[THE CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA]

Hebrew Bible

As compared with the Latin Vulgate, the Hebrew Bible includes the entire
Old Testament with the exception of the seven deuterocanonical books,
Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, I and II Machabees, and the
deuterocanonical portions of Esther (x, 4 to end) and Daniel (iii, 24-90;
xiii; xiv). So far as Jewish tradition testifies, these books end passages
never belonged to the official Hebrew Bible, though Hebrew was the original
language of Ecclesiasticus, most probably also of Baruch and I Machabees,
and either Hebrew or the closely allied Aramaic, of Tobias, Judith, and the
additions to Esther; also, according to some, the additions to Daniel. Even
if several of these books were written in Aramaic, that fact alone would
not account for their exclusion from the Hebrew Bible, since lengthy
passages of Daniel (ii, 4, to vii, 28) and of Esdras (iv, 7, to vi, 18;
vii, 12 to 26) are in that language. The Protestant versions adopt the
contents of the Hebrew Bible only.

By its threefold division, which antedates the prologue to Ecclesiasticus,
into the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings, or Hagiographa, the Hebrew
Bible differs considerably from the arrangement and order of the
Septuagint, which have been adopted by the Vulgate and the Protestant
versions. The Law contained the five books of Moses in the unvarying order
of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Prophets
comprised the four books of the Former Prophets, in the unvarying order of
Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings; and the four books of the Latter Prophets,
Isaias, Jeremias, Ezechiel, Minor Prophets (all twelve counted as forming
one book). The Writings comprised the remaining eleven books, the poetical
works, Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the five Megilloth, or Rolls (Canticle of
Canticles, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecelesiastes, Esther), and finally Daniel,
Esdras, Nehemias, Chronicles -- twenty-four books in all, though perhaps
more frequently reckoned as twenty-two by counting Ruth with Judges, and
Lamentations with Jeremias. The above order is that of the printed Bibles,
which, in the ease of the Latter Prophets and the Hagiographa, differs
widely from that prescribed in the Babylonian Talmud, while no fixed order
obtains in the manuscripts. In this arrangement the most noteworthy
differences from the Vulgate are the classifying of the historical books as
prophetical, the placing of the Latter Prophets before the Hagiographa, the
ranking of Daniel not with the Prophets, but with the Hagiographa, and the
grouping together of the five Rolls, which is a witness to the special
favour they enjoyed of being read publicly on certain feasts. The Hebrew
names for the sacred books of the Pentateuch differ from our own, which are
derived from the Septuagint.

With the arrangement into books, the labours of the earliest editors seem
to have ended; they made no further division into sections or chapters. The
text at first was a close succession of consonantal letters without
vowel-signs or spacing or punctuation to guide the reader; but Jewish
scholars through many centuries of painstaking care have provided a most
perfect system of helps to the intelligent reading of the Hebrew Bible.
Words were separated at an early date, perhaps before Christ. This was
imperative, as the letters were frequently combined in different ways. The
Septuagint translation bears witness not seldom to a combination different
from the Massoretic. Verse divisions, too, were made by the early scribes,
who found this necessary not only to aid the reading, hut to guard against
the intrusion of new verses. Uniformity did not obtain, however, as the
Palestinian Jews, we are told, had shorter verses than the Babylonian. The
present system is that of neither, but was partly a new arrangement
elaborated by the Massoretes. The care taken is shown by the fact that
every verse, in fact every letter, was counted by the scribes. Our chapter
divisions were unknown to early Jewish scholars, who had their own
divisions, according to sense, into the open and closed sections. A change
in subject was marked by the open section, so called because of the vacant
space showing its close, which was either the remainder of an unfilled line
or a blank line succeeding a full line. The closed section began a minor
break in thought, indicated only by a short interval of space, the new
section recommencing on the same line, or after a brief interval at the
beginning of the next line. In late manuscripts and in printed Bibles, the
open section is indicated by the letter Pe in the vacant space preceding
it, the closed section by the letter Samech.

The Christian division into chapters, invented by Archbishop Stephen
Langton about the beginning of the thirteenth century, has gained an
entrance into the Hebrew Bible. The beginning was made by Rabbi Solomon ben
Ismael who first (c. A D. 1330) placed the numerals of these chapters in
the margin of the Hebrew text. In printed Bibles this system made its first
appearance in the first two Bomberg editions of 1518. Arias Montanus, in
his Antwerp Bible of 1571, "broke up the Hebrew text itself into chapters
and introduced the Hebrew numerals into the body of the text itself"
(Ginsburg). This, though contrary to the Massoretic directions, is still
followed in nearly all printed Bibles on account of its great usefulness.
In most instances (617 out of 779) the chapter coincides with one or other
of the Massoretic sections. In Bomberg's great Bible of 1547-8, Hebrew
numerals were affixed to every fifth verse. It was in the above mentioned
Antwerp Bible that the Arabic numerals for all the verses were first placed
against them in the margin, though this had been done on a more limited
scale in the "Basle Psalter" of 1563. A further division of the text was
for liturgical purposes. It was the custom in Palestine to complete the
Pentateuch in Sabbath readings every three years; the various sections into
which the text was thus divided were called sedarim. The same name was
applied to the sections from the Prophets and the Hagiographa appointed to
be read at the same service. The length of a sedar may be judged
approximately from the fact that the fifty chapters of Genesis are counted
as forty-five sedarim, the forty chapters of Exodus as thirty-three
sedarim. Instead of the triennial cycle, the Babylonian Jews had an annual
cycle, and the Talmud divides the Law into fifty-four sections called
Parashiyoth, one for each Sabbath of the interealary year. The
corresponding readings from the Prophets were called Haphtaroth, or
dismissals, because they were read before the close of the service (see
BIBLE; CANON OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES; CRITICISM, BIBLICAL; MANUSCRIPTs OF
THE BIBLE; EDITIONS OF THE BIBLE; MASSORAH; VERSIONS OF THE BIBLE). JOHN F.
FENLON

[New Advent Catholic Website]
http://www.knight.org/advent

Taken from the New Advent Web Page (www.knight.org/advent).

This article is part of the Catholic Encyclopedia Project, an effort aimed at placing the  entire Catholic Encyclopedia 1913 edition on the World Wide Web. The coordinator is Kevin Knight,  editor of the New Advent Catholic Website. If you would like to contribute to this  worthwhile project, you can contact him by e-mail at (knight.org/advent). For  more information please download the file cathen.txt/.zip.

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