(BA) Book

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In the context of the Bible, the term book is a tricky one.

A brief deconstruction of "books"

Let us begin with a noteworthy difference. If you open a Jewish Bible or a Protestant Old Testament, you'll find the same number of chapters in each, and the chapters will contain basically the same content, with perhaps differences in the interpretation of some critical verses, and some text-critical sorts of differences here and there. It is not a bad first approximation to say that the Protestant Old Testament is the same thing as the Hebrew Bible.

Both of these Bibles will be divided into "books" -- sections of text that have a title. But, curiously, there are different numbers of books in these Bibles. Jews count 24, while Protestants count 39 for the Old Testament.

If you compare the lists of books the two groups use, the first difference you might notice is that the books of 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel, in Protestant Bibles, are counted as the book of Samuel in the traditional Jewish count. Likewise, the Protestant 1 Kings and 2 Kings are just Kings in Judaism. Now, the chapter divisions were added by Christians. So when Stephen Langton was sticking chapters into the Hebrew Bible, he goes through more or less arbitrarily breaking the books into chunks 1 Samuel: 1, 2, 3, 4, ... 31. Then 2 Samuel 1, 2, 3, ... 24. Sometimes Langton's divisions reflect actual breaks in the narrative; sometimes they're basically just a way of slicing the text into roughly equal-sized sections. We'll get back to this.

When having intense scholarly discussions of the Bible, chapter numbers are handy. So Jews picked up the habit, and if you go buy yourself a Hebrew Bible it will almost certainly have chapter numbers. So it may not be quite accurate to say Jews have 24 books now. For both Jews and Christians, 2 Samuel 1 follows 1 Samuel 31. While Jews may have borrowed chapter divisions from Christians, Christians have borrowed the actual content of those chapters from Jews. Following this process shows us how the divisions of Samuel and Kings into 1 and 2 is not the only place where the borders of biblical books are contested.

Christian Bibles, starting with Protestants but later including Catholics, have become more "Jewish" over the last 500 years, insofar as they have been conformed more closely to the Masoretic Text than they were before. Before about 1500, Western Christians used the Vulgate, a a Latin translation of the Bible which was pretty close to the Masoretic Text but differs here and there, for about a thousand years. Prior to the appearance of the Vulgate about 400 AD, the standard Old Testament was the Septuagint, an ancient translation of the Hebrew Bible (and then some) into Greek. Its departures are greater, and it is still used by Eastern Christians.

If you open a Septuagint, as used by Eastern Christianity at the present, and thumb over to the equivalent of Samuel and Kings, and you will find, as in Protestant Bibles, four books. But if you look at their titles, you will see something curious: Βασιλειῶν Αʹ, Βασιλειῶν Bʹ, Βασιλειῶν Γʹ, Βασιλειῶν Δʹ. You don't have to read Greek to notice something: rather than two titles occurring in two volumes each, you have four volumes of Basileion, literally, "Of Reigns". So comparing various Bibles shows us not only that the divisions within Samuel and Kings are contested, but that the divisions within Samuel and Kings are contested.

So do we have four books, or two books, or one? Each of the four picks up where the previous left off, forming what amounts to one long narrative. Is there something natural about the current places where they are divided up? Well, we can zoom out further and complicate things yet more.

Not only is there a basically continuous narrative across Samuel and Kings, there is a basically continuous narrative across what Jews call the Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Kings, Samuel. Each picks off where the one before drops off. Yes, and even Joshua picks up where Deuteronomy leaves off. Are the current divisions reflective of "real" book-level divisions in the overall narative?

Deuteronomy, largely, is a series of speeches put in the mouth of Moses. Joshua covers the story of his successors. Judges covers, well, the biblical judges. 1 Samuel covers the leadership of Samuel and Israel's first king, Saul. 2 Samuel covers the reign of David. 1 Kings covers the reign of Solomon through the reign of -- nevermind. It's hard to make a quick case for the division between 1 and 2 Kings being natural. Let's just say Kings covers all the kings of Judah during the existence of the Temple, from its creation to its destruction.

Of course, a history of the United States could certainly be cut up into similar sections: the colonies, the Articles of Confederation, the ante-bellum period, the period between the Civil War and World War I, and so on -- but that wouldn't really prove that such a history is multiple "books" in any real sense -- just that history has periods of time in it. So even the existence of recognizable sections, if it were demonstrated, doesn't quite settle the book question.

But it gets trickier, because the divisions in the Deuteronomistic History as it appears in today's Bibles are not the only possible ones.

If Deuteronomy is about Moses and Joshua about Joshua, for example, one could argue that Deuteronomy 34 should really be the first chapter of Joshua. Judges 1:1-2:5 could instead have wound up as the ending of Joshua, telling as they do of Joshua's death and continuing its conquest narratives as they do. And Joshua 2:6 does look a lot like the beginning of a book -- the rest of Judges 2 serves as an introduction to the structure of Judges.

If Judges is about the pre-monarchical judges of Israel, then should it include what is now 1 Samuel 1-8, which narrates a time when the leader of Israel was the judge Samuel? There is certainly enough material about the reign of David to form a "book", if you like, which would start at perhaps 1 Samuel 16 when David is anointed and end at 1 Kings 2:12, when David dies. The forty-two chapters of the Book of David could perhaps be followed by a Book of Davidic Kings, which would be about his successors and cover forty-seven chapters.

Now, I whipped out those last couple of paragraphs without any extensive research one afternoon. But there is a substantial body of research, starting with Martin Noth, arguing that Deuteronomy and the Former Prophets form a single large work, put together by an author who used pre-existing sources to put together a substantial history of Israel.

There is more that could be said, but for now suffice it to say that the idea of dividing the Bible into books is a tricky business. And even if you get the dividing points right, the chunks of text you come up with will not necessarily be "books" the way you think of them.

Take, for example, Genesis, which seems sort of book-ish on a first read. There is reason to believe -- though the exact details remain a matter of dispute -- that the book was put together through an extensive editing process. The sources can be distinguished by various methods, including looking carefully at what they call the creator. He is "God" in Genesis 1:1-2:3, but "Yahweh God" in the rest of Genesis 2. Now, when we talk about a "Book" in English, we are talking about a hunk of text that was created, maybe in a year or two, by a single author, who is responsible individually for all the words on the page.

Borrowing a metaphor from Jacques Berlinerblau,^[1] we might say that a biblical book is a bit like a city. A city shows evidence of intentional construction, but most cities are not all constructed all at once by a single author responsible for all the neighborhoods and buildings. They grow through the work of multiple people, and perhaps city planners come along and impose some order on the city, rearranging some features, tearing down blighted parts, adding in new structures. A metaphor can only go so far -- there are certainly less hands at work in producing Genesis than New York, for example -- but there is something to it. When you look at the layout of New York, you don't think, what was the architect thinking when he designed this city? You ask more complicated questions, about what sorts of intentions the various actors had in bringing it to be. Ditto for the Bible.

The task is an impossible one to pull of perfectly. The writers of Genesis are gone. The sources that Genesis relied upon directly are gone, though there are stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh that give us a window into how it came to be, and authors like Wellhausen who can tease out some of the implications of the text as it stands. But reading the Bible is in some ways more like archaeology than like reading A Christmas Carol. When perhaps, in the distant future, archaeologists excavate New York, what they find will tell them a lot of very interesting and noteworthy things. But it will not necessarily tell them much about any particular mayor of New York.

They will be studying the character of a community through what it leaves behind. So we do with the Hebrew Bible.