Four Main Parts

The Superstructure of the Old Testament

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 16, “Four Main Parts.” This is the second of ten shows that we’ll do on the Old Testament. And in this program, we’re going to talk about the overall superstructure of the Old Testament, dividing it into four main parts – the Pentateuch, the Historical Books, the Wisdom Books, and the Prophetic Books. I hope that by the time we’re done, you’ll have a good, solid, satellite level view of the Old Testament, its geography, and its contents.

In the previous show, we learned all about Canaan, that small strip of coastal land between Egypt and Mesopotamia. We learned about two kingdoms there, Israel in the north and Judah in the south, both of which were associated with an indigenous people called the Israelites who came down out of the eastern highlands and onto the coastal plain after the Bronze Age Collapse destabilized the power structure once dominated by Egypt. And we learned that in both north and south, from the late 800s down to the early 500s BCE, these Israelites faced wave upon wave of invasions by foreigners – Aramaic Syrians, then generations of Assyrians, then Egyptians again, and finally, Babylonians. We voyaged through the history of Canaan up until the 580s, when, after years of being pummeled by foreign conquests, the nobles and priests of the southern kingdom of Judah were relocated to modern day Iraq in what is commonly called the Babylonian Captivity. And, most importantly, we paid very close attention to those crucial years between 630 and 580, when a generation existed in the court of a king called Josiah who almost certainly wrote much of the Old Testament. Now, after that enormous windup, it’s time to open up the Old Testament, or Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, all of which mean nearly the same thing. For the sake of candidness, and general respect for a wide and diverse listenership, let me talk for just a moment about my approach to the Old Testament.

This Show's Approach to the Bible

This program is called Literature and History. And my primary interest in the Old Testament is to understand it in the context of the literary traditions, and historical events that took place between 900 and 100 BCE. In doing so, I don’t want to devitalize it of the spiritual power it has for millions of people. And I certainly don’t want to imply that it’s just another piece of literature, like Moby-Dick or the Decameron. People don’t have holidays around works of literature, or recite works of literature at annual rituals. People don’t go to war over works of literature, or build cathedrals or mosques due to literature. People don’t recite prayers to Herman Melville, or Boccaccio. We say our prayers to gods, and goddesses, and we learn of these beings in a small, special set of texts – the Bible, the Qur’an, the Mahabharata, the Buddhist scriptures, the Avesta. This is all very obvious, of course. But while I understand the Old Testament’s unique staying power as a piece of theology, I think that one of the ways – one of the many ways – that we can appreciate it, and understand it, is to do so within the historical framework of the early Iron Age, and the literary traditions of the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. This is an old approach to the Bible, dating back to nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century German scholars like F.C. Bauer, William Wrede and Adolf von Harnack, made possible by the archaeological and textual discoveries that have taken place since the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799. So my personal, subjective approach will be a historical one. This not the correct, or only way to approach the Old Testament, but it’s one that I feel best qualified to take, based on my background and education.

As I record this, I already have all of my ten episodes on the Old Testament written and completed. They come to about a hundred thousand words, and the music and recordings will create a connected narrative of around fifteen hours. Researching and writing them has been a taxing, but rewarding process. It wasn’t my first go through the Hebrew Bible. But the extent to which I took my time, and immersed myself in history and intertextual traditions of the Ancient Near East made the Old Testament come to life in ways that it never has before. So many books now have deep associations for me with events and in some cases texts that likely inspired them – the Prophetic Books and the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions, for instance; some of the narratives in Genesis and the Akkadian tablets of Nineveh and Ashur; Ecclesiastes and the comparative tranquility of the Persian period; the intellectual flowering of the Hellensitic Period and parallels between Platonism, Stoic philosophy, and late books like 4 Maccabees. The long story of the people who wrote the Old Testament is as great as any story that’s in the Old Testament. And in the episodes to come, I’m going weave them together, and share them with you.

Of the many risks I take when talking about the Old Testament, not the least of which is simply being boring or rehearsing things you already know, what I fear the most is glossing over, or misrepresenting something that really matters to you, and thus appearing to disrespect or dismiss your beliefs and interests, whether they’re religious, secular, or in between. I can only repeat what I said earlier. My personal approach to this book is going to be historicist, and intertextual. It will be as subjective an approach as anyone’s, but it will be grounded in academic scholarship, and of course, painstaking attention to the Bible itself. Nothing I say will convert anyone, or unconvert anyone. And if I still do something wrong, or heavy handed, let me just say that what I do here is always done with enthusiasm, reverence, love for books, and hope for mutual understanding, and, as much as is possible for me, not the advancement of some blinkered personal ideology. While I hope my approach will be uncontroversial and academic, and suspect that it will be more workmanlike rather than visionary, I think that the material itself – the Old Testament– will be tremendous enough to keep you interested the whole way through. [music]

Old Testament, New Testament, Apocrypha

So, on with the show. It’s time to delve into the overall structure of the Old Testament, or Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible – again, same thing with variations. I don’t want to assume any prior knowledge of this book, so I am going to start with the laughably obvious, and we’ll go from there.

The whole Bible – not the Old Testament, but the entire Bible – is divided up into three mega-sections. The first is the Old Testament, written and compiled between about 800-50 BCE in Ancient Israel, Mesopotamia, and Egypt mostly in a language we call Biblical Hebrew, with a very small portion written in Biblical Aramaic. The second part of the Bible is the New Testament, written from 60-150 CE in the Eastern Mediterranean, composed in a language called Koine Greek, or common Greek. The third is the Apocrypha, which is a Greek word for “obscured” or “hidden away.” The Apocrypha are the additional books, written mostly in Greek during various periods of ancient history, that are only included in certain Bibles.

The Dimensions of the Main Parts of the Bible

So, continuing the laughably obvious part. Those three mega-sections are the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Apocrypha. The major branches of Judaism and Christianity – say, Judaism itself, Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, Protestantism, and the Slavonic church – all have different configurations of these three parts that they consider canonical. But, let’s bracket all that for now. Again, this is the easy, laughably obvious part, so we’ll continue to keep it simple. Let’s talk about length. The Old Testament, New Testament, and the more common Apocrypha together weigh in at about 915,000 words, depending on the translation. To picture how long this is, the modern print novel has between 300 and 400 words on each page. This means that if the entire Bible were printed not in the double column, tiny font manner that it usually is, but like a modern book, it would be somewhere between 3,050 and 3,660 pages long. Having read the thing in its entirety more than once – an edition that’s swollen even more by footnotes and interstitital essays, I can tell you that it is immense. Comparatively, the Qur’an is a slim 144,000 words, or 480-570 pages if printed in a modern format – just 16% of the length of Christianity’s truly massive holy book. Needless to say, I don’t think that these sizes reflect on the overall quality of the two books – there’s plenty to be said for compression, and Islam has done quite well with its main text.

Anyway let’s move a little beyond the laughably obvious, and into the just obvious. So far, the main point I’ve covered is that the Bible is over 3,000 pages long, and that it includes the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha. I realize you likely know all of this already, but let’s talk about the length of each of those parts – the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha. Of those 3,000 pages, the vast majority are the Old Testament. With some 2,000 pages, the Old Testament dwarfs the rest of the Bible in size and density. Because it was produced over such a wide period by so many different sources, the Old Testament is more heterogeneous in language and contents than the other portions of the Bible. Though its opening books are a thousand years younger than Gilgamesh and the Atrahasis of Babylon, the Old Testament is nonetheless difficult from the beginning, and its rapid fire alternations between storytelling and imperative instructions for self conduct have challenged new readers for thousands of years. The New Testament, by comparison, is far shorter. There are only nine books of any significant length. Because the New Testament was produced in just a century and a half at most, as opposed to the many centuries it took to form the Old Testament, the 600 pages of the New Testament are generally more tightly organized and narratively cohesive. The length of the Apocrypha, the third mega-part of the Bible, depends on who you ask, and which texts you include. There are dozens of apocryphal and pseudepigraphal works – pseudepigraphal meaning attributed to an ancient author but probably not written by that ancient author, but because by definition they are non canonical, I can’t really give you a definite figure for their word count or length.

Five Major Bibles

In any case, let’s move into the land of slightly less obvious. I’ve introduced the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha, and their relative lengths. These three mega-sections are intelligible to the entire woprld of Judaism and Christianity. But after that, things get quite complicated, quite quickly. In a word, there is no such thing as “the” Bible. There are many Bibles. Their contents vary, and their internal organization varies. Although the topic of which books are included in which Bibles sounds a bit dry to the newcomer, think of it this way. We’re talking about the most circulated book in human history. Billions of them are sitting on shelves and church pews today. It’s worth taking a minute here and, at a high level, going over what’s in each of the major Bibles.

We’ll start at the beginning, with Judaism. Judaism doesn’t use the New Testament. Judaism only uses the Old Testament, which it calls the Tanakh. The Tanakh is divided into three main sections – the Torah, or Law, the Nevi’im, or Prophets, and the Ketuvim, or Writings. If you’ve been raised Catholic or Protestant, and look at the table of contents of a Tanakh in a synagogue, it looks like someone took the table of contents of your familiar Old Testament, moved everything around a bit, changed some titles, and removed an odd book or two. The shortest Bible by far, then, the Tanakh of Judaism is the oldest anthology of scriptures sacred to Judaism and Christianity.

While Judaism had a well codified canon by the first millennium CE, the Christian Bible’s formation took a little longer. To keep things manageable, in this program I’ll be talking about five bibles. The Tanakh – again, the Hebrew bible, is the first. It has 24 books. The other four major bibles all include the New Testament. The second bible is the Greek Orthodox Bible. It has 83 books. The third bible is the Slavonic Bible, which also has 83 books. The fourth is the Catholic Bible, with 77 books. And the fifth is the Protestant bible, which has 66 books. While modern rabbinical Judaism denies the divinity of Christ and thus has no cause to include the New Testament, the other bibles vary based on what they consider to be apocryphal. So Judaism has the smallest set of scriptures, and then Protestantism, then Catholicism, and then the Greek Orthodox and Slavonic churches, in order from smallest to largest.

The 1,000 Years of the Bible's Composition

The Bible, then, is difficult because of its massiveness. It is difficult due to the fact that it refuses to hold still and be one thing, even its largest major canons varying from one another and excluding fascinating apocryphal texts like the Books of Enoch and Jasher and the Gospel of Thomas. But to leave the realm of the obvious, let me enter the world of Divinity School 101, and take a stab at telling you the thousand year long story of the Bible’s composition in one paragraph.

The oldest parts of the Bible, like the Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges, bear diction and syntax from the earliest known Hebrew, likely being oral poems as old as the 800s or even 900s BCE, passed down through generations before being embedded, often in a lumpy fashion, into the bulk of the Old Testament in the 600s and 500s BCE. These ancient songs are tendrils of Israel’s polytheistic past during the early Iron Age, as Israelites headed down onto the coastal plain and into the Jezreel valley following the Bronze Age collapse and sparred with other tribes, until they came to be a formative part of the kingdom centered in Samaria – that northern kingdom called Israel in the Bible. What happened over the next three centuries we covered in the previous show – waves of invaders, chiefly the Assyrians and Babylonians, caused the northern and southern kingdoms to fall. These events are the background of most of the Old Testament. But the return from the Babylonian Captivity in the 530s and 520s, and the building of the Second Temple at Jerusalem, was only the beginning, and the Bible continued to be written. As Leonidas and his beefcake Spartan friends fought the Persian forces in the early 400s BCE in Greece, deep within the Persian territories, Jerusalem was peaceful and prosperous, as the book of Ecclesiastes suggests, and it began to show the imprint of Persian religion, as we see in the Book of Tobit. In 330, though, catastrophe struck again, when Alexander of Macedon wrecked the Persian Empire and left a mess in his wake, a mess that included a checkerboard of successor kingdoms, two of which, the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires, played tug-of-war with Canaan for a long time, eventually resulting in conflicts like that which we read about in the Books of Maccabees. One of the most far reaching consequences of Alexander’s conquests between 334 and 323 BCE was that Koine Greek became the international language. Another was that the interstate chaos ultimately caused by Alexander’s conquests had a broad effect on Ancient Mediterranean ideologies for the next three centuries leading up to the birth of Christ. People didn’t want to sacrifice goats at their ancestral temples any more. The ancestral temples had all been pummeled by various imperial regimes, indigenous peoples had been deracinated and sold into slavery, and continued to be, as Republican Rome gained ground during the 200s and 100s. As a result, citizens of the Ancient Mediterranean basin began to seek out philosophies and cult religions not based on ethnic heritage or geographical center, but instead due to the intrinsic appeal of their various creeds – creeds involving posthumous salvation and the care of the self – creeds like brawny Socratic self-reliance and all of its variants, stoicism, Epicureanism, the cult of Dionysus Zagreus, Egyptian Isis, Anatolian Cybele, and eventually, Jesus Christ – creeds that could weather the storm no matter who happened to be in charge at any given moment. Meanwhile, Persian Zoroastrianism hung behind it all for nearly the entire time, later inspiring ideologies like Manichaeism and Gnosticism, which, especially during the second century CE, profoundly influenced early Catholicism.

That’s the story of the Bible’s expansive ideological background in a paragraph. It’s a story that leads from the tribal oral narratives of the early Israelites all the way to the lavishly cosmopolitan and educated provincial Roman world of Saint Paul and his colleagues, who wrote the New Testament 900 years later. And that history is imbedded into every single Bible ever printed. The massive ideological and cultural evolutions that took place in the Mediterranean and greater Eurasian worlds during the Bible’s centuries and centuries of composition are another reason, then, for its foreboding difficulty. The Bible itself not only refuses to be a single thing, with all of the variants of it that exist. And it is not only astoundingly long. Additionally, the ideology, or ideologies that it contains also form an unfolding story – a story of the Mediterranean, over a thousand year period, a story with many characters, places, events, and striking twists of plot.

But we don’t have to get into it all at once. The Bible, after all, has a nucleus, a nucleus that Paul and Peter and John the Baptist and Jesus himself would have known, and that nucleus is the Old Testament. So now, we’re going to put away the New Testament for a long time, and bracket the Apocrypha for quite a while, too. We’ll take the history piecemeal as it comes. And from here on out today, our plan with the Old Testament will be to understand it as divisible into four main parts. The 51 total books included variously in the different versions of the Old Testament are ordered in all sorts of ways, depending on whose Bible you’re holding. But mainline Biblical scholarship commonly divides any given Old Testament into four main parts – great big groupings of books all sharing a kernel of common characteristics. Let’s go over those four main parts. [music]

Four Main Parts, Part 1: The Pentateuch

The first main part of the Old Testament is called the Pentateuch – Biblical Hebrew for “five scrolls.” Penta means five, Pentateuch five scrolls. By chapter count, the Pentateuch makes up about 20% of the Old Testament. The “five scrolls” in question are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – the first five books of all Bibles. Another name for these five books is the Torat Mosche, Biblical Hebrew for “Law of Moses,” and in English sometimes just “the Torah.” So again, the name of the first main part of the Bible is the Pentateuch, or Torah. The first five books of the Old Testament are included, with little variation, in all major Bibles. Because they start the whole thing off, and they are in all major bibles, the books of the Pentateuch are likely the most heavily read and studied texts in human history. So, what’s in the Pentateuch?

The story in the Pentateuch is, ultimately, about a family – a singular family, chosen by God to be the progenitors of an entire nation. It is about the generations that lead up to Abraham, the patriarch of the Israelites, and the generations that follow him. The Pentateuch tells of the earliest Israelites’ trials and tribulations, in the days when the world was still new, and ends just as they stand on the shores of their promised land of Canaan. It’s the origin story of an entire people, a people whom it presupposes are at the center of all history.

The Pentateuch contains many of the most famous stories in the Bible. The first five books of the Bible introduce us to Yahweh Elohim, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Lot and his wife, Noah and the flood, Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Moses and Aaron, the Egyptian Captivity, plagues of locusts, the chase across the parted waters of the Red Sea, the wandering in the wilderness, the Arc of the Covenant, the Golden Calf, the Sermon on the Mount and the Ten Commandments, twice! The narrative portion of the Pentateuch is a spellbinding tale, filled with strange lands and journeys, sacred pacts and terrible betrayals, humiliation and triumph, and all sorts of darkness – murder, incest, rape, infanticide, disease, and condemnation. Pound for pound, the Pentateuch, or Five Scrolls, or Torah, likely ontains as many household names as the rest of the Old Testament combined. In the next episode, Episode 17, which is called “The Roots of the Pentateuch,” we’ll explore the narrative, or story portion of the Pentateuch, and some of the Ancient Near Eastern myths and theological traditions which may have influenced portions of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, and beyond.

But the narrative portion, or the story of the first five books of the Bible, is only half of the Pentateuch. In addition to the great family saga of the earliest Israelites, the Pentateuch also contains a huge amount of instructional material, written by an unspecified narrator, telling the reader what to do, and how to do it, in order to stay in the good graces of Yahweh and his priests. The instructional portion of the Pentateuch, commonly called the “priestly” portion, tells you how to design the holy tabernacle, or sacred tent of the Israelites. It goes into exhaustive detail about animal sacrifice, cleanliness, and civic conduct. Verse after verse specifies how a bull must be clean before it is sacrificed, a turtledove’s blood must be splashed on the altar in just this fashion, that this tapestry must be this many cubits long in the tabernacle, that we must not marry our siblings, and so on. The priestly section of the Pentateuch is the early brick wall that stops many of us from getting through the Bible. We can see a certain gloomy parable in the flood story of Noah. We can sense the wonder and adventure of the journeys of Abraham, and the drama of Moses interceding on behalf of the people of Israel in the desert of Sinai. But when the priestly section of the Pentateuch starts telling you that you need to take a good, long look the testicles of a bull you bring to the temple to be sacrificed, and that those testicles need to be nice and unblemished, you become conscious of a wide historical and situational difference between your timeframe and the Pentateuch’s. Piety, for the modern Jew or Christian, does not mean leaning down and inspecting the scrotum of a hoofed mammal. Put simply, and I hope, fairly neutrally, to the modern reader some sections of the Pentateuch are far more inspiring, entertaining, and relatable than others. In Episode 18, titled “The 613 Commandments,” we’ll explore the expansive instructional materials in the Pentateuch, and similar material that survives from ancient Assyria and Babylon.

So, the Pentateuch is the first of the four main parts of the Old Testament. It tells the epic family story of Abraham and his descendants, and offers some very specific instructions for sacrifice, cleanliness, and holiness in the Iron Age coastal strip called Canaan, some of which are stirring and ethically coherent, and others which are not quite so relevant to modern life, to put it diplomatically. The narrative portion, and the instructional portion of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – those are the two portions of the Pentateuch, the first of our four main parts. Let’s go on to the next. [music]

Four Main Parts, Part 2: The Historical Books

The second main part of the Old Testament is what we call the “Historical Books.” By chapter count, the Historical Books comprise about 27% of the Old Testament. If the Pentateuch tells the story of the earliest patriarchs of Israel, the Historical Books chronicle the formation and early generations of the kingdom of Israel. In the Pentateuch, Israel is at most a large band of bedraggled wanderers, heading toward Canaan with a promise of divine favor. The Historical Books tell the next part of the story. In the Historical Books, we learn about how Israel grew from a collective of slaves and castaways into a powerful kingdom centered in Canaan. The story of how this happened is moving, chronologically organized, and, from time to time, also supported by archaeological finds. In the Historical Books, we meet Sampson, Saul, David, Solomon, and dozens of other kings, and learn of the split of the Hebrews into two separate kingdoms, the traumatizing conquests by the Assyrians in the 720s, and Babylonians in the 580s, and the return to Israel after the Persian conquest. In the previous episode, I told you about archaeology’s record of Canaan’s Late Bronze Age and Iron Age history. The Historical Books of the Bible cover roughly this same period, although their emphasis is always on Israel and its central place in the cosmos.

Although this is a very basic fact about the Old Testament, and it’s probably clear by now, I’ll pause for a minute, and say it anyway. Much of the Old Testament is simply national history. If you open, say, the book of Second Kings expecting to hear praises and hymns to God, sometimes you’ll read for a long time before you find anything theological. I’d advise you, early on, to think of the Historical Books as a sort of national diary just as much as a religious text, the diary of a small civilization that persisted against many odds in a violent, chaotic period of Ancient Near Eastern history. What is surprising to many readers of the Old Testament is that it is not, like the New Testament or Qur’an, a book that offers joy and salvation to anyone who is devout. The vast bulk of the Old Testament does not proselytize or promise, but instead tells the conflicted story of the history of a single ethnic group. Accepting some psalms and an odd group of verses here and there, the Old Testament is not engineered to compel you to accept Yahweh into your heart – it’s built to share the story of the early Israelites, rationalize what’s happened, and reconcile them to their sufferings and sacrifices.

Although the history in the Old Testament is understandably biased, sometimes contradicted by archaeological discoveries, and sometimes full of revealing anachronisms, it’s important to remember that the Historical Books were perhaps the first concerted effort of a people to draft a comprehensive national narrative. That, in itself, would make the Historical Books a world famous text, even if they weren’t affixed to the other sections of the Old Testament.

Being composed during and after the reign of King Josiah, the Historical Books are over a hundred years older than Herodotus’ Histories. Three episodes from now, in Episode 19, there will be a show called “The One Who Struggles with God.” In that upcoming show, I will cover the Historical Books and related work in Biblical archaeology that variously supports and contradicts what’s printed in the Bible, a fascinating subject for many reasons. So, that’s a quick introduction to the Historical Books. [music]

Four Main Parts, Part 3: The Poetic and Wisdom Books

So the Pentateuch is the first big section of the Old Testament, and then the Historical Books. Let’s go on to the next one. Section 3 of 4 is what we call the “Poetic and Wisdom Books.” These books, by chapter count, make up about a tiny little 10% of the Old Testament, though if you include the 150 Psalms as chapters, that number jumps way up to 25%. Earlier in this podcast, I introduced the wisdom literature of Ancient Egypt, and the wisdom literature of the first millennium BCE more generally. The Poetic and Wisdom Books of the Bible are Ancient Israel’s main contribution to thos genre. The Poetic and Wisdom Books, which include Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, are of special interest to literary scholars. They’re often gorgeously written, with dense figurative language and intellectual energy. With powerful literary craftsmanship, and a philosophical restlessness that in places seems to scratch at the bounds of monotheism, the Poetic and Wisdom books are one of the more accessible parts of the Old Testament, and we’re going to spend a disproportionate amount of time with them.

One of the really magical things about the poetic and wisdom books is that you can read them in isolation from the rest of the Old Testament and still understand and enjoy them. You don’t, for instance, need to know the whole grand history of the Israelites in order to understand that many of the Psalms are wonderful poems. They’re filled with compressed bursts of meaning. Often an impassioned first person speaker pleads for help, or expresses awe at the vastness of God and the universe, or hopes for retribution for wrongs done to him. The Psalms are, for the intimacy of their speakers, and intensity of their messages, surprisingly like the confessional poetry of the twentieth century. In this podcast, the poetry that we’ve heard so far is very different from the Psalms. Understanding Homer or Hesiod or ancient Babylonian religious texts requires familiarity with a small panorama of human and mythological figures, referenced variously throughout their pages. The Psalms, however, are usually simpler. There is a speaker, and an addressee – most often God, and a series of parallel lines that develop an idea or image. And that’s it. Whether or not you share their specific strain of monotheism, the Psalms communicate an essentially human core of emotional experiences – hope, anguish, reverence, and fury – that are the same today as they were in the Iron Age. So the 150, or 151 by some counts Psalms have always been one of the more broadly accessible parts of the Old Testament. We’ll cover the Psalms – the most heavily read poems on earth – in Episode 21, in a show called “The Bible’s Magic Trick.”

Now, while Psalms come first in the Ketuvim of the Hebrew Tanakh, the first poetic and wisdom book in the Catholic and Protestant canons is Job. And Job is one of the more famous books of the Old Testament. Job is the story of a good man who suffers terribly, seemingly for no other reason than that God gets into a sort of horse race betting situation with another semidivine being – a being called “the adversary” to Jews, and Satan to Christians. Whatever the reason, Job loses everything and gets deathly ill, and his book unfolds mostly as a long, heated philosophical discussion on why good and innocent people suffer. The central issue of the Book of Job, often called “the problem of evil,” or “theodicy,” is one of the traditional inquiries people pose when they doubt the beneficent motives of a god or gods, and it’s pretty remarkable that the Old Testament itself doesn’t shy away from this tough question. In Episode 20, titled “The Problem of Evil,” we’re going to spend a long time with the Book of Job, and explore the way that its 42 chapters have been read and interpreted over the past two and a half thousand years.

While I won’t spend much time with Proverbs, which we already more or less covered with the Ancient Egyptian wisdom literature and Instructions of Amenemope and ‘Onchsheshonqy, the next part of the poetic and wisdom books is the Book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is very short – just twelve chapters, but it’s another one of the Old Testament’s more philosophically robust contributions to world history. Ecclesiastes, a long speech delivered by a mysterious figure called “the gatherer,” or “the teacher,” or “the preacher,” questions the point of existence. Everything, Ecclesiastes tells us, is as meaningless and ephemeral as a single breath. Everything that we do, and try to do, that we fear and hope for – all of it is meaningless. Just as the Book of Job is surprisingly modern in its engagement with the “problem of evil,” Ecclesiastes, with its callous indifference to earthly life, often seems like a piece philosophy from a far later era. In Episode 22, entitled “Fatalism,” we’re going to learn about the remarkable confluence of Iron Age philosophical traditions that come together in Ecclesiastes, and, before the Book of Revelation and Catholicism came along and carefully codified heaven and hell, what the Hebrew Bible has to say about the meaning of life on earth.

The final poetic and wisdom book is the Song of Solomon, or the Song of Songs. At just eight chapters, it’s a tiny little book. But the Song of Songs has engendered centuries and centuries of controversy. Because the Song of Songs doesn’t – on the surface at least – seem to be a religious text at all. There’s no mention of Yahweh, of sacrifice, or fidelity to Iron Age Judah, or any of those core strains that propel the rest of the Old Testament along. The Song of Songs is a love poem that runs as a dialogue between a male and female speaker. Judaism and Christianity have come up with interpretations of the Song of Songs that work to explain what it’s doing in the Old Testament, and their interpretations are every bit as interesting as the book itself. In Episode 23, “Love, Desire, Exegesis,” well learn all about this book of the Old Testament, and the ways it’s been interpreted.

So those are the poetic and wisdom books – Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. Because they’ve been so influential to world literature, and because they’re more thematically diverse than many other sections of the Old Testament, we’re, again, going to spend a disproportionate amount of time with them. With three out of four of our main parts done, let’s go on to the last one. [music]

Four Main Parts, Part 4: The Prophetic Books

Let’s quickly talk about the Prophetic Books. By chapter count, they make up about 27% of the Old Testament. There are seventeen Prophetic Books, but by far the most important are just three – those thought to have been composed by the eighth-century prophet Isaiah, his sixth-century successor Jeremiah, and a man roughly the contemporary of Jeremiah, Ezekiel. If the Historical Books chronicle the kings and major events in Ancient Israel’s history, the Prophetic Books record the psychological ramifications of these events. In a word, as generations of Ancient Israelites found themselves cornered, conquered, and humiliated, their prophets attempted to cope with geopolitical setbacks in their religious writings. The Prophetic Books are thus frequently angry, blaming the people of Ancient Israel for their own sufferings, furiously condemning Israel’s enemies for impiety, and predicting a coming period of vengeance and righteousness. Written in first person singular, and often alternating rapidly between vigorous anger and vibrant visions of the future, the Prophetic Books are one of the darker and more thematically repetitious portions of Judaism’s writings.

They’re also enormous. The Prophetic Books alone are about the size of the entire New Testament. And to Christians, the Prophetic Books have a special significance. As I said before, the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, is organized radically differently than Catholic and Protestant Bibles. One of the biggest differences is the way these versions of the Bible end. The Tanakh ends with the books of Chronicles, which recapitulate earlier Biblical history and see the exiled Judahites home, back to the city of Jerusalem, to rebuild their temple and way of life under the auspices of the tolerant Persian Empire. But Christian Bibles put Chronicles right in the middle of the History books, and leave the Prophetic Books until the end. Why do they do this? Why rearrange the traditional order of the Tanakh?

One of the main reasons has to do with what the Prophetic Books prophesize. In the midst of the cornucopia of violent punishments envisioned for both Israelites and their opponents, the Prophetic Books, somewhat less often, envision a better future for Israel. In four or five points in the first Prophetic Book, the Book of Isaiah, especially Chapters 52 and 53, there are references to a mysterious redeemer figure who will some day come and lead the Judahites into an era of much greater prosperity. And a reference to a “messenger of the covenant” in the final Prophetic Book – the Book of Malachi, also seems to indicate the impending arrival of a savior figure. The Jewish Talmud and midrashim have their own explanations for these passages in the Prophetic Books. But to Christians, including the authors of the New Testament themselves, the descriptions of this savior figure are referencing the coming of Jesus. So, put plainly, Christian Bibles place those Prophetic Books last because that way, they form a logical segue to the stories of Jesus in the Gospels of the New Testament.

I’m going to cover all of the Prophetic Books in a single episode – Episode 24, “God May Relent.” There are individual prophetic books that stand out from the crowd. Daniel and Jonah, for instance, are formally distinguished by the fact that they’re written in third person omniscient and tell splendid little short stories with memorable plots. Portions of Ezekiel are famous their visionary and almost hallucinatory imagery. Amos is notoriously miscellaneous – a sort of hodgepodge of instructions. However, when you remove these, the Prophetic Books start to become indistinguishable from one another, unless you’re a scholar of Ancient Hebrew grammar or an academic studying the subject. As I said, stretching across hundreds of pages are denunciations of foreign peoples, castigations of the Israelites themselves, and less often, hopeful statements about the future. Because of the repetitious nature of these books, I feel like we can cover them in a single episode.

So that’s it – the four main parts – the Pentateuch, Historical Books, Poetic and Wisdom Books, and the Prophetic Books. To close out today’s show, I want to talk a little bit about some of the resources I’m going to be using, in addition to the Old Testament, to help give context to it. [music]

From the Rosetta Stone to the Tell Dan Annals

On August 27, 1917, almost exactly 99 years ago to the day that I am releasing this episode, my great grandmother gave my great grandfather a bible. In perfect cursive, a relic of the manuscript and epistolary culture that my generation has so jarringly left behind, she autographed the bible for her husband with the date of the presentation. And it wasn’t just any bible – it was a 2-inch thick, twelve inch by ten inch dreadnought of a book that must weigh no less than five pounds. It wasn’t one of those church pew King James bibles that skimps on notes and cross references and indexes, either – this thing was a new translation, directly from Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. It had maps, scholarly information, notes on translation, woodcuts, a pronunciation guide, and a four point font, staggeringly dense five-column cross-reference index at the back just in case you wanted to look up one of the bible’s 2,600 proper nouns, or any subtopic of Judaism or Christianity, for that matter. The book itself, family history aside, is an awesome testament to the seriousness and attention to detail with which past generations have read the Bible. An inset section of the book, between the Old and New Testaments, was reserved for records of births, deaths, and marriages, and my great grandmother had used it. The big brown frigate of a book must have sat prominently somewhere in their midwestern country house for most of their lives together.

Now, I’d like to think that my progenitors read this book, maybe even thoroughly, and that a little bit of their German Protestant heritage influenced my own love for the printed page. It absolutely delighted me that my great grandparents had a scholarly bible a century before I sought one out – that separated by a century that saw some of the most profound historical changes in human life that would ever take place, we both wanted to learn more about the Anglophone world’s biggest book, beyond what was strictly available in that book itself. But to be honest, I don’t know how much they read it on their own – I’m left to imagine.

Whether or not my great grandma dove into her scholarly bible, armed with a pen and notepaper, it was her generation and the two before her that unlocked Biblical archaeology and the Ancient Near East. Many of the things that we talked about last time were discovered by her contemporaries and her parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Flinders Petrie discovered the Merneptah Stele in 1896. The Mesha Stele was found three decades before this, and over the course of the 19th century, other seminal findings from biblical archaeology were dug up and put in museums that we’ll soon learn more about – the Obelisk of Shalmaneser, the Annals of Tiglath-Pileser, Sennacherib’s Prism, and the Library of Ashurbanipal. We had had the Old Testament’s version of ancient history for thousands of years. Only recently have we had other sides of the story.

Since the Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 and deciphered by Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young in the 1820s, we’ve begun to have a much clearer understanding of the dynasties of Ancient Egypt – their religion and culture, their economics and international relations. Soon after, Henry Rawlinson began transcribing the famous Behistun Inscription in the Zagros Mountains of modern day Iran in the 1830s, and Austen Henry Layard found the library of Ashurbanipal in 1851. It contained 20,000 clay tablets – a snapshot of all of the Mesopotamian literature of the Iron Age and before. Six years later, in 1857, four translators working on behalf of the Royal Asiatic Society created similar translations of an Akkadian cuneiform tablet from around 1,100 BCE. The decipherment of ancient languages from Iraq and Iran meant that the texts of ancient Mesopotamia could be read and understood. Then, in 1906, the discovery of 10,000 more tablets in Hattusa, the land of the Hittites in modern day Turkey, added hugely to our knowledge of the ancient world. And also at the turn of the century, the discovery and compilation of the Amarna letters, clay tablet correspondence between Egypt’s kings and the regional powers of Mesopotamia, Turkey, and the Levant, began to give us a view of a Late Bronze Age world that was highly specialized, economically stratified, and commercially interlinked, from Sicily to the eastern regions of Iran, up to the mountains of the Balkan peninsula, and as far south as Yemen and the Sudan. The world that existed before Ancient Greece and Rome, once buried beneath sands and lost in dark caches under crumbled cities, started being recovered in the nineteenth century. And the discoveries continued in the decade after my great grandma purchased her scholarly bible. In the 1920s, a cache of Ugaritic texts was discovered in modern day Syria, and once the were deciphered, these late Bronze Age tablets began to reveal very specific, and very interesting parallels with the theology of Ancient Israel.

A century before my great grandma’s generation, it seemed that the Old Testament was the largest, most colorful, reliable source of information about the ancient world we had. If the Old Testament said that King Solomon had 700 wives and undertook larger than life building projects, then there was little reason to suppose otherwise. If the Old Testament said that Joshua’s armies marched around Jericho tooting trumpets and Jericho’s walls suddenly collapsed, then the trumpets sounded, and the walls fell. But we have many other contemporary and older texts now – the Enuma Elish, Atrahasis, Gilgamesh, the Descent of Ishtar, the poetry of Enheduanna, the Ugaritic Baal cycle, the Hittite Kumarbi cycle, and a whole shelf of writings from Ancient Egypt, from pharaohnic inscriptions to short fiction like “The Shipwrecked Sailor” to the novella The Story of Sinuhe to the wacky and pornographic “Contendings of Horus and Set” to the gigantic Book of the Dead. These texts were not widely available a hundred years ago. They are now.

There is something inherently nettling to some of us about drawing textual parallels between the Old Testament and other Iron Age, and Bronze Age texts. As we explore some of these together over the next bundle of episodes, though, I should note that my intention isn’t to prick or scratch at the colossus that is the Old Testament, which is doing quite fine with its two billion readers, so much as it is to prop up some other texts that are far less well known. To this day, shockingly, to me, there are hardly any editions of the work of Enheduanna, a priestess of Ur in the 2200s BCE and the first named author in the historical record. You might think that this lady would merit a Penguin or Oxford edition, or perhaps even be a household name. Similarly, from the same period, the Descent of Ishtar, sometimes called the Epic of Inanna and Dumuzi to use the deities’ Sumerian names, a long narrative about a courageous deity, her journey to the underworld, her doomed love, and a lot of beer and sex along the way, is only known to specialists and published in one modern edition, while her masculine counterpart Gilgamesh somehow snuck into the world of general literary knowledge. The sacred narratives of the Hittites and of Ugarit, Israel’s neighbors, as important as they are, are only published in a couple of modern editions. To put it briefly, Israel and Judah, those kingdoms we met last time, were actually never very powerful or well known over the course of the 1,000 years the Bible was being written, but when we look back into the ancient world, we continue to almost completely ignore their larger cultural milieu. In drawing your attention from time to time to probable lines of influence between the Old Testament and the world around it, I hope to call just a bit more attention to other wonderful ancient texts that continue to be stubbornly and unaccountably ignored outside of academic circles. [music]

Moving on to the Narrative Portions of the Pentateuch

This is a superb time to read the Old Testament. Archaeology has produced a wealth of raw materials – cuneiform tablets, wooden coffin inscriptions, papyrus fragments, ostraca and monuments with writing on them, architectural remnants, pottery and jewelry, bones and mummified remains, burn layers, soil samples, shipwrecks, figurines, plinths and totems, armor and weaponry, chariots, bits, sculptures, etchings, seals, and far more. These materials have been, and continue to be processed and analyzed. In 1993, as the Simpsons entered its fifth season, a paving stone was discovered near the Golan Heights, dated roughly to the 800s BCE, that contained the first archaeological record of the name of King David. While we can hope that the next few decades will bring us another set of Dead Sea Scrolls or Nag Hammadi Library, maybe the most important thing that biblical archaeology has taught us is something that can be summed up very simply.

From archaeology and related scholarship, we have learned that the Old Testament isn’t really that old. We’ve learned that half of recorded history had elapsed before ancient Canaanite scribes began writing it all down in their fancy newfangled phonetic alphabet. While for some 2,500 years we have been reading the Old Testament, it’s only been over the last 200 of those that we’ve begun having substantive archaeological information about the ancient world. And of those 200 years, only for a scant half century have professionally trained linguists and anthropologists, together with the techniques of modern survey archaeology, been put to work in understanding the world of the ancient Israelites. The Old Testament is closer to us, and more approachable, and more human than it’s ever been – and today we’ve learned that as complicated as the Old Testament can sometimes seem, it’s all divisible into four main parts – say it with me if you can – first, the Pentateuch; second, the Historical Books; third, the Wisdom and Poetic Books; and fourth, the Prophetic Books.

In the next episode, then, we’re finally going to get into it – the first of those four main parts we talked about today, the Pentateuch, and the narrative sections that stretch through the Bible’s first five scrolls – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. In the next episode, we’re going to meet the most famous family in history – specifically, the family of Abraham, and explore the world of the Biblical patriarchs down to Moses’ farewell speech on the banks of the Jordan River. And while we’ll hear the story of the fathers of Israel, we’ll also consider parallels between the Pentateuch and other ancient Mediterranean tales of watery creations, floods, original sins, babies adrift on rivers, and explore whether some of the Hebrew names for God in the Bible might bear traces of a polytheistic past.

So thanks for listening to Literature and History. As always I have a quiz on this episode at literatureandhistory.com, plus the usual full episode transcription, illustrations, and some especially handy infographics about the various canons of the Bible. Got a song coming up if you want to hear it. If not, class dismissed, and I’ll see you next time.

Still listening? I got to thinking about how long the Bible is – I mean, those 915,000 words of the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha. How many novels, plays, and poems could you squeeze into that length, and which ones? Just how long is 915,000 words? I got to thinking about that, and I wrote the following jazz tune, called “It’s Long.” Hope you like it, and Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the gang are coming your way soon in Episode 17: Roots of the Pentateuch.





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