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The Hebrew Bible and thenon-HebraistProfessor W.D. McHardy D.Phil. D.D. aa University of LondonPublished online: 25 Feb 2011.

To cite this article: Professor W.D. McHardy D.Phil. D.D. (1960) The Hebrew Bibleand the non-Hebraist, Religion in Education, 27:2, 57-58, DOI: 10.1080/6008555868

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/6008555868

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The Hebrew Bible and the Non-Hebraist

Professor W. D. McHardy, D.Phil., D.D.

THERE ought to be a Hebrew Bible in every school library, and every child who does an Old Tes tament course ought to have some familiarity with the appear- ance of the Hebrew text. T h e teacher need not be a Hebraist to provide guidance; indeed many facts about the Hebrew Bible can be discovered by the more able pupil for himself, and this might be made an exercise in detection and deduction.

First of all, it is obvious that the Hebrew Bible in its printed fo rm- - t h e earliest complete printed Hebrew Old near Milan--differs in one striking par- ticnlar from our English Bible. While both are designed to be read from cover to cover, the English begins at the left- hand cover and the Hebrew at the right- hand cover. (This is less question-begging than to say that one begins at the right end and the other at the back of the book.) Having discovered where Genesis begins, the pupil will soon observe, from the position of the beginnings and endings of verses and paragraphs, that the writing runs from right to left. The British and Foreign Bible Society edition (see Religion in Education XXVI, Spring I959, P. 85) begins the book of Genesis with a larger initial letter at the right hand of line I on page I.

The alert pupil can work out the entire Hebrew alphabet from the Bible Society edition. He will notice that, while all the verses are numbered, the first, fifth, tenth, fifteenth and so on verses in each chapter are marked not by an Arabic numeral, our ordinary 'English' system, but by Hebrew letters. He will notice also that each chapter has both a Roman numeral and a Hebrew letter prefixed to it. Hebrew letters, it is dear, were also used as numerals. So from the numbers at the heads of the chapters of Genesis the order of the first fourteen letters of the Hebrew alphabet may be discovered.

It will have been noticed that while

Tes tament appeared in 1488 at Soncino

single letters are used to represent the numbers I-IO, eleven is represented by the letters for 'ten' and 'one' placed side by side, twelve by those for 'ten' and 'two', and so on. After chapter 19 a single letter appears again, and this must stand for 2o. The next single letter will be 3o, and the letter at the head of chapter 6o of the book of Isaiah will be the fifteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. To go further one must turn to the Psalter where before Psalm ioo stands the nineteenth letter.

There one would stick, were it not for the alphabetic or acrostic passages. These are mostly psalms, though the device is used elsewhere also, e.g. Lain. I - 4, Prov. 3I.IO-3I. Probably as an aid to memory, the successive lines of the poem or successive groups of lines begin with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Some of the poems are incomplete and some are corrupt and the acrostic faulty, but Psalms I I I and II2 give the complete alphabet, while in Psalm 119 not only do the twenty-two stanzas begin with suc- cessive letters, but all eight lines (num- bered as verses) of each stanza have the same initial letter. Of course were not this an exerdse based on the Hebrew Bible one might save trouble by turning to Psalm 119 in the English Revised Version, where not ouly the Hebrew characters but

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R E L I G I O N I N

also their names are given at the beginning of the stanzas--Aleph, Beth, Gimel right through to the last letter, Tau, twenty-two in all.

As the pages of the Hebrew text are turned it will be found that after the first five books, the Pentateuch or Torah (Law), there is another title page, and on it a Hebrew title with the Latin translation Prophetae Priores, ' the former prophets'. Under this are listed the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, books, that is, which we regard as historical but which the Hebrews classed as prophetic. We treat them as historical sources, and there is a great deal of excellent historical material in those books. But the Jews were more concerned with the significance of the events recorded, their religious meaning. So those books were termed 'former prophets' because in them, as in the later prophetical writings, funda- mental principles were laid down and illustrated: namely, that God has guided and still guides the destiny of his people, and Israel's part is loyalty and obedience.

The 'former prophets' are followed by the 'latter prophets', and together these two form the second main division of the Hebrew Bible. The first is the Law, the second is the Prophets, and the third is the Writings, given the title Hagiographa. I f note has been taken of the order of the books, it will have been observed that the order differs in the Hebrew and English Bibles. Thus Daniel appears not between Ezekiel and Hosea, as in the English, but within the miscellaneous group of the Writings, a pointer to the late date and non-prophetic character of the book. Noteworthy also is the position of the books of Chronicles, for they come not after the books of Kings, but right at the end of the Old Testament, after Ezra and Nehemiah. Obviously Chronicles should precede Ezra-Nehemiah, the sequel to Chronicles, and it looks as if Chronicles was added to the Hebrew canon of Scripture after Ezra-Nehemiah had been included. It is the Hebrew order which

E D U C A T I O N

gives point to M~tt. 23.35. Our Lord is referring not to the earliest and last murders but to the earliest recorded murder, i.e., of Abel, and the last recorded in the last book of the Old Testament, i.e., in II Chronicles 24.20£

Lastly, it will be obvious that the Hebrew in the text is cluttered up with a plethora of dots and dashes. If, for example, the first word of Genesis as printed in the text is compared with that word as printed in the title of the book it will be observed that under the word in the text are various combinations of dots. The same result would foUow from a comparison of a biblical text from among the Dead Sea Scrolls with the same pas- sage in the printed Hebrew Bible. It is here that some help must be given, for the pupil can hardly be expected to guess that, apart from some accents, these dots and dashes are the vowels, while the letters, as we have been calling them, are the consonants. Nor can he know that in earliest times only the consonantal text was written and the vowels were added comparatively lately, about the seventh century An. Hebrew Bibles with con- sonantal text only, i.e., with what are known as unpointed texts, are still pro- duced, and those who know Hebrew well enough can read them. Now if one had to supply vowels to the consonants BD, one might read them as bad, bed, bid, bud or as bade, bead, abode and so on. In a sentence the context would help, and one might get assistance from someone who had heard the sentence from the lips of someone who had in turn heard it; there being, as it were, a traditional pronuncia- tion. But in spite of such aids one might go wrong, and similarly the Jewish scholars who inserted the vowels in the Hebrew text were not infallible, and mistakes were made.

But here we are passing beyond our subject into the realm of textual criticism, where as a short and clear guide A Primer of Old Testament Text Criticism (Epworth Press) by D. R. Ap-Thomas may be recommended.

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