Where the Old Testament Came From

Most arguments about the Bible skip the Old Testament entirely and start at Nicaea, which is like arguing about a river by standing at the last bridge. Three quarters of the book was already ancient when the apostles quoted it, and the story of how it reached them is longer, stranger and better attested than most people are told. This page traces it from Moses to Trent. The New Testament has its own page, How the Canon Was Formed, because the two stories are genuinely different and running them together is how most accounts go wrong.

A book, laid beside the ark

Writing starts early and casually. "Write this for a memorial in a book" (Exodus 17:14), and "Moses wrote all the words of the LORD" (Exodus 24:4), both long before anything is called a collection. What Deuteronomy adds is keeping. "And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book, until they were finished" (Deuteronomy 31:24), and then the instruction: "Take this book of the law, and put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, that it may be there for a witness against thee" (Deuteronomy 31:26).

Notice what that is and is not. It is a text, deliberately finished, deliberately deposited, and kept as evidence in a legal sense, a witness against the people who carried it. It is not yet a Bible. It is one book in a box.

Lost in the temple, and found again

Then a thing happens that nobody inventing a religion would put in the record. The book goes missing. Centuries later, during repairs under Josiah, "Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD" (2 Kings 22:8). Found. In the temple. By accident, during building work.

Josiah tears his clothes when it is read to him, because the nation has been living without it long enough to have forgotten what was in it. Whatever else the Old Testament is, it is not the product of a priesthood that kept careful control of its own foundation document.

Read aloud after the exile

The next great moment is public and deliberate. After the return from Babylon, Ezra reads the law to the assembled people, and Nehemiah records the method: "So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading" (Nehemiah 8:8). Read plainly, then explained. That is the first description of what a teacher of Scripture does, and "gave the sense" is doing work that readers have argued over ever since, whether explaining or translating for people whose daily speech had become Aramaic.

Law, Prophets, Writings

By the time of Christ the Hebrew Scriptures are in three parts, and He uses the threefold shape Himself: "all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me" (Luke 24:44). Law, Prophets, and the Writings named by their largest book.

Paul says whose these were: "unto them were committed the oracles of God" (Romans 3:2). The Jewish people kept the text, and the church received it from them.

The Greek Bible the apostles quoted

Somewhere in the third and second centuries before Christ, in Alexandria, the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek. That translation is the Septuagint, and it matters more than almost anything else in this story, because it is the Bible of the New Testament writers. When the apostles quote the Old Testament, they very often quote it in Greek, and their wording follows the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew we now print.

Two consequences follow, and honesty requires both. The apostles used a translation, and did not apologise for it, which is a quiet argument against anyone who says only one rendering can be the word of God. And the Septuagint carried more books than the Hebrew collection did, which is where the long argument about the second rank begins.

The keepers of the Hebrew

The Greek story is only half of it, and the other half belongs to the people who kept the Hebrew. Generations of scribes, and later the Masoretes, guarded the text letter by letter, counting the words of a book and even identifying its middle letter so that nothing could drift unnoticed. They built a system of vowel points and marginal notes around a consonantal text they would not touch. Almost every modern Old Testament in any language, Catholic and Protestant alike, is translated from what they preserved.

So there are two lines of transmission and the church has always used both: the Greek the apostles quoted, and the Hebrew the synagogue kept. Neither side of the later argument owns the evidence. The Jewish people did the keeping, and Paul says so without qualification.

The scrolls in the caves

In 1947, as the story is usually told, a shepherd threw a stone into a cave near the Dead Sea. What came out of Qumran over the following decade included copies of nearly every Old Testament book, a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew manuscripts anyone had.

The result was not what either side expected. The text had been transmitted with remarkable care, and the great Isaiah scroll reads substantially as the Isaiah we have. But the caves also held more than one textual family, and books nobody had counted as Scripture sat on the same shelves as books everybody did, including Enoch and Jubilees. The evidence is a witness to careful copying and to a messier shelf than the tidy story allows. Both are true.

Jamnia, and a claim worth resisting

You will often read that rabbis at Jamnia around AD 90 closed the Hebrew canon and expelled the extra books. It is a tidier account than the sources support. What can be said is narrower: discussion continued into the second century about a few books, Esther and Ecclesiastes and the Song among them, and the Hebrew collection settled at twenty-four books counted the Jewish way. No council handed down a list the way the story implies.

Jerome, Augustine, and the second rank

The sharpest argument in this whole history runs between two contemporaries who never resolved it. Jerome, translating the Vulgate from the Hebrew, held to what he called the Hebrew truth, and treated the books that came only through the Greek as useful for edification but not for establishing doctrine. Augustine, working from the Greek and Latin the churches actually used, kept them in.

This site holds Jerome's own footnote on Daniel, where he flags material as "apocryphal additions to Daniel," so the distinction is his and not a later invention. What we do not hold on our own shelf is the full correspondence between the two men, and we will not quote what we have not read.

What is worth seeing is that the disagreement was never settled by either of them winning. It was inherited.

Trent, the Reformers, and Ethiopia

The Reformation reopened it, and each side then fixed a list. Trent in 1546 defined the Catholic canon including the books Jerome had ranked lower. The Reformers followed Jerome and moved them to a separate section, which is why early Protestant Bibles printed them between the Testaments rather than dropping them. The King James of 1611 included them. They were removed from most printings in the nineteenth century, a decision driven by Bible societies and argued at the time on both grounds, the cost of printing and the conviction that they did not belong. Which weighed more is still disputed, and the dispute usually runs along the line you would expect.

And the Ethiopian church, which has been outside the fellowship of both Rome and Constantinople for most of Christian history, kept the widest canon of all, including Enoch and Jubilees, which the Dead Sea caves show were being read in Judea before Christ.

What we take from it

We accept the approved Scriptures, and we mean all of them: the Catholic canon, the Protestant canon, the Ethiopian canon. The site's Study Bible carries the deuterocanon whole, and Beyond the Canon lets you read Enoch and Jubilees for yourself, because a reader who is told a book is dangerous and never shown it has been handled rather than taught.

We also think the councils were right to be careful. The reason a list exists at all is that false teaching is real and was already circulating, and a church with no way to say what it had received is a church with no way to say anything. That caution was warranted, and books should not be accepted freely.

But a council settling a list is not the end of God speaking. He is alive and He speaks now, more often than we notice, through ordinary means we do not recognise at the time. The test the church used is the test still available to anyone: does it agree with what God has plainly said, and does the conscience He gave bear witness or recoil? "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

Related: How the Canon Was Formed (the New Testament side), The Authority of Scripture, The Books That Almost Made It, Beyond the Canon, Enoch, Jubilees, and from the ground: The Great Isaiah Scroll and Archaeology & Scripture. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub.