• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1240 0

conquered too, this time by the new superpower in the area, the Chaldeans (or Neo-Babylonians), led by Nebuchadnezzar. In 587 BCE, his troops captured and looted Jerusalem, destroyed the Great Temple built by Solomon, and set the city on fire. Thousands of the elite of Judean society were taken to Babylon in what is commonly known as the Exile. It is possible that they carried with them the “Ark of the Covenant,” the sacred chest holding the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments, although this most holy object in Israel may have been destroyed with the temple. Somehow, in that fifty-year exile, the Ark of the Covenant disappeared without a trace or a mention. Of course, if you like Hollywood history, Steven Spielberg would have you think that the chest was found by Indiana Jones and is now locked up in some dusty U.S. government warehouse.

The final composition and editing of the Torah, along with the rest of the Tanakh, or Old Testament, largely took place over the stormy five hundred years between 900 and 400 BCE. And it was against that background of historical events—kings rising and falling, bitter disputes over religious authority, nations divided, conquests, and Exile—that the Hebrew scriptures were finally set down.

If they wrote it in Hebrew, where did all the Greek words come from?

Approximately two thousand years of history pass within the Bible’s pages. Great empires came and went around the ancient Near East: Sumer, Akkadia, Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and Greece. Along with those rising and falling empires and cultures, Hebrew and Aramaic fell into disuse, eventually replaced by Greek. And sometime around 250 BCE, when many Jews realized that they no longer understood the Hebrew of their ancient religion, someone decided to preserve those writings in a complete Greek translation of Hebrew scripture. An old tradition held that this Greek translation of the Hebrew holy scrolls was commissioned by Ptolemy II (282-246 BCE), one of the heirs to Alexander the Great who ruled Egypt after Alexander’s death. Based on manuscripts sent from Jerusalem to the famed Library at Alexandria, this Greek translation was later called the Septuagint, meaning “seventy.” According to the legend, seventy-two elders, six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, did the translating. Each of these elders produced exactly the same translation in exactly seventy-two days. The number was rounded off to seventy. Of course, this sounds like the old notion that enough monkeys working at typewriters with enough time could produce the works of Shakespeare.

Modern scholars dismiss the connection with Ptolemy, as well as the seventy-two identical translations, as legend. In fact, the work was begun because the large Jewish community in Egypt and elsewhere in the Hellenized—or Greek-speaking—world needed a translation from Hebrew, which had fallen out of use during the Diaspora, or “dispersion” of Jews throughout the Mediterranean world.

The Greek Septuagint became the most popular form of the Hebrew Bible. It was the unofficial Scripture of the early Christians who read the Hebrew Laws and prophets in Greek. Roman Catholic Bibles, such as the Jerusalem Bible, still show this influence. Some of the books in the Septuagint were not considered “holy” by the Jewish rabbis who established the official “canon” of their Bible. When the Christian church split during the Protestant Reformation, the Protestants accepted the Jewish canon. That’s why the Protestant Old Testament is the same as the Hebrew Bible, except for the order and numbering of some books. However, Roman Catholics considered the Septuagint holy, and Roman Catholic Bibles include eleven books that are not in the Hebrew or Protestant Old Testament. These books, called the deuterocanonical books, are represented in modern Bibles in the Apocrypha. (Apocrypha, not to be confused with Apocalypse, is from Greek by way of Latin and means “hidden.”) To further confuse this issue, other Christian sects, such as the Eastern Orthodox churches, recognize even more books as sacred. In