Canon to the right of them, canon to the left of them…

#53: “Canon to the right of them, canon to the left of them…” by Brendon Wahlberg
How many books are in the Old Testament? What are their names? What order are they in, and which one comes last? You would think these are easy questions. Just pick up a Bible and look up the answers in the table of contents. Not so fast. It would really depend on where you were standing when you picked up that Bible. Did you grab a Protestant Old Testament or a Catholic one? Or was it a Hebrew Bible (called a Tanakh) from a Synagogue? Take a look at each of these and you’ll find that all of them are different in some way. They include different books, group them differently, divide them differently, and arrange them in different orders. (I won’t even get into the many different Eastern Orthodox Christian Bibles.) Each official list and order of books is canonical for that religion. Let’s take a look at the names of the books in each different kind of Old Testament, and the order in which they appear in modern Bibles.
Hebrew Bible canon
Part 1: Torah - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Part 2: Prophets - Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Book of the 12 lesser Prophets (includes Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi). Part 3: Writings - Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra (includes Nehemiah), Chronicles. (24 books total)
Catholic Old Testament canon
Part 1: Pentateuch - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Part 2: Historical Books - Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Tobit, Judith, Esther, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees. Part 3: Wisdom Books - Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, Sirach. Part 4: Major Prophets - Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel. Part 5: Minor Prophets - Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. (46 books total)
Protestant Old Testament canon
Part 1: Pentateuch - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Part 2: Historical Books - Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. Part 3: Wisdom Books - Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs. Part 4: Major Prophets - Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel. Part 5: Minor Prophets - Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. (39 books total)
How did we get to the present day situation, where we have several different Old Testaments? In other words, why do these Bibles have different content and order? To understand this, you should probably not think of the Old Testament as a single book, with all of the smaller books, like Genesis and Jeremiah, collected between a front and back cover. Instead, picture the Bible the way it began, as a pile of loose scrolls. If you are familiar with the Dead Sea scrolls, then you know that among them were multiple copies of the books of the Old Testament. Each book was generally on its own scroll. Isaiah, for example, was on one large scroll. Some books were combined. For example, traditionally, the twelve minor prophets were collected together on one scroll. Sometimes, books were divided because they were too long for one scroll.
As long as the books of Holy Scripture were a pile of scrolls, it was possible to change their order around, or to add or remove one or two if people disagreed about them. Then, the codex was invented. A codex was a bit like our modern books, with sheets of parchment sown together into pages. The codex became popular during the early centuries of Christianity, and many early Christian collections of scripture were written on a codex instead of a scroll. For example, the four Gospels, or a set of Paul’s letters might be written as a codex. When you have a codex instead of scrolls, you can have a fixed collection of books in a particular order. So now you have to decide what those are going to be.
The first important translation of all of the Old Testament scrolls into Greek was called the Septuagint. Jews around the Greek and Roman world used this translation. In the Christian era, the Septuagint was collected in a large codex. But there wasn’t yet a standard order for the books inside it, and so several different orders were used. There was still an attempt to group the books in a way that made sense. The five books of Moses came first, followed by the poetical books, the historical books, and the prophetical books, but these last three categories were placed in various arrangements. Neither was there any kind of official list of books to include, so sometimes a copy of the Septuagint would include books like 1, 2, 3, or 4 Maccabees, the Psalms of Solomon, or the Epistle of Jeremiah, and sometimes it would not.
Meanwhile, the Jews were busy deciding on a canonical list of scriptures. There were some books that were popular among Jews which were ultimately rejected from their canon. The Jews partly made choices based on when books were written, and whether they were written originally in Hebrew. The later the date of writing, the more likely a book was to be rejected. Greek or Aramaic language books were likely to be dumped. The time of truly inspired writings and real prophecy was considered to be over by the time of those books. But contemporary Christians made different choices. Jewish books including Maccabees, Baruch, Tobit, Wisdom, Sirach, and Judith were kept by Christians instead. That is why they appear in the Catholic Old Testament list above.
But not all Christians have agreed on these books. They have been labeled “The Apocrypha” and “deutero-canonical” (secondary canon), but to Catholics, they are simply part of the Bible. When the Protestants split away from the Catholics, they decided that their Old Testament was going to be different. Protestants discarded the Apocrypha, returning to an Old Testament list which matched the list of Hebrew language books which the Jews used in their Tanakh. So, that explains the three different lists of books shown above. Jews and Protestants use the same pared-down list of books, while Catholics retain a larger collection of books dating far back to the early centuries of Christianity.
What about the order of the books as we have them today? Check the lists above again, and you’ll see one interesting difference. Both Catholic and Protestant Christians place the “prophets” last, while Jews place the “writings” last. Each arrangement has meaning for that particular faith. For Jews, the books are placed in order of importance to the community and holiness. The Torah comes first, for it is considered to be the word of God. God speaks through the prophets, so they come next, and finally there are some inspired, man-made writings that develop the ideas of the Torah and the prophets (although some of these writings, like the Song of Songs, were almost not included).
If you think of the Bible as a book that tells a story, every story has an ending. What is the last book of the Hebrew Bible? How does the story “end”? The final book is Chronicles, a retelling of the history of the Jewish people. At the end of that book, it tells of the end of the Babylonian exile, a high and hopeful moment that renewed God’s promise of the Holy Land. “In the first year of King Cyrus of Persia, in fulfillment of the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord stirred up the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia so that he sent a herald throughout all his kingdom and also declared in a written edict: ‘Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him! Let him go up.’” (2 Chronicles 36:22-23)
Alternatively, you have the Christian Old Testament. For Christians, the books are placed in an order that enables the story of Jesus to be told. The Books of Moses come first, for they tell of the fall of man and the giving of the Law. The Historical books reveal the story of the House of David. The Wisdom books begin to foreshadow Jesus, and the Prophets predict him. The ending of the Old Testament is not an ending at all, but merely a pause before the beginning of the New Testament, the continuation of the story.
What is the last book of the Christian Old Testament? How does the story say “to be continued”? The final book is Malachi, which is the last of the twelve minor prophets. At the end of Malachi, it says, “Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.” (Malachi 4:5-6) If you look at it a certain way, this passage makes a pretty good transition to the Gospels, because John the Baptist is said to be Elijah, metaphorically.
To each major faith, their Old Testament is THE Old Testament. But when you take a step back, and look at the big picture, there are many more similarities between these canons than differences. There is much more held in common than held apart. The same inspired writings shared by Jews and Christians, and between Christians of different branches, give all of us common ground to believe we are all God’s children.