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AnonymousBible: Old Testament: English Standard Version
Nonfiction | Scripture | Adult | Published in 1611A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Human Authorship and Divine Inspiration
The authorship of the books of the Old Testament is a complicated question, such that authorship studies constitute a significant and much-disputed field in Old Testament scholarship. A few books can be confidently assigned to particular authors, but in most cases, authorial attribution is difficult because of the antiquity of the texts, their frequent lack of internal claims of authorship, and in some cases, their apparent structure as composite works. While some scholars offer support for traditional authorship claims, others argue that there were likely many other authors involved, in addition to redactors and compilers who brought the canon into its final form.
Many Old Testament books have authorship attributions assigned by long-held traditions. These include the practice of referring to the first five books (the Pentateuch) as “the law of Moses,” with the assumption that they are almost entirely the work of Moses himself. The internal evidence in many Old Testament texts is often not strong enough to decide the matter of authorship, so scholarly opinion on the topic ranges from defenses of traditional authorship to arguments for a much more complicated scenario involving multiple authors, redactors, and compilers. One example of the latter position is the influential JEDP hypothesis of the Pentateuch’s composition, which argues against Moses’s sole authorship and instead makes a case, based on differences in vocabulary and thematic content, that the first five books of the Bible represent the interwoven contributions of at least four main sets of writers, known as the Yahwist (represented by J), the Elohist (E), the Deuteronomist (D), and a Priestly (P) writer. While many such hypotheses have become influential, it is rare for any single position on authorship to reach a consensus of scholarly agreement in Old Testament studies.
Within the Christian tradition, the study of each text’s authorship is important in discerning historical and cultural contexts which can aid in the interpretation of the text, but of greater theological importance is the conviction that divine inspiration guided the Old Testament’s composition. Christian tradition does not hold that the texts of the Old Testament represent word-for-word dictations from God (except in the case of certain prophetic utterances), but rather that God has sovereignly guided the content and meaning of the text’s composition so as to embody his message for his people. The human authorship of the text is therefore acknowledged to be both real and important, evident in the widely varying styles and genres, and representing God’s intention for an authentic relationship with humanity rather than a brute application of divine prerogatives. The Old Testament books are counted as the works of their human authors, who wrote in the language and concepts of their own historical contexts, but did so in such a way that, under God’s guidance and inspiration, the content of those texts stands as God’s own message to his people.
The practical effects of the doctrine of divine inspiration on biblical interpretation fall across a broad range depending on the theology of each particular group of Christians. Some groups hold that divine inspiration means that the biblical texts are entirely without error, while others hold that God continues to use and speak through the content of the texts in a spiritual way, whether or not they might contain historical errors.
Literary Context: Translation, Tradition, and Transmission
The Old Testament is written almost entirely in Hebrew (with a few isolated passages in Aramaic), which distinguishes it from the New Testament, which was written in Greek. The Old Testament is also distinguished from the New Testament in theological chronology, as it represents a different covenant—the one established between God and Israel—from the new covenant established through the death and resurrection of Jesus. The terminology “testament” relates to this distinction, as it was used interchangeably with “covenant” in older English.
The Old Testament shares many features in common with other extant works of ancient “Near Eastern” (ANE) literature, including a shared heritage of literary themes, styles, and genres. Some works of ANE literature, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, relate accounts that appear to parallel the stories of Genesis in several important respects. Similarly, the styles and themes of biblical wisdom literature have much in common with the wisdom literature of contemporary civilizations. However, the Bible is unique among ANE literature in its scope and variety, as well as in the refinement of its genre-specific works—for example, biblical historiography and psalmody are remarkable for their time. The theology of the Old Testament texts also stands apart from its ANE context, offering a monotheistic worldview at odds with most of the surrounding cultures and offering a different scope of philosophical articulation. While parallels to particular genres or styles exist in ANE literature, there is no comparable corpus of texts that approaches the historical scope and theological consistency of the Old Testament when considered as a whole.
The Old Testament texts went through centuries of preservation and transmission by scribes, both Jewish and Christian, and in the latter tradition they were mostly used in Greek, Latin, and Syriac translations until the 16th century CE. With the advent of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, there was a wave of renewed interest in the study and translation of scripture from its original languages, which produced a series of vernacular Bible translations across Europe. One of the standard early English translations was the King James Version (KJV) of 1611, which continues to find widespread usage in the English-speaking world. Modern English translations are usually based on the most complete Hebrew text-tradition available (called the Masoretic Text), as informed by parallel texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint (a pre-Christian Greek version of the Hebrew Bible). While a centuries-long process of making copies based on earlier handwritten copies is likely to result in errors and corruptions, modern scholarly techniques offer a high level of confidence that current translations represent a faithful version of the original text. The ability to access and compare many different manuscripts from all periods of history allows scholars to reconstruct the original text with a high degree of accuracy.
The English Standard Version (ESV) is a modern translation from the KJV family of translations, and it seeks to retain much of the form and diction of the KJV while also making use of the full set of ancient text-traditions available to scholars. The ESV took the Revised Standard Version (RSV), a 20th-century version that emerged directly from the KJV tradition, and compared each of its terms with the best textual sources in the original languages. The ESV aims for an essentially literal style of translation, opting for a word-for-word correspondence with the original Hebrew and Aramaic terms whenever possible.
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