Jimmy Akin - 20 Answers - The Old Testament (20 Answers Series from Catholic Answers Book 31)

20 Answers

The Old Testament

Jimmy Akin

20 Answers: The Old Testament

Jimmy Akin

2018 Catholic Answers

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The Old Testament is not just the first part of the Bible; its also the largest. In fact, its more than three times as long as the New Testament. Despite this, it is far less well-known. Many Christians skip it entirely and go straight to the New Testament.

This is understandable, since the latter scriptures are the most relevant to us today. However, its also a problem, because the Old Testament provides the essential background for the New. For the first Christians, including the apostles, the books of the Old Testament were the scriptures, and they understood their Christian faith as the ultimate fulfillment of everything the Old Testament had been striving toward.

You cant understand the Gospels, the epistles, or the book of Revelationmuch less how Jesus fulfilled Gods plan of the ageswithout the Old Testament. Yet for many today, its pages are a terra incognita , an unknown land. Although there is no substitute for reading the Old Testament for yourself, this short book will answer basic questions about it and help you understand the fundamentals of this treasure of our Faith.

1.What is the Old Testament?

Simply put, the Old Testament is the collection of inspired books that God gave the Jewish people prior to the time of Christ.

The precise books that it contains are debated by Jews and Christians (see answer 14), but for Catholics it contains forty-six books. The first of theseGenesisopens by describing the creation of the world, and the last to be writtenprobably Wisdomwas likely penned in the first century B.C. or even the early first century A.D. All told, its books were written over a period of about a thousand years.

The Old Testament takes its name from the covenant God made with the Jewish people. Testament is another word for covenant, and during the course of history, God made covenants with and through a number of individuals, including Abraham, Moses, and David.

To Abraham, God gave the promise that he would become the father of a multitude, and this promise was fulfilled in a special way through the people of Israel. Through Moses, God gave Israel his law for their nation. And to David, God gave the promise of an eternal kingdom, which was ultimately fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

A special moment came around 600 B.C., when the prophet Jeremiah revealed that God would create a new covenant :

Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people (Jer. 31:3133).

On the night of his passion, Jesus announced the fulfillment of this prophecy, stating:

This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood (Luke 22:20).

Christians thus saw Jesus as inaugurating the New Covenant that Jeremiah had prophesied, and the books written about Jesus by the apostles and their associates came to be known as the books of the New Covenant or the New Testament . By contrast, the books that covered Gods former dealings with the Israelites came to be known as the books of the Old Covenant or the Old Testament .

Although it is very common in our culture, the term Old Testament frequently is not used in Jewish circles, since it presupposes the Christian understanding of the New Covenant. Instead, these books are often called the Jewish Scriptures , the Hebrew Scriptures , or the Tanak an acronym based on the threefold classification of these books as the Law ( Torah ), the Prophets ( Neviim ), and the Writings ( Kethuvim ).

This way of classifying the books of the Old Testament is commonly used in Jewish circles today, but it is not the only way of grouping them. In the New Testament era, it was common to use a twofold division, distinguishing between the law and the prophets (Matt. 5:17, 7:12, 22:40; Luke 16:16; John 1:45; Acts 13:15; Rom. 3:21)that is, between the Pentateuch and everything else.

Today it is common to divide the books of the Old Testament into several groups, including the Pentateuch, the historical books, the wisdom literature, and the prophets. We will discuss each of these categories.

Another way of dividing them is between the protocanonical (first canon) and deuterocanonical (second canon) books. The former refers to the books that are considered canonical in Jewish and Protestant circles and the latter to the additional books considered canonical by Catholics and Eastern Christians.

The original language of the Israelites was Hebrew, and most of the Old Testament was written in this language. However, after they were conquered by the Babylonians around 587 B.C., many Jews began to speak Aramaic, and so small portions of the Old Testament are written in that language. Finally, following the conquests of Alexander the Great around 330 B.C., many Jews began to speak Greek, and a few of the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament were written in that language, just as the New Testament is. In addition, a major translation of the entire Old Testament, known as the Septuagint , was produced for the benefit of Greek-speaking Jews.

2.How do we know that the text of the Old Testament is accurate?

Given the age of the Old Testament books, people sometimes ask how we know we have accurate texts.After all, before the invention of the printing press in the 1400s, books had to be hand-copied by scribes, who invariably make at least small mistakes. After so many centuries of hand-copying, could serious errors have been introduced into the text?

Could some of them even have been introduced deliberately, in the service of some theological agenda, perhaps by people who purposely suppressed certain texts?

Several factors worked to prevent this. The first is the fact that the books of the Old Testament are considered sacred. This meant that scribes took great pains not to make mistakes when copying them, and to quickly fix mistakes if they did.

In particular, a group of Jewish scribes known as the Masoretes were active in Palestine and Babylonia between around A.D. 600 and 950. They developed elaborate procedures for the accurate copying of the Hebrew scriptures. The version they producedknown as the Masoretic Text served as the basis of later versions of the Old Testament.

The fundamental accuracy of the Masoretic Text was confirmed in the 1940s with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were hidden in caves surrounding the Dead Sea in Palestine during the First Jewish Revolt in the A.D. 60s, and they contained copies of Old Testament scriptures, some of which have been carbon-dated to centuries before Christ. Suddenly scholars had access to copies of biblical books from the Old Testament period itself, and they confirmed that the text had not been fundamentally altered.