Tanakh is the Jewish scripture. Tanakh - Hebrew Bible

The Bible is of great importance to the Jewish people. In addition to being considered a sacred book, it also traces the historical events of Israel, taking place over almost two thousand years, from the birth of the Jews as a nation, starting from the forefather Abraham, and ending with the conquest of Judea by Alexander the Great. When it comes to the Jewish Bible, it usually refers to the Tanakh, which is the liturgical book of the Jews. The word "Tanakh" is an abbreviation made up of three words: Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim. The Tanakh is completely the Old Testament of the Bible, and differs only in the sequence of books included in its composition. Of particular importance for the Jews is the Torah - the Pentateuch of Moses, which contains all the laws by which the Jews are still trying to live. Neviim is the name of the books of the prophets, and Ketuvim is the writings of the saints. The Hebrew Bible had a great influence on the formation of Christianity and Islam and on the birth of the written heritage of these two religions.

Structure of the Hebrew Bible

The Bible of the Jews consists of 39 books, like the Christian Old Testament. The Tanakh was divided into three parts approximately in the 2nd century BC. e., and, as in the Old Testament, there is a division into chapters and verses. An interesting difference between the Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible is the presence of not only the Written, but also the so-called Oral Torah. The value of the Oral Torah for the Jews is no less than the Written one: in particular, many representatives of Judaism believe that the Oral Torah was received by Moses on Mount Zion along with the Tablets of the Covenant. At one time, the Jews had a ban on writing down the Oral Torah, but at present, the severity of this ban has been significantly reduced. The oral version of one of the books of the Hebrew Bible is rejected by a number of Jewish sects, such as the Sadducees, Samaritans and Karaites.

No New Testament in the Hebrew Bible

The radical difference between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible is that it has not changed over the past millennia. The Christian Bible was replenished with the New Testament - the doctrine of the incarnation of God in human form, His crucifixion and Resurrection. In addition, the New Testament includes the books of the apostles and the Revelation of John the Theologian. This happened because at the beginning of the 1st century AD. e. among the Jews there was a split into those who recognized in Jesus Christ the Savior promised by God, and those who rejected Him. Thus, the followers of Judaism are still waiting for the fulfillment of the prophecies recorded in the Hebrew Bible and waiting for the Messiah. Therefore, the holy prophets, who, according to traditional religious tradition, wrote the book of the Bible of the Jews, are recognized and revered in both Judaism and Christianity.

M.G. Seleznev - Associate Professor of the Institute of Oriental Cultures and Antiquities of the Russian State Humanitarian University, Head. Department of Biblical Studies of the All-Church Postgraduate and Doctoral Studies named after St. Cyril and Methodius, member of the biblical group of the Synodal Biblical and Theological Commission.

1

At the last lecture, we talked about the history of the appearance of the Greek Bible, about the legend of the seventy interpreters. The topic of today's lecture is the reasons for the discrepancies between the Greek Bible and the Hebrew Bible. This topic is very important for us, because our main liturgical text (Slavonic) generally follows the textological line of the Greek Bible, and our main liturgical text (Synodal translation) follows mainly the line of the Hebrew Bible. So the problems of textual criticism are visible not only to a professor who knows Hebrew and Greek, but also to a simple parishioner who wants to compare the text of the Slavonic Psalter with the Synodal translation.

There is one more reason why this topic seems to me very significant - it is for us, right now. When we look at the history of discrepancies between biblical texts, at the history of interpretation and reinterpretation of the Bible, we understand one extremely important thing: how irreducible the Bible - both at the level of texts and at the level of exegesis - to something so uniform, immovable, in uniform chained. What a colorful mosaic appears before us! A mosaic that has both a cultural dimension and a temporal dimension.

There is a myth in our popular piety that the Jewish scribes deliberately distorted the text of Holy Scripture. Such an accusation was often heard by early Christian writers and by the Fathers of the Church. A heated discussion about the validity of this accusation flared up in the middle of the 19th century between Bp. Theophan the Recluse, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, prof. Gorsky-Platonov, an associate of Met. Filaret of Moscow, one of the leading biblical scholars of the Moscow Theological Academy. The discussion was particularly poignant because it was, in fact, not about the history of the Jewish Bible, but about the future of the Russian Bible: about the dignity of the Synodal Translation, which, under the guidance of Met. Philaret of Moscow, was made precisely from the Hebrew text (with relatively minor changes and additions - in brackets - according to the Greek Bible). Ep. Theophanes only recognizes the Slavonic text of the Bible, which mostly goes back to the Greek text. For him, the Synodal Translation is a “newfangled Bible,” which needs to be brought to “burning on St. Isaac’s Square.” Gorsky-Platonov defends the honor of Met. Filaret of Moscow and his offspring. The controversy was published in the "Church Herald", "Home Talk" and "Emotional Reading"

What can we add to this discussion one hundred and fifty years later?

2

For the first time, the accusation of the Jewish scribes that they deliberately distorted the text of the Old Testament was heard in the "Dialogue with Trypho the Jew" by St. Justin the philosopher (c. 160 AD), and then was repeatedly repeated by a number of early Christian writers and Church Fathers. The controversy between Christians and Jews went on even before Justin, we can recall, for example, ap. Paul. But ap. Paul is talking about exegesis: "their minds are blinded ..," writes St. Paul about the Jews - the veil remains unremoved until now when reading the Old Testament, because it is removed by Christ ”(2 Cor 3:14). This is not to say that the Jews have a different or corrupted text of the Old Testament. It's just that they misread the correct text. Justin is the first to translate this controversy into the field of textual criticism.

St. Justin can be called the most significant of the Christian apologists of the 2nd century. Born around 100 into a pagan (Greek) family in Naples, ancient Seachem, and having received a good Greek education, he sought truth in the philosophical schools of the Stoics, Perpatetics, Pythagoreans, Platonists, and after a long search found it in the Christian faith. Justin's conversion appears to have taken place sometime in the mid-130s. The decisive role was played by his meeting with a certain Christian elder, whose name he does not name; this meeting, many years later, he colorfully describes in the first chapters of the Dialogue with Trypho the Jew. Justin devoted his entire subsequent life to the defense and preaching of Christianity as "the only, firm and useful philosophy." He had many students, among them the famous early Christian writer Tatian. St. Justin was martyred in Rome between 162 and 167.

The work of interest to us, "Dialogue" tells how, in Ephesus, Justin met a certain Tryphon, a Jew who moved to Greece during the "last war" (that is, the war of the Romans with the rebellious Jews led by Bar Kokhba, 132- 135). Between Justin on the one hand, Tryphon and his companions (Jews? Or Gentiles converted to Judaism?) a dispute ensues, lasting two days.

Disputing constantly turn to the Old Testament texts. Justin argues that the Old Testament accurately predicts the life of Jesus Christ to the smallest detail, Tryphon and his companions object. In several places, Justin accuses the Jews of corrupting the Scriptures. Later Christian writers, relying on the authority of Justin, understood this accusation in the sense that the Jews, according to Justin, corrupted the Hebrew (i.e. Masoretic) text of Scripture. In fact, as we shall see, the situation is much more complicated.

The Bible for Justin was the Greek Bible (he did not know Hebrew). Justin argued in Greek with Greek-speaking Jews, who apparently also used Greek rather than Hebrew copies of the Bible. Dial eloquently testifies that both Justin and his Jewish opponents lived in the world of the Greek Bible and Greek interpretations of it. 113:2. The Jews, Justin writes at this point in the Dialogue, do not pay attention to the fact that Joshua was first called Hosea, and then his name was changed to Joshua. (Justin is referring to Numbers 13:17, which says “Moses gave the name Jesus to Hosea the son of Nun.” It should be noted that in the unvoiced Hebrew letter, the names Hosea and Jesus differ in one letter - “Yud”.) That the name the leader of the Jewish people was changed from "Hosea" to "Jesus" for Justin, the prophecy about Jesus Christ was hidden. Justin accuses Trypho the Jew of ignoring this prophecy by the Jews, and then adds: “This is despite the fact that you are theologizing why He added one more alpha to the name of Abraham, and also reasoning why He added another ro to the name of Sarah.”

Why is this passage so important for understanding the Bible used by Justin and his opponents? The fact that God changed Abram's name to Abraham and Sarah to Sarah has always been the starting point for various exegetical constructions, both in the Jewish and Christian traditions. However, for readers of the Hebrew Bible, the difference is that the letter "he" is added to the name Abram, while the final "yod" is changed to "he" in Sarah's name. For readers of the Greek Bible, the letter "alpha" is added to the name of Abram, and the letter "ro" is added to the name of Sarah.

There are Jewish midrashim where, in connection with this renaming, the letter “he” is considered to be the bearer of a special divine meaning - not only was it inserted into the names Abraham and Sarah, it is also in the mysterious name of God YHVH. Such midrashim were born among those who read this text in Hebrew. And among those who read the Bible in Greek, completely different stories were born - about the addition of alpha and rho. For example, the famous Philo of Alexandria belongs to those who read the Greek Bible and do not know the Hebrew original. In De Mutatione Nominum, he speaks of adding the letters "alpha" and "rho" to the names of Abram and Sarah, without mentioning (and apparently unaware) that the original Hebrew letters are completely different.

Justin (and his opponents, of whom Justin says that they theologize about the letters "alpha" and "rho" in the names of Abraham and Sarah) clearly, like Philo, referred to readers of the Greek, not Hebrew, Bible. In the last centuries BC. and the first centuries A.D. in addition to the Hebrew-speaking Jewish culture, there was a huge and very rich Greek-speaking Jewish culture. It was within this field, the Greek field, that the discussion between Justin and his opponents took place. One of the modern researchers of Justin’s work writes: “We come to the almost inevitable conclusion that neither Justin nor his interlocutor knew either the Hebrew language or the Hebrew text of Scripture ... They shared this ignorance with many Greek-speaking Jews who listened to the text of the Greek Bible in synagogues ".

In other words, in contrasting the "translation made by the 70 elders" with the biblical text of his opponents, Justin is referring not to the Masoretic Hebrew text, but to the Greek translations used by Greek-speaking Jews of the 2nd century. Russian exegetes of the 19th century, involved in the controversy about which text is more correct - the Jewish Masoretic text or the Greek Bible - pick up on Justin's thought, understanding him in such a way that he compares the Hebrew text with the Greek. In fact, Justin is not defending the Greek text of the Bible against the Masoretic, but the Greek text of the Old Testament used by the Christians in his time against the Greek text of the Old Testament used by the Jews in his time. Justin knows about the translation of the Seventy interpreters and identifies the text used by Christians with the translation of the Seventy. Justin also knows that after the translation of the Seventy, the Jews made new translations of the Bible into Greek - and denounces them for this:

« But I do not agree with your teachers, who, not recognizing that those seventy elders during the time of Ptolemy, king of Egypt, correctly translated, they themselves try to translate in a different way ... And I want you to know that they are from the translation made by the elders during Ptolemy, completely destroyed many scriptures that clearly testify to what was foretold about the divinity, humanity and death on the cross of this Crucified"(Dial 71:1-2).

It is clear from the context that Justin accuses the Jews not of spoiling the Hebrew text (the Hebrew text does not appear in the discussion at all), but of maliciously editing the translation of the Seventy.

Justin's interlocutor asks for concrete examples of the distortion of the Scriptures. “I will fulfill your desire,” Justin answered, and further, in chapter 72 of the “Dialogue ...” he gives three examples. Let's consider them.

First accusation.

« From the explanations given by Ezra regarding the Passover law, they[your teachers] released the following: // “And Ezra said to the people: This Passover is our Savior and our refuge. And if you consider and enter into our hearts that we have to humble Him on a sign, and then let us hope in Him, then this place will not be devastated forever, said the God of hosts; but if you do not believe in him, and do not obey his preaching, you will be a laughingstock to the nations.”

There is indeed no such passage in the Masoretic text of the Bible. But it is not in any manuscript of the Greek Bible. It is not, accordingly, in the Slavic Bible. Moreover, none of the fathers and early Christian writers, except Justin the philosopher, quotes anything of the kind.

Second accusation.

« From the words of Jeremiah[your teachers] released the following: // “I am like a gentle lamb carried to the slaughter. They had thoughts of Me, saying, Come, let us throw a tree into his bread, and let us destroy him from the land of the living, and let his name be remembered no more.”

There is indeed such a place in the Greek Bible. But it is also in the Hebrew: it is Jer 11:19, and we have no evidence that the Hebrew manuscript tradition has ever omitted this place.

It is interesting that Justin himself writes: “... these words from Jeremiah are still preserved in some lists in Jewish synagogues - for they have recently been released ...” These words are a riddle. Perhaps one of Justin's opponents during one of the disputes could not find these words in his list (and it was not easy to find, because Justin, arguing with the Jews, did not indicate the number of the chapter and verse - there was no such numbering at that time - therefore, Justin's opponent had, in fact, to reread the entire book in order to test Justin). If Justin's opponent could not find the quote cited by Justin, then Justin could well decide that the Jews right now, just now, agreed to remove these words from the Bible. This is the simplest explanation of Justin's phrase that "these words ... are recently issued." There are other, more complex explanations, we will not dwell on them now.

Third accusation.

« From the words of the same Jeremiah they[your teachers] also released the following: // “The Lord God remembered his dead from Israel, who fell asleep in the ground of the grave, and came down to them to proclaim his salvation to them.”

There is no such passage in the Masoretic text of Jeremiah. But it is not in any manuscript of the Greek Bible. It is cited, however, by Irenaeus of Lyons, and is cited several times. In the III book "Against heresies" (20. 4) - as a quotation from Isaiah; in book IV (22.1) - as a quotation from Jeremiah; in the IV book (33. 1, 12) and in the V book (31. 1) - without specifying the authorship. In the "Proof of the Apostolic Sermon" (78) - as a quote from Jeremiah.

As modern scholars suggest, the text of the Septuagint quoted by Justin was very often drawn not from complete scrolls containing one or another biblical book (say, Jeremiah or Isaiah), but from collections of specially selected testimonies about the Messiah. Collections of this kind (they are called "testimonia", which means "evidence" in Latin) - have come down to us from the early Middle Ages (sometimes they are called "florilegia" - "collection of flowers"). It has long been assumed that it was from this kind of collections that Justin (and partly Irenaeus) borrowed their material. This is also supported by the fact that Irenaeus of Lyon does not know for sure whether the corresponding quote was taken from Jeremiah or Isaiah: if it were taken not from the testimonia collection, but from the scroll of a specific prophet, it would be difficult to explain that Irenaeus is confused between Jeremiah and Isaiah . Testimomnia collections could include both biblical quotations and material of apocryphal origin.

Until the middle of the 20th century, we had no examples of testimonia contemporary to Justin. The earliest ones belonged to the early Middle Ages. But in the middle of the 20th century, among the Qumran scrolls, the so-called “thematic pesharim” were discovered: thematically arranged collections of biblical quotations with interpretation. Of particular interest to us is one of these pesharim, which is called 4Q Testimonia. This is a collection of quotations from Deut. 5:28-29, 18:18-19, Numbers 24:15-17, Deut. 33:8–11, and the apocryphal Psalms of Joshua. These are texts of predominantly messianic content (which is why the researchers called this collection Testimonia - by analogy with the later Christian collections of "testimonies").

The Qumran text confirms two things. Firstly, that this kind of thematic collection of Old Testament quotations even before the advent of Christianity. The genre of messianic testimonia, which includes quotations from canonical and non-canonical texts, was adopted by early Christianity from Judaism, long before Justin and Irenaeus. Secondly, the Qumran testimonia testify that already from antiquity in such collections, canonical texts were interspersed with non-canonical ones (however, until the turn of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, the line between canonical and non-canonical texts was not clear even in Judaism). Reading the collection of Testimonius was unable to distinguish where the Old Testament text is here, and where the additions to it are. Therefore, Christian apologists, working not with the lists of Jeremiah or Isaiah, but with the testimonia collections, could well identify some non-canonical texts as the prophecies of Isaiah or Jeremiah - which, naturally, their opponents did not find in their manuscripts of Isaiah or Jeremiah.

But let us return to the dialogue between Justin the Philosopher and Tryphon the Jew. In chapter 73 of the "Dialogue ..." Justin continues to analyze the places where, in his opinion, the Jewish scribes distorted the Old Testament.

Fourth accusation.

« From the ninety-fifth psalm of David they [your teachers] destroyed the following few words: "from the tree." For it was said: “Speak among the nations: The Lord reigns from the tree” (εἴπατε ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσι ὁ κύριος ἐβασίλευσε ἀπὸ τοῦ ξύλου), but they left it thus: “Speak among the nations:».

If the division of the book of Jeremiah into chapters was unknown at the time of Justin, then the division of the Psalter into separate psalms, each with its own number, has long been part of the Jewish (and, accordingly, Christian) tradition. Justin gives the exact reference. We are talking about Ps 95:10 (according to the Greek, Slavonic and Latin account of the Psalms; according to the Hebrew account - 96:10). As we know, there is a difference in the numbering of the psalms between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint. Justin refers to the numbering of the Greek account - another proof that both he and his opponents already live in the world of the Greek Bible (more precisely, Greek Bibles).

But if we turn to the Greek Psalter, we will see that the words “from the tree” quoted by Justin are not there. This is a well-known psalm, from which are taken the lines of the prokeimenon "Roar in the tongue, as if the Lord reigned." The insert mentioned by Justin is absent from the Greek psalter, it is not mentioned by any of the Greek Fathers of the Church, it is not mentioned at all by any of the Greek writers, except for Justin.

It is present, however, in the Coptic translations of the Psalter (Bohair and Sahid). Coptic is the language of pre-Islamic Egyptian Christians and those who remained faithful to Christianity after the Islamic conquest of Egypt. In addition, it is present in the manuscripts of the pre-Jeronimo Latin psalter (ALIGNO "from the tree"). Although the blessed Jerome, who retranslated the Psalter into Latin from Hebrew, removed the ALIGNO insert from the 95th Psalm, it was copied in Latin manuscripts for quite a long time and penetrated into Latin hymnography. Many Latin (but not Greek) authors refer to the psalm we are interested in with the insert ALIGNO (Tertullian, Lactantius, Arnobius, Augustine, Cassiodorus, Pope Leo, Gregory of Tours, etc.).

What does it mean? We have a huge Christian ecumene, its core is the Greek-speaking world of the Mediterranean. At one end of this ecumene is Egypt with the Copts, at the other end is the Western Church, Latin speaking. The Coptic and Latin areas do not directly touch each other, only through the Greek-speaking area. It is reasonable to assume that it was not the Latin scribes who borrowed the insert from the Copts and not the Copts from the Latins, but independently of each other, both from the Greeks. “Dialogue with Trypho the Jew”, the epistle of Barnabas, the evidence of the Latin and Coptic traditions indicate that in the early Greek Church the insertion “from the tree” existed, penetrated from the Greek area into the Latin and Coptic. But very early (already in the 3rd century) it was rejected by the Greek Church, purged from the manuscripts. And on the "periphery" of the then Christian world - in the West and in Egypt - remained.

I said that this insertion is unknown in Greek manuscripts, but in fact there are three exceptions. They are worth stopping by. In all three cases, one can speak of the undoubted influence of either the Latin or the Coptic manuscript tradition on these lists.

One manuscript is the Basel Codex, a bilingual uncial codex of the Psalter, from the ninth century. This is a Greek-Latin interlinear, where there is a line in Greek, a line in Latin. In the Latin text of the 95th psalm there is an insert ALIGNO "from the tree". In Greek, the corresponding interpolation is given in the barbaric form ΑΠΟ ΤΩ ΞΥΛΩ. According to the norm of the Greek language, there should be a genitive case here, but there is a dative case. Obviously, the scribe, rewriting the Latin Psalter and - through the line - Greek, saw that the Greek lacked those words that were in his native, Latin Psalter, and inserted them back there, translating into Greek from Latin. The Latin dative-ablative is rendered, without much thought, by the Greek dative.

The second manuscript is the Psalter of Verona, a sixth-century bilingual uncial codex with Greek on one side and Latin on the other. Moreover, Greek is given in Latin letters (this reminds me of our priests who on Easter read in Hebrew and Greek the Gospel of John, written in Russian letters. In this manuscript, the Latin part contains the insert ALIGNO, and the Greek part contains the insert APO XYLU (without The absence of the article suggests that in this case, too, the insertion in the Greek part was translated from Latin.

The third manuscript is a bilingual Coptic-Greek Psalter from the British Museum. This is a minuscule manuscript of the 12th century, only nine pages - not the complete Psalter, but a selection of individual lines from the Psalter, obviously for the liturgical use of the Copts. First, the initial words of the corresponding line in Coptic are given, and sometimes this Coptic quotation breaks off in the middle of a word, then the Greek line is given in barbaric orthography, sometimes with Coptic letters instead of Greek. The interpolation we are interested in is given in the grammatically correct form ἀπὸ τοῦ ξύλου (as in Justin), but, obviously, it was preserved in this rather late manuscript precisely thanks to the support of the Sahid translation.

Thus, wherever the insert "from the cross" is preserved in the Greek manuscripts of the Psalter, this is a reverse translation into Greek from Latin or Coptic.

What is the origin of this insert? Most researchers believe that this insertion occurred already in the Christian tradition, and we are talking about the Cross. The naming of the Cross as a “tree” is found in Christian literature starting from Acts, for example. Acts. 5:30: "The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom you put to death by hanging on a tree." Since Ps 95:10 "The Lord reigned" was perceived in the early Church as speaking of the Resurrection of Christ, passages such as Acts 5:30 might well suggest the insertion of ἀπὸ τοῦ ξύλου into Psalm 95:10 (for example, in its liturgical use). Interestingly, neither in Greek, nor in Latin, nor in other Christian traditions do we find such insertions in Ps 92:1, or 96:1, or 98:1, where the words “The Lord reigned” (ὁ κύριος ἐβασίλευσεν ). Perhaps their liturgical use was different from the liturgical use of Psalm 95.

We see an important parallel in the so-called "Epistle of Barnabas" (mid 2nd century AD, approximately the same time as Justin's "Dialogue ..."). In chapter 8 of the "Message ..." it is explained why, when sprinkling the people for ritual cleansing with the ashes of a red cow, the Old Testament prescribes attaching crimson wool to a piece of cedar: " What do you think the commandment to Israel was a type of, that men who have serious sins would bring a cow and, after slaughtering it, burn it, and the youths would take the ashes, put them in vessels, attach scarlet wool to a piece of wood (here again the type of the Cross! ) - and scarlet wool, and hyssop - and sprinkled the people, one by one, so that people would be cleansed of sins? .. And the wool on the tree: this means that the kingdom of Jesus – on the tree...»

The author of the Epistle retells Numbers 19 quite freely - apparently, he was also familiar with the book of Numbers from third hands. The words " …the kingdom of Jesus is on the tree…” are very close to Ps 95:10 in the version of Justin. Perhaps the author of the "Epistle of Barnabas" was also familiar with this version.

Interestingly, when Justin forgets about the controversy with the Jews, he quotes the actual text of the Septuagint without any additions. For example, having reproached the Jews for having let out the words “from the tree” from Ps 95, Justin himself, a few paragraphs later, quotes this psalm in full, but at the same time without the very addition, for the absence of which he reproaches his Jewish interlocutors!

Apparently, the situation with the existence of the Greek versions of the Old Testament at that time, in the 2nd century AD, was something like this. In the world of Greek-speaking Judaism, since the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, a text has been created and transmitted that we call the Septuagint. Starting from the 1st century BC. Jewish revisions appear: the text of the Septuagint is corrected so that the translation, firstly, is less free, more literal, and secondly, so that it is closer to the proto-Masoretic text.

Among the early Christians, the Old Testament does not exist in the form of some complete lists from beginning to end, but, as a rule, in the form of testimonia. When Justin denounces the Jews for manipulating the text of the Old Testament, he compares "our" testimonia and "your" scrolls. And when he abstracts from these denunciations, he uses Jewish full scrolls, because at that moment there were few full Christian scrolls, Christians were content with testimonia collections.

It is remarkable that when scientists began to restore exactly which text of the minor prophets Justin uses, it turned out that he does not use the text of the Septuagint, but just the very text of the Jewish revision of the turn of the era, which was intended to replace the Septuagint! The existence of different versions of the Greek Bible in the context of all this Judeo-Christian controversy is an extremely interesting thing.

Fifth accusation. Let us return again to the dialogue with Tryphon the Jew. Toward the end of the dialogue (ch. 120), Justin rebukes the Jews once more: your teachers ... destroyed ... the place concerning the death of Isaiah, whom you sawed with a wooden saw ... " This place is not in the canon of the Old Testament that we have accepted, but there is, however, an apocrypha about the martyrdom of Isaiah, and, apparently, Justin is talking about this apocrypha, considering it to be part of Scripture.

After listening to Justin's invectives, Tryphon replies: “God knows whether our leaders have destroyed anything from the Scriptures; And I think it's incredible."

We must admit that Trypho was right in this case: of the five passages that, according to Justin, were omitted from Scripture by the Jews, one is erroneously mentioned (it is present in the Masoretic text and certainly should have been also in all hebraizing revisions of the Septuagint), one belongs to the Apocrypha, three are absent from the main manuscript tradition of the Septuagint and, apparently, are drawn from texts of the testimonia genre.

Even Yüngerov, a rather conservative researcher and inclined to give preference to the Septuagint over the Masoretic text, wrote about the accusations of Jewish scribes of deliberately corrupting the Scriptures: now that if ... due to natural human weakness, unintentional corruption in the Hebrew text could be allowed, then it should not be great ... "

Professor Gorsky-Platonov speaks even sharper: “The idea of ​​intentional or semi-intentional spoiling of the Jewish text should be thrown away, like an old weapon, now completely unusable. And damage not intentional, at least not in the least caused by the struggle against Christians, really exists even now in the Hebrew text; there are places in it that can and even should be corrected according to the manual of the Greek translation.

This is a sober, philologically balanced position.

3

I believe that if it were not for the catastrophe that befell Russia in general and the Russian Church in particular at the beginning of the 20th century, if we continued to develop biblical studies, focusing on philology, and not on ideology, then the phrases I quoted from Gorsky-Platonov and Jungerov , would long ago have been a commonplace, an expression of the accepted and established attitude of our Church towards the Old Testament texts. But at first we had a pogrom of everything, and then - when this pogrom of everything was over - the restoration of our theology proceeded under the slogan that "the closer to antiquity, the better." Here is such a funny situation: a century and a half after the words of Russian biblical philologists of the late 19th - early 20th centuries I quoted, I again have to begin my lecture on the relationship between the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Old Testament with an analysis of whether the Jewish scribes forged or not forged the Old Testament text. During the thirty-five years that I have been in our Church, I have met and continue to meet with allegations that the Jews have corrupted the text of the Old Testament - at every turn.

In fact, the history of the Bible was much more complicated than pseudo-scientific myths.

4

Modern printed editions of the Hebrew Bible are based on medieval Hebrew manuscripts, which, it should be noted, are amazingly unified. Medieval Jewish scholars, known as the Masoretes, developed special techniques to prevent accidental misprinting when creating a new manuscript, so the differences between manuscripts are negligible; if you do not pay attention to the vowels, then the discrepancies are literally single. This is a unique case for medieval manuscript practice; suffice it to say that the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament show several thousand discrepancies; the same variability is observed in the handwritten transmission of classical authors (only manuscripts of classical authors have come down to us incomparably less than biblical manuscripts). Some past Hebraists have taken the striking unity of the Masoretic manuscript tradition as proof of its divine inspiration.

However, in the middle of the 20th century, Qumran manuscripts were discovered and published, much earlier (2nd century BC - 1st century AD) than all the hitherto known Jewish copies of the Bible. The Qumran lists, which diverge from the Masoretic text in a number of places, as well as from each other, show that at the very beginning of the Jewish manuscript tradition, before the Masoretic authorities imposed tight control over the correspondence of biblical books, the Hebrew text was subjected to corrections and distortions as often as others. handwritten texts of antiquity and the Middle Ages, whether they are Greek manuscripts of the New Testament or ancient Russian chronicles.

As for the Greek Bible, it is constantly edited, checked against the Hebrew text, influenced by later translations of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek (translations of Akila, Symmachus, Theodotion, which appear at the beginning of our era). Therefore, the discrepancies between different manuscripts of the Septuagint are very large. When they talk about the Septuagint, what do they mean? A protograph of the Hellenistic era that textual scholars seek to restore? Modern editions of the Greek Orthodox Church? Byzantine Lectionaries? It is desirable whenever you say "Septuagint" or "Greek Bible" to specify which manuscript (family of manuscripts) or which edition is meant. Depending on which Greek text we call the "Septuagint", the degree of closeness of the "Septuagint" to the Hebrew text will change.

Thus, the Masoretic text is in no way identical with the protographs (original text) of the Hebrew Bible. And the Greek manuscripts that have come down to us are by no means identical with the ancient Alexandrian translation.

Some places of the Hebrew text already in ancient times (before the formation of the Masoretic tradition, before the translation of the Bible into Greek, before the Qumran scrolls) were distorted during copying so much that they cannot be understood. Unfortunately, a 100% convincing reconstruction of the protograph of such places based on the material we have is impossible. Textologists can approach the protographer, but they cannot reach him.

Most people are familiar with the Old Testament through translations. So, translators know - and readers usually do not realize - that many texts of the Old Testament the translator has to translate simply following guesses - either his own or that interpreter, on which the translator is guided. For two decades I led the translation of the Old Testament into Russian, today I was even asked to sign the book in which this translation was published. It often seemed to me in the process of our work on the translation of the Old Testament that in some places it would make sense not to translate the text, but simply to put brackets, and inside the brackets an ellipsis - and make a note: this place is so corrupted in all versions that have come down to us that it is reliable it is impossible to restore the original reading. This is what the Assyriologists do, for example, when they translate beaten cuneiform tablets. But the leadership of the Bible Society did not support such an idea. Although there are translations in the West, when creating which the translators did just that, when they came across places that were difficult to restore: they put ellipses in brackets.

In some places it can be assumed that the Hebrew original from which the Greek Bible was translated was closer to the protograph than the Masoretic text. More often, however, it is more plausible that the Masoretic text is closer to the protograph than the original Septuagint.

Sometimes the voices of scientists are divided equally on the question of which reading comes first. Thus, in the Hebrew text of the book of Genesis (4:8) we read: “Cain said to Abel his brother. And while they were in the field, Cain attacked Abel his brother and killed him.” What Cain said to Abel is not clear from the Hebrew Bible. The Septuagint "corrects the matter." The Greek text reads: “Cain said to his brother Abel, Let us go into the field. And while they were in the field, Cain attacked Abel his brother and killed him.”

One of the largest scholars of the Septuagint, Domenic Bartelmy, believes that the text of the Hebrew Bible should be considered here as the original, and the text of the Septuagint as “targumism”. The opposite opinion was expressed by the now largest specialist in the textual criticism of the Old Testament, Emmanuel Tov. According to Tov, the text of the Septuagint here retains the early reading, while the Masoretic text is defective. This dispute is notable because Dominic Barthelemy, who advocates the priority of the Hebrew text, was a Catholic monk, and Emmanuel Tov, who advocates the priority of the Septuagint, is a Jew and a professor at the University of Jerusalem.

The ratio is different for different books. Let's say, for Genesis, the case where the reading of the Seputagint is different from the Jewish one and at the same time may turn out to be older than the Hebrew one, are isolated. And in the first and second books of the Kings (according to the Jewish account - the first and second books of Samuel), the Hebrew text is often so vague (apparently, the manuscript taken by the Masoretes as a model was not very successful here, that the Septuagint really allows us to explain many corrupted places.

One myth, it must be said, arose in connection with the Qumran finds. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hebrew texts have been found reflecting such readings that were previously considered a characteristic of the Septuagint; for biblical textual criticism it became a sensation. The sensation migrated from scientific literature to popular books and discussions, where they began to claim that "the Qumran manuscripts proved the superiority of the Septuagint over the Masoretic text." This often happens when any information gleaned from a scholarly publication descends to the level of non-fiction literature, and from there to the level of mere popular literature without the prefix "scientific". A myth arose that wherever or almost wherever the Septuagint differs from the Masoretic text, it goes back to the protographer. This is not true. In most cases where there are discrepancies between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text, we must admit that the Masoretic text is closer to the protographer.

According to the calculations of Prof. Emmanuil Tov, today's leading specialist in the field of textual criticism of the Old Testament, about 20-25% of the biblical scrolls from Qumran show peculiar spelling features that make them related to the sectarian literature from Qumran, they are characterized by frequent errors, and frequent attempts to correct the text, but, according to Tov, scribes could rely on proto-Masoretic manuscripts; approximately 40-60% of the Qumran biblical scrolls are of the proto-Masoretic type, about 5% are of the proto-Samaritan type, about 5% are close to the Hebrew prototype of the Septuagint, the rest cannot be classified at all.

Yes, from the point of view of a 19th century scholar, the Qumran texts are a real sensation: here they are, the original Jewish texts that we see in the Septuagint. But still, as the statistics of Prof. Tova, only 5% of the manuscripts, and the most common in Judaism even before the turn of the era was the proto-Masoretic text.

Qumran is not the only place in the Judean Desert where ancient Jewish scrolls have been found. There are two more places, but the Hebrew texts found there are slightly later than those of Qumran. Firstly, this is Masada - the last stronghold of the Jewish rebels in their struggle against Rome. Masada fell in 73 AD, fragments of Old Testament texts were found there, they all belong to the proto-Masoretic type. Secondly, fragments of manuscripts from wadi Murabaat, which were hidden during the Bar Kokhba uprising in 132-135. AD All of them also belong to the proto-Masoretic type. If we compare the role of the Masoretic text in Qumran, Masada and Wadi Murabaat, we see how before our eyes the Masoretic type begins to supplant other types of Hebrew manuscripts.

The ratio of different types of Old Testament text can be represented as a tree. At the top of the tree will be a Hebrew protograph. We can draw several arrows from it: the Qumran texts, the proto-Samaritan text, the proto-Masoretic text, the Hebrew protographers of the Septuagint. It should not be thought that there was one manuscript from which the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek was carried out. There were a number of manuscripts, many different translators. Even within the Pentateuch we see different translation principles. The text of the Septuagint is edited, reviews of the Septuagint appear. There is a variety of Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament of the Byzantine tradition. And also the Latin Bible, the Slavic Bible.

In our church, it is customary to put an equal sign between the Slavic Bible and the Septuagint. Indeed, the Slavic Bible basically goes back to the Greek. But at the same time, the Latin Bible also had a tremendous influence on the formation of the Slavic Bible: we constantly meet in the Slavic Bible with some readings that are not characteristic of the Greek tradition, but of the Latin one ...

But no matter how we supplement and complicate our tree, no tree can reflect the complexity of the picture. Why? Yes, because when drawing a tree, we proceed from the fact that each book had a certain Hebrew protograph - one and only one. Meanwhile, as the latest textual studies show, the books of the Old Testament have gone through a complex history of editing, combining different traditions, different traditions into a single whole. It seems that in the circle of the disciples of the prophet Jeremiah there were two editions of the prophecies of Jeremiah: a short one (it formed the basis of the Septuagint) and a complete one (the Masoretic text). If this hypothesis is correct, then the question of which text is more authentic: the Masoretic or the Septuagint - loses its meaning. Before us are two equal and more or less simultaneous versions of the book of Jeremiah. Both have the right to exist!

5

Ideologization is always simple, but science is always complex.

Thank you for your attention.

Elko Hooglander

What makes the Bible different from other books?

This is the oldest book in the world, which, despite its venerable age, still remains one of the most relevant (more than 560 million copies are sold annually).

The Bible has repelled many attacks: by Roman emperors who ordered it to be destroyed by fire; the Roman Catholic Church, which kept the Bible forbidden to the common people; modern critical theology, which tries to deprive it of all rights, etc.

The miracle of the Bible is that it continues to live. It is also the most translated book in the world. It has been partially or completely translated into 2261 languages ​​of the world. And most importantly, that millions of Bibles, and its translations, originated from one original of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles.

What is special about the Bible?

The Bible is indeed an exceptional book. What is its uniqueness? First, it is the only Book inspired by God. And this means that the people who wrote it had exactly the same in mind and wanted the same thing as God Himself. Their thoughts were guided by the Holy Spirit, and in the Bible they conveyed everything that God wanted to tell us humans. Therefore, we can safely say that the Holy Scripture is a reliable source, and the words written in the Book are trustworthy.

And we will also make sure that the Bible is unique in origin, content and range of its action.

Book of the Jews

The Bible cannot be imagined without the Jewish people, and the Jewish people without the Bible. Because of this, Israel is often referred to as the "People of the Book". The second part of the thesis causes painful disputes and disagreements. For it is confirmed only in relation to the first part of the Bible: the Jews cannot be imagined without the Tanakh (Old Testament). Unfortunately, many representatives of this people do not want to hear anything about its second part, the New Testament. They in no way accept the fact that this part is also Jewish.

The Bible is unique in nature

The word "Bible" comes from the Greek "bible", which means "books". From this we understand that it was compiled from separate books. For 1500 years it was written by more than 40 people. This fact is unique in itself! Most often, the authorship of a book belongs to one or more people. So, a group of compilers of an encyclopedia can include 40 people, but all of them must belong to the same era, or at least several generations, but not to a 1500-year period! .. And what a consistency of thought! In fact, this is unique to the Bible!

Each writer of the Bible had a different background, social background, knowledge, and experience. So, Moses was a shepherd, in the past - a pupil at the court of the pharaoh; Jeremiah - the son of a priest, from a young age called a prophet; Amos raised sheep; Peter was a fisherman; Paul is a Pharisee; Matthew is a publican. All of them were united by the work of writing the Bible, as well as their direct relationship to the offspring of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that is, to the Jewish people.

And yet, they have something more in common. Despite the fact that they often did not know each other, lived at different times (sometimes with an interval of centuries), they all wrote with the same goal - to tell the world that God has a plan of salvation through the coming of the Savior, Yeshua the Messiah. This difficult task is directly related to the Jewish people, for God made a covenant with Abraham. He chose for Himself His special people as an inheritance, to whom He gave promises for the benefit of all peoples. Not because the Jewish people were the most numerous or powerful, but because of His love for them. Moses said: “... For you are a holy people to the Lord your God: the Lord your God has chosen you to be his own people out of all the peoples that are on the earth. Not because you were more numerous than all peoples, the Lord accepted you and chose you - for you are less numerous than all peoples - but because the Lord loves you, and in order to keep the oath by which He swore to your fathers, the Lord brought you out with a strong hand and freed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt.” (Deut. 7:6-8).

But... The most important thing was that the Messiah, the Salvation of all peoples, was to come from Israel.

The emergence of the first five books

Regarding the origin of the first five books of the Bible, we turn to Moses.

Under the guidance of God, he recorded history from the creation of the world to the time of Israel's wandering in the wilderness (that is, from about 4000 to 1400 BC). Most of the stories from the beginning of the creation of the world, most likely, were passed on by word of mouth (in the time of Noah, people lived for 900 years, so the likelihood of distortion of oral traditions was minimal). After the flood, the average age of people decreased, although Shem (Sim) lived to the days of Jacob and Esau, and remained their contemporary for another 50 years. Clay tablets were already known in the time of Abraham. And, perhaps, it was on them that the patriarchs wrote down their stories and passed them on to their children. Moses probably used both oral and written communication.

Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers set out many laws and regulations for the Jewish people, which formed the basis of its formation as a nation. In the writing of the first five books of the Bible, one can see God's method of establishing and establishing His covenant and connection with the Jewish people. The first five books of the Bible are called "Torah", which means "Teaching".

Samuel was born after Joshua and the time of the Judges (1100 years before Christ). At that time, there were prophetic schools in Israel, which, as is commonly believed, were partly related to the writing of the Bible. The authorship of such books as Judges and Ruth is attributed to Samuel or one of the prophets of this school. The First Book of Kings tells of his death. Apparently, the period after his death was described by other prophets. The details of this fact are reflected further in the Bible, in 1 Chronicles 29:29, where it is written: “The works of King David, the first and the last, are recorded in the records of Samuel the seer and in the records of Nathan the prophet and in the records of Gad the seer.”

The first and second books of the Kings (980-586 BC) were written by different prophets, as the corresponding texts of the books of Chronicles testify.

During the time of the Kings in the kingdom of the two tribes and the kingdom of the ten tribes, the prophets spoke and wrote down prophecies under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Think of Isaiah, Hosea, and Habakkuk, for example. The same happened during the Babylonian captivity and after it (Ezekiel and Zechariah).

After the Babylonian captivity, the priest Ezra was the first to establish the canon of the Old Testament. In addition to being the author of his own book, he may also have edited Chronicles.

Book order of the Hebrew Bible
The arrangement of the books of the Jewish Tanakh differs from the generally accepted order of the Old Testament. The Tanakh is divided into three parts: the Torah, the Prophets and the Scriptures. The most important book of Scripture is the Book of Psalms. The Lord Jesus Himself seems to follow this sequence in Luke 24:44: "... that everything that is written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled."

According to the Jewish order, the books from Joshua and inclusive of Kings are referred to as (early) prophets. The later prophets are from Isaiah to Malachi, with the exception of the book of Daniel, which is part of the Scriptures. And the last book of the Torah is Chronicles. When the Lord speaks of the righteous blood shed on the earth “from the blood of the righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah” (Matthew 23:35), he means the period from Abel to the end of the Tanakh.

After the prophecy of Malachi, there came a time of God's silence, which lasted 400 years until the Word became flesh. He came to live among His people, but they did not receive Him (John 1:11). Those who accepted Him and recognized Him as the Messiah who was to come, became among those who would soon write the New Testament or the New Covenant. Thus was born the second part of God's Word, after which Salvation will be sent to the Gentiles.

The New Testament originated between about 45 and 95 AD. AD and consists of 27 books or letters. Most of them were written not in Israel, but in near Mediterranean countries, although all the authors are Jews, disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul wrote 14 letters (including Hebrews) from various places. From Rome, where he was twice in prison, 6 letters were written. There are his messages from Corinth, Ephesus and Macedonia.

Peter, Luke and Mark wrote from Rome, John from Ephesus, and the book of Revelation from the island of Patmos. Peter writes his first epistle from Babylon (1 Pet. 5:13). The remarkable thing is that all these letters and books, written by Jews from different places, then entered the Bible, which is a unity, where everything agrees with each other, complements each other and everything testifies to Yeshua, the incarnate Word.

Biblical traditions

This is the work of the “People of the Book,” the Jewish people, to whom the world owes much. Thanks to their efforts and efforts, we have an exact copy of the scriptures. An example of the preservation of biblical tradition is the Psalm of David. He wrote it down on a separate papyrus or parchment, and so that, say, the singers of the temple could use it, the psalm was carefully copied. Since David created more than one psalm, they were all written on one scroll. This is how the scroll (part) of the Psalms appeared. Due to wear and tear, the scrolls were rewritten several times. In the time of Ezra, all biblical scrolls (from the Torah, the Prophets, and the Scriptures) were ordered and kept in the temple and synagogue. Since then it has become a tradition.

After the destruction of Jerusalem (70 AD) and the revolt of Bar Kokhba (135 AD), the Jewish people lived in a "diaspora", in dispersion. However, the traditions of the Tanakh were invariably passed down from generation to generation.

During the early Middle Ages, Jewish keepers of the text, who copied the Bible with particular care, were called "Masoretes". On the margins of the text was placed the number of letters, expressions, a letter in the middle of each verse, and the middle of each book was indicated. All this was recalculated. Because of this, we know that Aleph (the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet) occurs 42,337 times in the Old Testament, and Beth (the second letter) 38,218 times.

Before and during the copying of the Bible, the Soferim (scribes) observed certain rituals. Before starting work, the scribe had to wash himself and put on traditional clothes. He could not write a single word or letter from memory. The distance between two letters should not exceed the thickness of a human hair, and between two words - the size of one letter. This matter was so important that even the king could not interrupt it.

If a mistake was made, they did not have the right to correct it, and the damaged part of the scroll was buried in the ground. As a result of this careful copying, only a few errors were found in the Old Testament. This became known for certain when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947. These are the scrolls that were hidden during the Jewish uprising (70 years after the death of Christ) in the Qumran cave (12 km from Jericho). Even today, comparisons are made between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the most ancient biblical texts, and they hardly find differences in them. This means that almost no mistakes were made for 10 centuries.

Bible Distribution

The fact that Biblical traditions are carefully observed does not mean that the Bible has already filled the whole world. If this question depended on Jewish scholars, this would never have happened. The Bible was rewritten carefully for future descendants from the same people. The historical reference that the Jews are God's chosen people lives deep within them. The word of God has reached various corners of the earth through the missionary command of the Lord: “Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19).

This mission was taken over by the disciples, and later by the apostle Paul. He formulated his strategy in the words of the Epistle to the Romans: "First, the Jews, then the Greeks." Moreover, he preached the gospel where no one before him spoke about Christ. (Rom. 15:20).

The work of Paul and the apostles was inherited by others. They went through the whole Roman Empire, but even after its fall, the gospel work continued. Along with the oral distribution of the Good News, the written one also began. The oral sermon needed translation because most of the Bible is written in Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament). A Greek translation of the Old Testament already existed at that time. In the 2nd st. d.c.e. Jewish scholars in the "diaspora" completed the Septuagint. The first translation of the entire Bible was made into Latin, the language of the Romans. It was carried out by Jerome and is called the Vulgate. For many centuries it was used by the Roman Catholic Church, considering the use of other translations inappropriate. This continued until the 14th century, when the Englishman John Wycliffe translated the Bible into a language other than Latin. Then there was Erasmus, who also embodied the Latin translation of the Bible, and Luther, who translated the Bible into German. Since the Reformed times, the Bible has been translated into all languages, wherever its Word has reached.

The Hebrew Scripture Society (SDHS), working closely with Israel and the Bible Society, has a unique place among many Bible Societies. It publishes Bibles in two languages, making them available to the Jewish people. On one page of this edition there is a text in Hebrew, on the other - a text in the language of the country where the Bible is distributed.

Already published Bibles in the following languages:

Tanakhi in: Hebrew - English, - Russian, - French and - Hungarian;

New Testaments in: Hebrew - Arabic - Dutch - English - French - German - Hungarian - Portuguese - Romanian - Russian - Spanish and Yiddish.

BIBLE, a book containing the sacred writings of the Jewish and Christian religions. The Hebrew Bible, a collection of Hebrew sacred texts, is also included in the Christian Bible, forming its first part - the Old Testament. Both Christians and Jews consider it to be a record of an agreement (covenant) concluded by God with man and revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai. Christians believe that Jesus Christ announced a new covenant, which is the fulfillment of the Covenant given in Revelation to Moses, but at the same time replaces it. Therefore, the books that tell about the activities of Jesus and his disciples are called the New Testament. The New Testament is the second part of the Christian Bible.

Bible text. Most of the Old Testament books are written in Hebrew (Biblical Hebrew), but there are also passages in Aramaic, which Jews spoke after the 4th century. BC. Traditionally, the authorship of the Old Testament books is attributed to several leaders who became famous in Jewish ...

The word "Tanakh" is an acronym (initial letters) of the names of three sections of the Jewish Holy Scripture:

Torah, Hebrew….

Offspring of Shem, sons of Eber, habiru
Sinai tribal union

Jews (Jews) in the Bible is called a religious-ethnic group of people descended from Abraham and connected with God by a number of unions (covenants). The initial moment of the formation of the Jewish people can be considered the conclusion of the covenant between God and Abraham ca. 17th century BC Later, the descendants of Abraham (as well as a number of other Semitic tribal groups) ended up in Egyptian slavery. In Egypt, these Semitic slaves received the common name "khaperu" ("khabiru") - the ethnonym "Jews" probably goes back to this word; The Bible also produces the name "Jews, the sons of Eber" from one of the ancestors of Abraham, Eber. One way or another, these Semitic tribes (in any case, most of them) preserved the memory of the faith of Abraham, the ancient Semitic monotheism. During the exodus from Egypt (c. 13th century BC), in the Sinai desert, the Semitic tribes living there joined the refugees. This heterogeneous tribal union became the ethnic basis for the formation of the Jewish ...

Hebrew Bible. The modern Hebrew Bible basically follows the canon adopted in Jamnia. In Hebrew, it is called Kitwe Kodesh ("Holy Scriptures") or Tanakh (an abbreviation of Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim). The Hebrew text is still considered official and is used in worship. Its standard text is based on the edition of the Jewish scholar of the 10th century. Moshe ben Asher, who corrected numerous scribal errors accumulated over the centuries. A widely circulated edition contains, in addition to the Hebrew original, its translation into Aramaic, as well as a commentary by Rashi, the great scholar of the 11th century.

The entire Bible is revered by the Jews as sacred, but the Torah is especially revered. Every synagogue has handwritten Torah scrolls. Thanks to the rule that no scroll of the Torah can be destroyed, many of its ancient manuscripts have been preserved, which otherwise might have been lost.

In the first centuries of our era, a code of oral law was formed in Judaism ...

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BIBLE - Jewish Holy Scripture, a collection of ancient texts canonized in Judaism, as well as the name of the books that make up the Holy Scriptures of Christianity. It consists of two parts: the Old Testament and the New Testament. The expression "Old Testament" is of Christian origin. The Apostle Paul was the first to give this name to the sacred books read and interpreted in the synagogue. The rabbis spoke simply of "Scripture" or "books" ("sefer"). As for the word "Bible", it was a tracing paper from the Greek ta biblia, i.e. "books", and eventually came to mean "Holy Scripture". The latter term (“kitvey ha-kodesh” - “Holy Scripture”) appeared in the Mishnaic era, which emphasized the difference between the Written Law recorded in the Bible and the Oral Law, which in this era was codified in the text of the Mishnah. Subsequently, in the Jewish environment, the acronym Tanakh, made up of the first letters of the names of three sections of the Bible: Torah, Neviim and Ketuvim, became commonly used. The Bible is a summary...

Bible (gr.

The Bible is of great importance to the Jewish people. In addition to being considered a sacred book, it also traces the historical events of Israel, taking place over almost two thousand years, from the birth of the Jews as a nation, starting from the forefather Abraham, and ending with the conquest of Judea by Alexander the Great. When it comes to the Jewish Bible, it usually refers to the Tanakh, which is the liturgical book of the Jews. The word "Tanakh" is an abbreviation made up of three words: Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim. The Tanakh is completely identical to the Christian Old Testament of the Bible, and differs only in the sequence of books included in it. Of particular importance for the Jews is the Torah - the Pentateuch of Moses, which contains all the laws by which the Jews are still trying to live. Neviim is the name of the books of the prophets, and Ketuvim is the writings of the saints. The Hebrew Bible had a great influence on the formation of Christianity and Islam and on the birth of the written heritage of these two religions.

BIBLE. The Jewish Holy Scripture does not have a single name that would be common to the entire Jewish people and used in all periods of its history. The earliest and most common term is הַסְּפָרִים , x a-sfarim(`books`). The Jews of the Hellenistic world used the same name in Greek - τα βιβλια - the Bible, and it entered mainly through its Latin form into European languages.

Term סִפְרֵי הַקֹּדֶשׁ sifrey x ha-kodesh(`holy books`), although found only in medieval Jewish literature, seems to have been occasionally used by Jews already in the pre-Christian period. However, this name is rare, since in rabbinic literature the word sefer(`book`) was used, with few exceptions, only to designate biblical books, which made it superfluous to add any definitions to it.

The word Torah, being the generally accepted name for the first section of the Bible, has a broader meaning of Divine revelation, law, and Jewish religious teaching in general; it is sometimes used in rabbinic literature to refer to the Bible as a whole.

The Old Testament is the purely Christian name for the Bible. It is used to terminologically separate the Hebrew Bible from the Christian New Testament.

The term "canon" as applied to the Bible clearly indicates the closed, unchangeable nature of the final edition of Holy Scripture, considered as the result of Divine revelation. For the first time the Greek word "canon" in relation to the sacred books was used by the first Christian theologians, the so-called church fathers in the 4th century. n. e. There is no exact equivalent in Jewish sources for this term, but the concept of "canon" in relation to the Bible is clearly Jewish. The Jews became the “People of the Book”, and the Bible became the key to its life. The commandments of the Bible, teaching and worldview were imprinted in the thinking and in all the spiritual creativity of the Jewish people. The canonized Scripture was unconditionally accepted as the true testimony of the national past, the embodiment of the reality of hopes and dreams. Over time, the Bible has become the main source of knowledge of Hebrew and the standard of literary creativity. The Oral Law, based on the interpretation of the Bible, revealed the full depth and power of the truths hidden in the Bible, embodied and put into practice the wisdom of the law and the purity of morality. In the Bible, for the first time in history, the spiritual creativity of the people was canonized, and this turned out to be a revolutionary step in the history of religion. Canonization was consciously adopted by Christianity and Islam.

Of course, the books included in the Bible could by no means reflect the entire literary heritage of Israel. There is evidence in Scripture itself of an extensive, later lost, literature; for example, the “Book of Wars of the Lord” (Num. 21:14) and “The Book of the Righteous One” (“Sefer ha-yashar”; IbN. 10:13; II Sam. 1:18) mentioned in the Bible are undoubtedly very ancient. True, in a number of cases the same work may have been mentioned under different names, and the word sefer could only refer to a section of a book, not the book as a whole. There is reason to believe that there were numerous other works that the Bible does not mention. The very concept of creating a canon of Scripture involves a long process of selecting the works on which it is based. Holiness was a necessary condition for the canonization of a particular book, although not everything that was considered sacred and the fruit of Divine revelation was canonized. Some works have survived only because of their literary merit. A very important role was probably played by the schools of scribes and clergy, who, with their inherent conservatism, sought to transmit from generation to generation the basic texts studied. Then the very fact of canonization forced to honor the book included in the canon and contributed to the fact that reverence for the Holy Scriptures was perpetuated.