Dawes - New Collegeville Bible Commentary: Old Testament, Volume 1

The book we know as the Bible is not so much a single book as a library. It is a collection of books, written by different authors, at different times, and dealing with a wide range of concerns. We recognize this fact when we refer to the Bible as the Scriptures, a term that implies we are not dealing with one book but with many. Even our English word Bible was originally not a singular noun but a plural one, for it comes from the Greek term ta biblia, which means simply the books. Only very late in its history did the corresponding Latin word biblia come to be treated as a singular noun.

Imagine that you were to walk into your local public library and pick up a book entirely at random off the shelves. As you opened the book, there would be a number of questions that would immediately spring to mind. First of all, you might ask yourself, What sort of book is this? Is it a how-to book, such as a car repair manual, or a work on home decorating? Is it a work of fiction, such as a novel? Is it a history book, telling what purports to be a true story of a person or place? Or is it a textbook, setting out the fundamental ideas of some field of study?

If you were not able to answer these questions, you would hardly know what to do with the book you were holding. What use would it be to you? How could you begin to understand it? As you continued turning the pages, other questions might occur to you. You might ask, for instance, Who wrote this book? When was it written? For what purpose was it written? How is it set out? Does it, for example, tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end? These questions, too, would help you to understand the book better and to use it more intelligently.

Each volume in the New Collegeville Bible Commentary series will deal with one or more of the books that form the biblical library. In studying that book, it will ask precisely these questions. What sort of book is this? When was it written? By whom was it written and for what purpose? How does it organize its material and present its message? It is important to try to answer such questions if we are to read biblical books intelligently.

This volume, however, is intended as an introduction to the series as a whole. For this reason it is not devoted to any one of the biblical books; it is intended to be a guide to the library as a whole. What we will be looking at in the following pages is the history of this collection of writings and the ways in which it has been used. The questions we will be interested in are: Who founded this library? What books are found in it, and why were they selected? How has the collection developed over time? The following pages will also discuss how the library has been used over the long period of its history. What authority has been given to this particular collection of books and why? What instructions have been given for their interpretation during the long period that they have been regarded as Sacred Scripture?

In a word, this short work is intended to provide an initial orientation to the Bible for the general reader. It aims to help you read both the Bible itself and its commentaries with a sense of the contexts out of which they have come. It will therefore discuss all the matters traditionally dealt with in an introduction to the Bible. To use some technical terms, which we will come across later, it will deal with issues of the biblical text, the biblical canon, biblical authority, and biblical criticism. But rather than discussing these matters in the abstract, it will do so in a broadly historical context. It will examine the origin of the biblical writings and the ongoing story of their interpretation by reference to wider changes in the Christian community and in the society to which it belongs.

The focus of this short book will be on the Christian churches andin more recent timesthe Catholic Church. But it is important to realize that the Christians are not the only people for whom the Bible is Sacred Scripture. The first part of the Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament, is also Jewish Scripture, read and studied in the synagogue in the same way as the Christian Bible is read and studied in the churches. The Jewish Bible, otherwise known as the Hebrew Bible, is often referred to simply as