The Law, The Prophets, and The Writings

Studies in Evangelical Old Testament Hermeneutics in Honor of Duane A. Garrett

Andrew M King, Joshua M Philpot, William R Osborne

• Publisher: B&H Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781535935944
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

The Old Testament is no ordinary text; it is a revelation of God's will, character, purpose, and plan, inspired by the Spirit of God. That same Spirit continues to work within God's people today as they read the Bible, even when the meaning is difficult to discern. In The Law, the Prophets, and the Writings, eighteen evangelical scholars analyze the Old Testament through a historical, literary, and theological hermeneutic, providing new insights into the meaning of the Scriptures. This festschrift in honor of Duane A. Garrett seeks to help Christians faithfully read and understand the Old Testament Scriptures.

1The Hermeneutical Significance of the Shape of the Christian Canon

Jason S. DeRouchie

For decades my mentor and friend Dr. Duane Garrett has served as a model of faithful, careful, conservative, evangelical Old Testament scholarship that is for the church and for Christ’s glory. His writing and teachings have covered the entire TaNaK and done so in a way that engages the whole of Christian Scripture. In a volume titled The Law, the Prophets, and the Writings, I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute in his honor this essay on the significance of canonical structure when engaging in the discipline of biblical theology.

Introduction

Not all modern Bibles are arranged in the same way.58 Most contemporary Christian Bibles in English structure the Old Testament (OT) books into Law, History, Poetry/Wisdom, and Prophecy, and the New Testament (NT) books into the Gospels, Acts, Paul’s Epistles and Hebrews, the Catholic Epistles, and Revelation. Historically, this order might go back to Jerome’s arrangement in his Latin Vulgate (late fourth century AD), which likely followed the structure of some known codexes (i.e., bound books) of the Greek OT.59 Nevertheless, the modern critical edition of the Hebrew Scriptures, which is based on the text but not precise order of the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible––the Leningrad Codex (ca. AD 1008/9), consists of twenty-four books divided into three sections: the Law (tôrâ), the Prophets (něḇî’îm), and the Writings (kěṯûḇîm).60 The parallel critical edition of the Greek NT follows the same structure as contemporary English versions,61 though a recent reader’s edition mirrors an ancient and early tradition that placed the Catholic Epistles directly after Acts and before Paul’s Epistles and Hebrews.62

Brevard Childs correctly notes, “It is historically inaccurate to assume that the present printed forms of the Hebrew Bible and of the Christian Bible represent ancient and completely fixed traditions. Actually, the present stability regarding the ordering of the books is to a great extent dependent on modern printing techniques and carries no significant theological weight.”63 Religious communities have been responsible for the present order of the biblical books, but we must ask whether historical and theological priority should be given to any one canonical structure over another, most specifically when doing biblical theology. Elsewhere I argue that biblical theology is “a way of analyzing and synthesizing what the Bible reveals about God and his relations with the world that makes organic salvation-historical and literary-canonical connections with the whole of Scripture on its own terms, especially with respect to how the Old and New Testaments progress, integrate, and climax in Christ.”64 So is the order of the canon significant when considering how the whole Bible progresses, integrates, and climaxes in Jesus?65

A number of factors move me to answer with a qualified “Yes,” and my response will come in three stages. First, the study overviews the nature and limits of the biblical canon. Second, it assesses how much ancient canon consciousness included not simply which books but also their ordering. Third, it considers ways that canonical arrangement could and should inform a Christian’s interpretive conclusions in relation to biblical theology.

The Nature and Limits of the Biblical Canon

The Christian canon is the church’s authoritative collection of holy books (Rom 1:2; 2 Tim 3:15; 2 Pet 3:16). God authored the whole through human agents (2 Tim 3:16; 2 Pet 1:21), and it is made up of what we now call the Old and New Testaments. The Protestant OT canon is made up of thirty-nine books, and the Jewish Bible is identical with it in content but consists of twenty-four books that are divided and arranged differently.66 The NT has twenty-seven books with some known variation in ordering.67

The word canon derives from the Hebrew term קָנֶה (“reed”), which came to signify a “measuring stick” (e.g., Ezek 40:5–8). The term entered i...