Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Tanach book order - different in Christian Bibles

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Harold Holmyard <hholmyard AT ont.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Tanach book order - different in Christian Bibles
  • Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2006 07:10:32 -0500

Dear Steven,


The Reformation Bibles we know have a different book order and combination of books than the Hebrew Bible, and its tri-partite division.
Where did this Christian book-order arise ? It is said sometimes that it arose from the Greek Tanach (socalled LXX) translations, but those manuscripts are quite inconsistent, so I am skeptical of that claim, at least it needs more detail about who, where, when.
Is there a study of the process that gave us the current Christian Bible
book order in Tanach ? Is this discussed in early days, like with Jerome ?
How did he order his Latin Vulgate, translated from the Hebrew-Aramaic ?
Do we know ?

HH: F. F. Bruce's book _The Canon of Scripture_ shows the order of the biblical books through time. It is pretty interesting. In Augustine's time the deuterocanonical books were still mixed in with the canonical ones, as in the Greek OT, and some books still had no particular order. Augustine writes:

There are other books which appear to follow no regular order, being connected neither with the order of the preceding books nor with one another, such as Job, Tobias, Esther, and Judith, the two books of Maccabees and the two of Esdras [i.e. Ezra and Nehemiah].

HH: Augustine includes Psalms and Solomon's books among the Prophets, considered Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus authoritative and to be numbered among the prophetical books, put the Twelve in the modern order, and put Daniel before Ezekiel.

Jerome's order in the Vulgate was important but not exactly like the modern order, it seems, for he had Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Esther after the Poetic books.

I can't find where the first occurrence of a list like the modern one appears, but it is included in the Elizabethan Thirty-Nine Articles of 1562-63.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page