Understanding the Old Testament

Abstract

The basic question which underlies what I have to say is how fully can we understand the Old Testament? And in asking this question I would like to draw a distinction between the understanding of the Old Testament and the exegesis of it. By the understanding of it I mean the discovery of what the Hebrew text says, and by the exegesis of it I mean the exposition of what the Hebrew text says when that has been discovered, so far as it can be discovered. We are familiar today—all too familiar—with such phrases as ‘the Old Testament says’ or ‘the Bible says’, But can we always be sure what it says? The truth is that it is rarely an easy task to discover what it says. In our endeavour to discover what it says, we encounter a preliminary question. What do we mean when we speak of the Old Testament? Is it the Old Testament in Hebrew, or in the Greek, or Aramaic, or Syriac, or Latin versions? Or in the Authorized Version or the Revised Version? Or in one of the many translations into English, as well as into other languages, which have appeared in recent years, and of which there are more still to come? The Old Testament as we know it in the original Hebrew and in the ancient versions and in modern translations by no means always presents a uniformity of statement. The answer to our question is probably that, if we wish to discover what the Old Testament says, we shall not find it in any one of these texts alone, not even in the Hebrew text itself. For this text has first to be established in its original form, so far as this

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.