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01 The Shape of the Hebrew Bible

Session 1: What on Earth is the Hebrew Bible?

This class is not so much a survey of the HB, it is Tim's attempt to distil the most helpful things for understanding it in a consumable way for laypeople.

A chunk of this is the other people giving some of their own background. One lady said something that might be helpful for ministry - "Maybe that thing that I saw as 'you don't love me' is 'I don't know how to love you'"

!!! note "how to love"

Maybe that thing that I saw as 'you don't love me' is 'I don't know how to love you'

!!! danger "Christian coping strategy for the Olt Testament"

1. Hero-example model
    * Stories get isolated and distilled down into a simple moral model, where the hero is just the hero.
    * Veggie-Tales is uber-guilty of this nonsense
    * There's something correct about this - but the oversimplification usually comes out of a massive re-writting of the stories, then anyone raised on those versions of the story is scaldalized when they read it for real

2. Poltical-authority source
    * Political parties hijacking "The Bible says X about Y" as a means to harvest authority from a book that many people claim is authoritative.

3. Theology answer book model
    * Treating the Bible like a dictionary of key/value pairs where keys are questions and values are simple answers.
    * This ignores narrative, and general literacy.
    * The instinct may be right - the Bible should profoundly shape my view of everything, but it isn't simple

4. Inspirational-heart-warming model
    * Verse-a-day calendars
    * Jermiah 29:11

!!! warning ""

Are we imposing a set of questions that are foreign to what the authors are
trying to communicate? do we need to set our cultural agendas aside to just
listen?

A result of asking the wrong questions is the common story of people's faith being dismantled by reading the Bible

!!! note "DL Baker - Two Testaments - One Bible"

One of the most fundamental questions which has faced theology and the
Church in every age... is whether or not Christianity also needs an Old
Testament. Is the Old Testament to be thrown away as obsolete, or pre-
served as a relic from days of yore, or treasured as a classic and read by
scholars, or used occasionally as a change from the New Testament, or
kept in a box in case it should be needed some day? Or is the Old Testa-
ment an essential part of the Christian Bible, with continuing validity along-
side the New Testament? —

Session 2: How Jesus and the Apostle ReadTheir Bibles

The Bible most often refers to itself as the Writings

!!! note "Road to Emmaus"

Jesus confronts a couple guys walking to Emmaus after he is resurrected and
more or less calls them idiots/fools for not understanding that the
Writings point to an annointed king who will suffer death for the sake of
redemption. He's recognized by them once their eyes are opened then he vanishes

Weird stuff

Paul and Timothy

Paul assumes when writing to Timothy that he, and probably believers in general, are in a community of people who are regularly learning about Yahweh through the Scriptures as a family

!!! scripture "2 Timothy 3:15-16"

... and that from childhood you ahve known the sacred writings which are
able to give you the wisdom that leas to salvation through faith which is
in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for
teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness

!!! success ""

For Paul, the `Scriptures` here are our OT, the Hebrew Bible. For Paul, the HB
is entirely _wisdom literature_ that leads to salvation through Jesus

The question of "What are the Scriptures?" is covered in the next session

To answer the question 'How do we read the HB?' we have to ask the question 'Whose book is the HB?'

Session 3: Shape of the Scriptures

Old Testament is the Christian term for a set of writings that comprise about 3/4 of the Christian Bible. The authors themselves though refer to those writings as the Scriptures. One time it is called the Old Covenant by Paul , but he's talking about Synagogue readings of the Torah portion in synagogues. THe phrase Hebrew Bible is a modern term that is a bit more neutral.

So, what is our Bible?

!!! scripture "Luke 24:25-27"

25 And he said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of
heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Was it not necessary
that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”
27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in
all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

Moses and the Prophets

TaNaK

Jweish reference to the books in our OT, in the Hebrew Bible, but the arangement is different...

!!! note "TaNaK"

1. T = Torah (first 5 books)
2. N - Nevi'im (Prophets: Joshua - Kings) [Christians often call these the 'historial books']
3. K - Ketuvim

| **Torah** | **Pentateuch** |
| --- | --- |
| Genesis - Exodus - Leviticus - Numbers Deuteronomy | Genesis - Exodus - Leviticus - Numbers - Deuteronomy |
| **Nevi'im - The Prophets** | **History** |
| *Former Prophets* <br/> Joshua - Judges - Samueal - Kings | Joshua - Judges - Ruth <br/> 1-2 Samuel - 1-2 Kings <br/> 1-2 Chronicles <br/> Ezra - Nehemiah - Ester |
| *Later Prophets* <br/> Isaiah - Jeremiah - Ezekiel <br/> Hosea - Joel - Amos - Obadiah - Jonah - Micah - Nahum - Habakkuk - Zephaniah - Haggai - Zechariah - Malachi | **Poetry** <br/> Job - Psalms - Proverbs - Ecclesiastes - Song of Solomon |
| **Kethuvim - The Writings** | **Prophets** |
| Psalms - Job - Proverbs <br/> Ruth - Song of Songs - Ecclesiastes - Lamentations - Esther [The Megillot] <br/> Daniel - Ezra - Nehemiah - Chronicles | Isiah - Jeremiah - Lamentations <br/> Ezekiel - Daniel <br/> Hosea - Joel - Amos - Obadiah - Jonah - Micah - Nahum - Habakkuk - Zephaniah - Haggai - Zechariah - Malachi |

!!! scripture "Luke 11:49–51 (ESV) "

49 Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, ‘I will send them prophets and
apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute,’ 50 so that the blood
of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, may be charged
against this generation, 51 from the blood of Abel to the blood of
Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell
you, it will be required of this generation.

Blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah...

Why would Jesus pick these two events? Abel is murdered on page 4, Zechariah is murdered in the last part of Chronicles, which in the TaNaK is significant... Jesus is saying that all the prophets from the beginning of the Scriptures to the end... All the prophets from A-Z so to speak

!!! note "Scriptures"

"Books" as we know it, bound papers with writing on it, called a 'codex'
wasn't a thing until a couple hundred years post-Jesus... so when the
authors say "The Scriptures" we need to keep in mind that Jews had the
scriptures in their minds and hearts, not on paper (save for a couple very
expensive scrolls). So the structure of the scriptures is also apart of the
Jewish being... This interaction with the Scriptures is _very very very
different than how we interact with the Bible_

!!! note "4QMMT"

"The scrolls of Moses, the words of the prophets, and of David."

!!! note "Philo of Alexandria"

The laws and the oracles given by inspiration through the prophets and the
Psalms, and the other scrolls whereby knowledge and piety are increased and
completed...

- De Vita Contemplatetiva, 25

Melito of Sardis

• Early 200s
• One of the earliest Christians to talk about the books/scrolls of Christian scriptures
• Summarizes Christian ordering of the Hebrew Bible with some logic
  • Foundation narrative of the Pentateuch
  • History
  • Poetry
  • Prophets then point forward to the coming Messiah, Jesus, and the NT writings

Session 4 - Seams between Texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls

Around 100-200 AD there was a split in the Jewish community over things like how the Temple and sacrifices were to be run, etc. A group got kicked out, so they grabbed some scrolls and went to start what we'd think of as a Monastic community. Qumran community is where they went, and the scrolls this group managed are called the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Out of DSS we have some of the oldest biblical scrolls, they have their own writings and liturgies since they were all priests basically too.

The scrolls were hidden in caves before the Romans marched on Qumran. They were found in the 1940s by a bunch of shepherds. A few showed up online for sale and that's how we found out about their exitence.... These scrolls give us pre-Christian Jewish Bible nerds...

Qumran community didn't know about Jesus - they thought the Messiah would be a man called The Teacher of Righteousness

Scroll-making

The DSS preserved for us, not only ancient biblical texts, but also the method by which scrolls were created. They were well-preserved papyrus that was stiched together - literal stitches. We also have obvious additions from Qumran community as well as notes from priests and corrections from missed transcribing.

Our Bible

The DSS scrolls, being the oldest stitched together set of scrolls, teach us how scrolls and collections of ancient holy texts were put together. We need to keep this in mind when we think about where our Christian Bible came from

The beginning and ending of our books might/are filled with hyperlinks that call a reader's mind back to other stories. It's the way of linking context and stories to one another before the writings are in a codex

Hyperlinks - language/syntax that remind a reader of antoher scroll - help us understand the structure of the Hebrew Bible

!!! note "A favorite quote from Tim"

So, you can see I'm interested in a historical question of like the
collection [Hebrew Bible] was produced by a group of people. What did they
mean by it? And we can actually know a lot about what they meant and locate
them and read it the way they wanted us to read it, and pick up what
they're saying. And, lo and behold, you know, I hope to convince you
that—and this is all pre-Christian—what's happening here and what this all
points to and means, fits hand in glove with how Jesus and Paul and the
apostles talk about these texts.
So that's different from saying nobody
knew what these texts meant. The events of Jesus happen, and then we go
reread it, and it has a whole new meaning that no one has ever imagined. It
seems to me what actually happened in history was a little more interesting
and complicated than that.  [17:30-18:21]