequel in Ju...

A different division is adopted in the present books of Judges and Samuel, in which the stories of Eli and of Samuel are not made the close of the period of the judges but the p...

David took Jerusalem, which till then had been a Jebusite stronghold, and made it the capital of his kingdom; but he reigned, after as before, in patriarchal fashion, making, so...

By the side of this comprehensive history stands another which is in part parallel, in part supplementary, to it, Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah. It differs from the former in being t...

The books which in our Bible bear the names Ezra and Nehemiah (in the Jewish Bible, one book, Ezra) are the immediate continuation of Chronicles, by the same author. When they w...

Besides the older and younger historical books we have been considering, the Jewish Bible contains some examples of what we should call the short story, and the church has prese...

In the old story of Saul and Samuel (1 Sam. 9 f.) Samuel is named "the seer," that is, a man endowed with what we call second sight, and a note by an editor explains that what i...

The first of the prophetic books bears the name of Isaiah, a Judæan prophet, who dates his call "in the year that king Uzziah died," a year which cannot be fixed with certainty,...

Besides these, the collection contains oracles against Moab (Isa. 15 f.), Nubia (c. 18), Egypt (c. 19), another vision of the fall of Babylon before the armies of Elam and Media...

Thus Isa. 13-23, like cc. 1-12, contains prophecies of Isaiah from both the earliest and the latest period of his activity, intermingled with others having a totally different h...

Mingled with these is a series of passages which foretell the destruction of the foe and the miraculous escape of Judah from imminent ruin, or, taking higher flight, picture the...

Jeremiah dates his call to the arduous mission of prophet in the thirteenth year of King Josiah (626 B.C.), and he lived till after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., so that, l...

There is good reason to believe that the author of this biography was Baruch, who not only stood in intimate relations with Jeremiah before the fall of Jerusalem, but accompanie...

Ezekiel was one of the priests of Jerusalem who was carried off to Babylonia with King Jehoiachin in the deportation of 597 B.C. Those who were thus deported were the upper clas...

In the Hebrew Bible the Book of Daniel stands, not as in our Bible among the Prophets, after Ezekiel, but among the miscellaneous books in the third division, the "Scriptures."...

The Minor Prophets--so called not in depreciation, but because their books are smaller than those of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel--form in the Jewish Bible one book, in which a...

Then the unexpected follows, in the prophecy that Jerusalem shall become the religious centre of the earth, to which all nations flow, and the law of God the universal arbiter i...

No less strangely assorted are the oracles in Mic. 6-7, of which there are four: vi. 1-8; vi. 9-16; vii. 1-6; vii. 7-20. The first of these contains the quintessence of the prop...

closes in the situation and spirit of Isa. 40 ff. Thus the Book of Micah, like that of his contemporary Isaiah, has been a depository for prophecies differing in age by several...

The Book of Psalms counts one hundred and fifty hymns, and this evidently by design, for the Greek Version, which sometimes unites in one what are two psalms in the Hebrew and d...

after Ps. 41. For it will be noted that the second (elohistic) part of the present Psalter (Pss. 42-89) is made up of Korahite, Asaphite, and Davidic psalms, and that in their p...

of each beginning with a letter of the alphabet in order; c. 4, of as many couplets; while in c. 3 each line of the tiercet begins with the proper letter. Chapter 5 is neither a...

The Book of Proverbs bears the title "The Proverbs of Solomon son of David, King of Israel." Other titles scattered through the book prove that it is made up of several collecti...

creations, the skilled artificer who was by his side at the making of the world, rejoicing in God's habitable earth and the sons of men who people it. Here the author comes near...

The Book of Job is the greatest work of Hebrew literature that has come down to us, and one of the great poetical works of the world's literature. In the form of a colloquy betw...

Two singular books remain, about the inspiration of both of which the straitest sect of the Pharisees in the first century of our era had grave difficulties, Ecclesiastes and th...