Continuing the analysis in a slightly different way…

Time for a change of tack, I think.

Up to now we've looked at the Bible book by book, to see where each book came from, who wrote it, when it was compiled and so forth.

We could go on doing that, but there are quite a lot of prophetic books and wisdom books, and the issues around dating them tend to come up again and again. A book-by-book analysis, while possible, would be tedious. Better, I think, to look at the nature and sources of these books in general terms, and then look at some of the books in a little more detail.

The Prophecies…

The groupings of the books of the Old Testament: The Torah (The Law); The Histories: The Prophets: The Wisdom Books The Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi The Wisdom Books: Job, The Psalms, The Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus

The prophets mostly arose at times of crisis for Israel. Each prophet's primary message was directed to the people of his own day. The prophets were reformers and religious teachers, identifying problems in society which would separate Israel from its covenant with God, and calling for those problems to be addressed. They held up the ideals of moral duty, adherence to religious truth, and national renewal.

Sometime prophets were anti-establishment figures, preaching an unpopular message and risking persecution for it. Sometimes they were close to powerful establishment figures, and acted as advisers to them.

In popular parlance, we think of a prophet as someone who foretells the future. This wasn't really the business of the biblical prophets. When they did make predictions about the future, it was often a prediction of the consequences of events already unfolding. ("If we carry on ignoring God and his laws, the nation will fall into ruin!"). But, having said that, some of the prophets did forecast more remote future events — particularly the coming of a Messiah.

Each prophetic book presents the poems, prophecies, and thoughts of the prophet for whom it is named. It's not always clear whether a particular book is the work of the prophet himself or his disciples, but it's generally assumed that prophetic books tend to come from the prophets involved, or from people fairly close to them.

There are therefore fewer disagreements between tradition and scholarship over the authorship of the prophetic books than there is over the histories. Nevertheless there are some. The fact that the prophets did sometimes predict future events is a regular source of disagreement. If a prophet says that, "the walls of such-and-such a city are fallen," and we know from the historical records that the walls did in fact fall in a particular year, scholars will date the book concerned to after that year. But traditionalists have no problem in dating it before that year.

Lots of the prophetic books are quite short, and many are basically poetry, using allegorical and allusive language. These features deprive scholars of many of the clues that they would normally use to date a historical book. On the other hand, it's often easy to work out what particular social evil or communal crisis the prophet is reacting to, and that can often enable us to date the book quite precisely.

The Books of Wisdom…

The "wisdom literature" — Psalms, Proverbs, Job — etc are basically works of poetry and philosophy, emphasizing moral imperatives based on religion. They don't describe events, like the histories. Nor are they reactions to events, like the prophecies, so many of the normal dating clues are absent. But very often the philosophical standpoints they take are indicators of age. For example, works which display a dualistic attitude to body and soul are likely to have been written by somebody who has been exposed to Greek culture and philosophy, and so to date from 300 BC or later.

Having said all that, let's look at a couple of the prophetic books and the wisdom books in a little more detail.

Looking in more detail at a selection of books…

Jeremiah…

Jeremiah is one of the most important prophets. He witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC and the subsequent exile into Babylon (though he himself did not go to Babylon, but stayed in what remained of Jerusalem.)

Much of the text is first-person narrative poems, ostensibly dictated by Jeremiah himself, and later revised by him. The poems are not organized in a very coherent way, and in fact ancient texts of Jeremiah present his material in a different order. But there is no reason to doubt that Jeremiah wrote (or at least dictated) most of the book, so the scholarly and traditional views on authorship agree.

As we saw last week, Jeremiah uses many phrases and quotes from Deuteronomy. Some scholars suggest that he might be the Deuteronomistic historian, who was the author/editor of Deuteronomy, editor of the historical books Joshua, Judges, and Samuel, and author of the Book of Kings. The theory is not without its problems — it requires Jeremiah to have produced the Book of Deuteronomy by 622 BC, when it is known to have existed, and to be still active nearly forty years later, in 586 BC, when Jerusalem was destroyed, and for at least some years after that. But that's not impossible. And the theory fits with the tradition that Jeremiah wrote the Book of Kings.

Isaiah…

Isaiah is a tricky one. The traditional perspective is that the book was written entirely by Isaiah of Jerusalem, who prophesied around 742 to 687 BC — that is, well before the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Captivity.

However, the scholarly view is that the last part of the book must have been written much later, after the return from exile in 539 BC. Scholars therefore think there were two Isaiahs — at least. Possibly three.

The reason is that the first part of Isaiah addresses people living in Judah under the Davidic kings. Jerusalem is the Holy City that God will protect, the Temple and sacrifice are in place, the Assyrians are a threat. This is consistent with a date in the 700s.

But the later parts of Isaiah describe how the cities of Judah are desolate, the Temple is in ruins, and the people are in exile in Babylon. The Assyrians aren't mentioned. The writer assures the people that Cyrus would overthrow Babylon and restore them to their land (which, of course, to the scholarly mind means that this event must have already happened). There is a new theological emphasis, as well as a changed political scene.

This leads scholars to believe there were two different prophets named Isaiah, living 150 to 200 years apart, whose works were later combined. And part of Chapters 40-66 may have been written by a different person again, the third Isaiah.

But it's not a case of three originally separate texts being combined at a later date, as we have seen before. The separate pieces of the book of Isaiah do not, in fact, stand well alone. The later pieces supplement and expand the prior work and, even if they did have separate authors, were probably written as an extension of it.

Daniel…

	Illustrated cover of Book of Daniel. Image from: www.mary-breeden.com

Daniel is another interesting book. It is explicitly set during the Babylonian captivity and tradition says it was written at that time.

But Daniel contains a preview of several centuries of what would be, from the perspective of the Babylonian captivity, future history. And this preview is remarkably accurate. Unsurprisingly, this book is a favorite of those who believe that "biblical prophecy" accurately predicts the future.

The problem with this is that Daniel is more accurate about the "future" than the supposed "present" — the Babylonian captivity. Too many details of the Babylonian court in Daniel are contradicted by archeological and other sources.

The scholarly view, then, is that Daniel was written after the events that it "predicts", not before. The period of the Babylonian Captivity, in which the work is supposedly set, is in fact the most remote period described in the book; hence the inaccuracy of the descriptions.

Scholars reckon that Daniel was probably written during the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucids in 165 BC. Daniel expresses his opposition to the Seleucids by disguising the situation as Babylonian.

In other words, it's a code. The author knew that his audience would understand what he was referring to. Daniel is often classified as apocalyptic literature, a genre popular from 200 BC to 100 AD. Apocalyptic works are full of codes of this kind, supernatural intervention, bizarre portents, and mystic visions, and Daniel is no exception.

The Psalms…

Illustrated page from a Gallican Psalter published in Flanders in 1270. Image from: www.leavesofgold.org

Psalms, the principal wisdom book, is a compilation of songs of praise, thanksgiving or supplication. Few of them are dated. They were certainly composed over a long period. Many psalms are explicitly attributed to David (1000 BC), and a few are attributed to Moses (1250 BC); there is a tradition that David wrote most of the individual psalms and compiled the book..

On the other hand, Psalm 137 is clearly written during the Babylonian captivity, over 400 years after David lived.

The scholarly view is that the entire final book was probably compiled from earlier collections, for liturgical use in the Temple, by about 515 BC. Some suggest that it was compiled later, possibly in the 3rd century BC.

The Song of Solomon is a compilation of about 25 sensuous love songs and wedding songs. Tradition says that Solomon wrote the songs. Scholars say that they are later than that, but not later than about the fourth century BC.

There are few, if any, explicit religious references in the Song of Solomon, but plenty of references that are explicit in a quite different sense. So why is it regarded as inspired scripture? Well there is a (somewhat stretched) interpretation that these are love songs about God and Israel. It is this interpretation, plus the popularity of the songs in ancient wedding celebrations, that leads to the book being taken to be scriptural.

Why is this interesting? Because it tell us that, at least at some stages of Jewish history, the principal criterion for treating a book as scriptural was not doctrinal (what does it teach?) but liturgical (was it used in worship ceremonies?). And this, if we think about it, tells us something important about what scripture meant to the Jews, and why they thought it was important. We'll come back to this point.

Next week: The New Testament.

ARTICLE NAVIGATION: PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V | PART VI

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