George W. E. Nickelsburg, Th.D. Emeritus Professor of New Testament and Early Judaism; University of Iowa; Iowa City, Iowa; Tobit
Kathleen O’Connor, Ph.D. William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament; Columbia Theological Seminary; Decatur, Georgia; Lamentations
Leo G. Perdue, Ph.D. Professor of Hebrew Bible; Brite Divinity School; Texas Christian University; Fort Worth, Texas; Jeremiah
David L. Petersen, Ph.D. Professor of Old Testament; Candler School of Theology; Emory University; Atlanta, Georgia; Ezekiel
David K. Rensberger, Ph.D. Professor of New Testament; Interdenominational Theological Center; Atlanta, Georgia; John, 1, 2, 3 John
Kent Harold Richards, Ph.D. Professor of Old Testament, Executive Director; Society of Biblical Literature; Atlanta, Georgia; Ecclesiastes, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah
J. J. M. Roberts, Ph.D. William Henry Green Professor of Old Testament Literature Emeritus; Princeton Theological Seminary; Princeton, New Jersey; Isaiah
Joel W. Rosenberg Genesis, first edition
J. Paul Sampley, Ph.D. Professor of New Testament; Boston University; Boston, Massachusetts; Ephesians, Colossians
James A. Sanders, Ph.D. Emeritus Professor of Biblical Studies; Claremont School of Theology; Claremont, California; Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151
Michael E. Stone, Ph.D., D. Litt. Gail Levin De Nur Professor of Comparative Religion; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Jerusalem, Israel; 2 Esdras
Marvin A. Sweeney, Ph.D. Professor of Hebrew Bible; Claremont School of Theology; Claremont, California; Joel
David L. Tiede, Ph.D. Bernhard M. Christensen Professor in Religion; Augsburg College; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Luke
Thomas H. Tobin, Ph.D. Professor of Theology; Loyola University of Chicago; Chicago, Illinois; Wisdom of Solomon, 4 Maccabees
W. Sibley Towner, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Biblical Interpretation; Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education; Richmond, Virginia; Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi
Gene M. Tucker, Ph.D. Emeritus Professor of Old Testament; Candler School of Theology; Emory University; Atlanta, Georgia; Amos
Raymond C. Van Leeuwen, Ph.D. Professor of Biblical Studies; Eastern University; St. Davids, Pennsylvania; Ecclesiastes
Lawrence Wills, Th.D. Ethelbert Talbot Professor of Biblical Studies; Episcopal Divinity School; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Jews, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon
Robert R. Wilson, Ph.D. Hoober Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of Old Testament; Yale University Divinity School; New Haven, Connecticut; 1, 2 Kings, Jeremiah
Walter T. Wilson, Ph.D. Associate Professor of New Testament; Candler School of Theology; Emory University; Atlanta, Georgia; James
David Winston, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Hellenistic and Judaic Studies; Graduate Theological Union; Berkeley, California; Wisdom of Solomon
Benjamin G. Wright III, Ph.D. Professor of the History of Christianity; Lehigh University; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Sirach, 2 Esdras
Adela Yarbro Collins, Ph.D. Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation; Yale University Divinity School; New Haven, Connecticut; Mark
Jürgen Zangenberg, Ph.D. Professor, Faculty of Theological Studies; University of Leiden; Leiden, The Netherlands; Archaeology and the New Testament
John Leinenweber Research Associate; Yale University Divinity School; Editorial assistant, revised edition
Lindsay A. Lingo Publications Staff; Society of Biblical Literature; Editorial assistant, revised edition
Introduction to the HarperCollins Study Bible
WAYNE A. MEEKS
THE BIBLE IS THE MOST FAMILIAR BOOK in the English-speaking world; certainly it is the one most often published and most widely owned. Yet many a serious reader has found it one of the strangest of books. This paradox arises from factors in the book’s history as well as from dimensions of our own history that have shaped the expectations with which we begin to read.
Enabling the Reader to Read
The most elementary of the obstacles standing in the way of reading the Bible is that its component parts were originally written in languages most of us do not know. Reading must therefore begin with a translation. The New Revised Standard Version stands in a tradition, many centuries old, of translating the Bible so that ordinary people can understand it when it is read aloud in worship gatherings or when they study it for themselves. More immediately, the NRSV stands in a direct succession from the King James Version of 1611 (as Professor Metzger explains in the Translation Committee’s preface, To the Reader). The NRSV is one among a large number of recent translations of the whole or parts of the Bible that together give to the present generation of English readers an unprecedented variety of fresh renderings of the original languages. All these are informed by significant advances in historical, archaeological, and linguistic knowledge that have occurred in recent decades.
The NRSV is selected for this HarperCollins Study Bible for several reasons, of which two are most significant. First, the declared intention of the Translation Committee to produce a translation “as literal as possible” makes this version well adapted for study. For example, careful reading is enhanced when we can observe such things as the recurrence of certain key words; if these are rendered into our language with some consistency, the task is obviously easier. Second, the NRSV was designed to be as inclusive as possible, in two different senses. It includes the most complete range of biblical books representing the several differing canons of scripture (about which more will be said below) than any other English version. In addition, it avoids language that might inappropriately suggest limits of gender.
Yet even the most excellent translation from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts cannot by itself completely remove the strangeness that many modern readers sense when they encounter the Bible. It is, after all, an ancient book. Indeed, it is a collection—no, several collections—of books that were formed and written in cultures distant from our own not only in time and space but also in character. Indeed, what is required of us as readers is rather to enter, through these texts, into another world of meaning. Only when we have sensed the peculiarity and integrity of that other world can we build a bridge of understanding between it and our own. The introductions and notes accompanying the text in the HarperCollins Study Bible are designed to provide readers with information that will make it easier to use this excellent translation for the deeper kind of translation readers must make for themselves: the actual encounter with the multiple worlds of meaning that these texts can reveal.
With the aim of removing as many obstacles as possible between readers and the text, the notes in this volume provide several kinds of information. First, they point to characteristics of the language that are significant for meaning. These include the biblical writers’ choice of words, the formal patterns of speech, the styles and genres of ancient literature that appear in the texts, and the rhetorical strategies—familiar to ancient readers but foreign to us—adopted by the writers. Second, the notes contain facts about historical events alluded to in the texts or underlying their message. Many of these facts have come to light through modern archaeological discoveries and the analysis of ancient inscriptions and other material evidence. Comparisons and contrasts between the biblical writings and other writings from around the same time and from the same part of the world also help to place them in their historical context. Third, the notes call attention to echoes between different texts of scripture. Sometimes these are direct quotations or paraphrases of earlier texts by later ones. At other times, they represent parallel formulations of common traditions or retellings of familiar stories in new settings. Fourth, the notes sometimes illuminate ambiguities in the text, multiple possibilities that the original languages leave open but that cannot be directly expressed by a single English translation.
One Book or Many?
Anyone who looks carefully at the Bible will be struck
by the immense variety of its contents. Here we have prose and poetry, expansive narratives and short stories, legal codes embedded in historical reports, hymns and prayers, quoted archival documents, quasi-mythic accounts of things that happened “in the beginning” or in God’s court in heaven, collections of proverbs, maxims, aphorisms, and riddles, letters to various groups, and reports of mysterious revelations interpreted by heavenly figures. This variety accounts for some of the richness that generations of readers have found within its pages, but it also causes much of the puzzlement even the most devoted readers often feel. How did it come about that so many different kinds of writing have been brought together into one book?
This is a question that has preoccupied many modern scholars. They have sought to answer it by investigating the history of the Bible itself. The very word “Bible” is derived from a plural Greek word, ta biblia, “the little scrolls.” A Christian term, the latter refers to the separate rolls of leather or papyrus on which the sacred writings, like other literary works in antiquity, were ordinarily written. The physical limits of the roll meant that many rolls were required for the writings that had come to be held sacred in the Jewish and Christian communities. Sometimes a long document had to be divided into two scrolls, such as the books of Samuel and Kings or the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. As early as the second century, Christians began to use instead the relatively new form of the codex, very much like our modern books. This made it possible actually to put all the sacred writings into one large manuscript, but the name ta biblia somehow stuck.
The individual books that make up our Bible were written over a period of more than a thousand years. During that time the people of Israel underwent many changes, even deep transformations, in their national life and culture. Their patterns of government, their cultic and legal organization, and their relationships to neighboring peoples and to the great empires of the ancient Mesopotamian and Mediterranean regions all changed. Those changes go far to account for the variety we see in content, language, and style of the biblical books.
Critical Study of the Old Testament
Several major narrative complexes within the Bible extend across several books. These have been the focus of especially intense research in the attempt to understand how these books came to have the form in which we know them. The first of these complexes is the Pentateuch (so called from a Greek word meaning “Five Scrolls”): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These five books constitute the Torah (Hebrew for “teaching”) in the Hebrew scriptures. Some scholars have preferred to speak of a Tetrateuch (“Four Scrolls”), taking Deuteronomy to be the foundation and introduction for the second great narrative. That second narrative, comprising the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, is called the Deuteronomistic History because its understanding of the Mosaic covenant and Israel’s obligations under it are those expounded in Deuteronomy. The history of Israel’s national life down to the Babylonian exile is explained and judged according to the degree to which each generation, particularly the monarchs of Israel and of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, abided by the laws of Deuteronomy.
The third major composition presents the same history related in the Deuteronomistic account, although from a quite different point of view, and extends it to include the restoration of Israel as a subject people under the Persian Empire. This composition comprises the books of 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Its unknown author is often called “the Chronicler,” though we cannot be certain that a single person was responsible for the composition.
In addition to the three major narrative complexes, some scholars have isolated smaller compositions, such as the cycle of Joseph stories (Gen 37–50) and the narrative of the succession to David’s throne (2 Sam 9–1 Kings 2), that may have existed on their own before being woven into the larger narratives.
The history of the biblical writings is further complicated by the fact that some of these books speak of still earlier times, before any of them were written. What were the sources for the pictures of the ancient days that these writers passed on? Some of the writings refer explicitly to other books or archives; others show less direct evidence of predecessors who told or sang the stories and codes and prayers that are now included in the larger literary frameworks.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scholars began by trying to detect in the existing narratives differences in style, language, or ideas that might indicate “seams” in the text, where older documents had been inserted or where two older versions of one story or two different sets of similar rules had been joined together. The most famous and controversial of the hypotheses that emerged was a reconstruction of four extended sources that, its advocates proposed, had been brought together over a period of centuries and through several distinct stages of editing, or “redaction,” to produce the Pentateuch (or, in other versions of the theory, the Tetrateuch [Genesis–Numbers] or the Hexateuch [Genesis–Joshua]). Beginning with the observations that some passages used almost exclusively the name represented by the Hebrew letters YHWH to speak of God, while others used mostly a common Semitic word for a divine being, but in its plural form, ’Elohim, these scholars guessed that these passages had originally belonged to separate documents. These hypothetical documents, which also differed in other characteristics of both style and content, were accordingly labeled “J” for “Yahwist” (because j in German and neo-Latin is pronounced like the Hebrew y) and “E” for “Elohist.” A later source, called “D” by the scholars, was identified with an early version of the book of Deuteronomy. The fourth and latest document, thought to serve as the framework for the final stage of editing the whole Pentateuch, was intensely concerned with cultic matters, especially rules for priests and the temple, so it was called “P” for “Priestly.”
This “Documentary Hypothesis,” first associated especially with the name of the German Protestant scholar Julius Wellhausen, came to dominate much of OT scholarship in Europe, Britain, and America in the early twentieth century. In some circles great ingenuity was exercised in trying to assign each verse, or even parts of verses, to one or another of the hypothetical sources or to the “redactors” who put them together. The very complexity of the results aroused skepticism in other quarters, and many scholars came to feel that the documentary analysts were not taking sufficient account of two other factors affecting the formation of the biblical books: the importance of oral transmission and memory in ancient societies; and the stylistic conventions and inventions of ancient writers, which were in many ways quite different from the expectations of modern print-based intellectual culture.
The response to the first of these concerns was the attempt to investigate characteristics of oral folklore that might be comparable to the lore of ancient Israel lying behind the written documents we possess. By studying the particular patterns of speech often repeated in various texts and by comparing these with similar patterns found in neighboring cultures, “form critics” undertook to discover the typical settings in the life of the community in which each “form” or pattern was characteristically used. By further analyzing variations in that form in other texts, they tried further to reconstruct a “history of forms” or “history of traditions.” For example, one might seek to show how a maxim or a style of address first used in village courts under local elders could later have affected central legal codes and, again, how it might have become a metaphor in prophetic speech to describe God’s “case” against the whole people.
Some of the form critics were satisfied to describe small, individual units of tradition they thought were eventually embedded in the literary compositions of the Bible. Others, however, were interested in the process of oral composition, as seen, for example, in the sagas of the Old Norse and Icelandic peoples or in the lengthy tales sung by skilled reciters in some parts of the modern Balkans and Africa. For some, it seemed plausible that the supposed “documents” of the Pentateuch had been rather the orally trans
mitted traditions of different groups within the people Israel. There also seemed no good reason to suppose that the oral culture of such groups would have disappeared once their traditions were put into writing. Oral recitation would have continued to affect the way writers remembered and copied documents.
Furthermore, many readers felt that the attempts to distinguish separate sources and the early, analytic kind of form criticism tended to dissolve the larger units of the text into unrelated fragments. They sensed that these results obscured the unique literary qualities of the final compositions, for some of these qualities are produced by the interplay between just those “doublets” and dissonant elements that had set the critics looking for earlier sources of embedded forms. Both within the guild of biblical scholars and from literary critics outside it, there has come in recent decades a new attention to the rhetorical and literary qualities of the biblical books and larger compositions as we have received them.
Critical Study of the New Testament
The NT contains no narrative of the length and scope of those of the OT, but the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles present problems that are in some ways analogous to the OT compositions. The methods by which scholars have tried to solve them have been, in part, similar. Scholars of the nineteenth century attempted to solve the “synoptic problem”—why Matthew, Mark, and Luke are in some places similar to the point of identical wording, while in other respects they differ substantially—by discovering what sources each Gospel writer used. The hypothesis that emerged as the dominant explanation was called the “Two-Source Hypothesis.” According to it, Matthew and Luke independently used the earlier Gospel of Mark, keeping almost entirely to its narrative outline but adjusting its style to their own somewhat more literary tastes and adding to it large blocks of material they had from other sources. Among these other sources was one that Matthew and Luke had in common (the second of the “two sources”), from which they drew the sayings of Jesus that were not found in Mark. Conventionally, this hypothetical second source has been called “Q,” presumably from the German word Quelle, “source.”
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