The two Old Testaments

End of February, aleteia posted about the "Hebrew Bible" versus "Old Testament".

Hebrew Bible is T-N-K, torah-nabis-kitabs. Pronounced tanakh because of the Aramaising of their language. It's in a few Hebrew dialects, including that last, Aramaising one; plus Imperial Aramaic itself. Overall the text is Masoretic with a smattering of qere/katib swaps to glide over errors. Nabis includes the earlier Deuteronomic books; then goes on to the prophets themselves, counting the Deuteronomic History as "former prophets". The rest include Jonah but not Daniel, starting with the Isaiahs / Jeremiah / Ezekiel. Kitabs are just what Josephus considered "Other Writings", starting with the Psalter and ending at Chronicles. Daniel fits in there.

Christian "Old Testament" is roughly the same: Torah first, then the histories (not counted as Prophetic) before getting into the Psalter, the kitabs, finally the Prophets but here promoting Daniel to the fourth of the big three.

I tipped my hand by calling both assortments, old-testaments. The Jews end with the Temple. But they have no Temple. So they're looking forward to a Second Coming of that. We Christians end with Malachi's prediction of the day of the Lord. Which also hasn't happened; we just got Christ. So we're looking forward to that Second Coming. And our canons don't quite end with a fat unreadable codex. Each of us recognise that Tradition gave us the codex. The same Tradition carries forward: Jews start with Mishnah, Christians after our NT (should) start with 1 Clement and Ignatius.

There's some crossover. In the West, we further end the New Testament with John's Revelation, that most Jewish of our books. Guess what - the New Temple features. If the Christians have chosen not to end with Chronicles, a good part of that may be because John presented an alternative - at least for those of us accepting John, mostly Copts and Catholics. For minority-report: Vaticanus in Greek (not Latin nor Coptic) ended with "Hebrews", as far as we know, with its Revelation penciled-in later. "Hebrews" claims Christ as the Priest of this Temple Out Of Time.

The "better arrangement" is, therefore, a mulligan between our Traditions. Doing an ultra-Luther to Hebraise our Old Testament would simply slant our Christianity into Hebrews and the Revelation which we Catholics... already do. As for the rest of it: on the one hand the Masoretic Text is flawed (especially Jeremiah); on the other, Daniel really shouldn't be considered a Prophet. But then neither should Jonah so *blows-raspberry*.

BACKDATE 4/9