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    Bible Survey: Useful Information About Every Book in the Bible
    Bible Survey: Useful Information About Every Book in the Bible
    Bible Survey: Useful Information About Every Book in the Bible
    Ebook385 pages5 hours

    Bible Survey: Useful Information About Every Book in the Bible

    By Edwin Walhout

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    About this ebook

    Historical settings, occasions, content summaries, perspectives, memorable moments – lots of background information to help you understand the Bible’s message.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEdwin Walhout
    Release dateApr 22, 2014
    ISBN9781311083340
    Bible Survey: Useful Information About Every Book in the Bible
    Author

    Edwin Walhout

    I am a retired minister of the Christian Reformed Church, living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Being retired from professional life, I am now free to explore theology without the constraints of ecclesiastical loyalties. You will be challenged by the ebooks I am supplying on Smashwords.

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      Book preview

      Bible Survey - Edwin Walhout

      BIBLE SURVEY

      Useful Information About

      Every Book in the Bible

      by Edwin Walhout

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2014 Edwin Walhout

      Cover design by Amy Cole

      See Smashwords.com for additional titles by this author.

      Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION THE BOOK THE OLD TESTAMENT

      Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy

      THE HISTORICAL BOOKS

      Joshua Judges Ruth First Samuel Second Samuel First Kings Second Kings First and Second Chronicles Ezra Nehemiah Esther

      THE WRITINGS

      Job Psalms Proverbs Ecclesiastes Song of Songs

      THE PROPHETS

      First Isaiah Second Isaiah Jeremiah Lamentations Ezekiel Daniel Hosea Joel Amos Obadiah Jonah Micah Nahum Habakkuk Zephaniah Haggai Zechariah Malachi

      THE NEW TESTAMENT THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

      Matthew Mark Luke John Acts

      THE LETTERS OF PAUL

      Romans

      THE CORINTHIAN CORRESPONDENCE

      First Corinthians Second Corinthians (the Distress Letter) Second Corinthians (the Comfort Letter) Galatians Ephesians Philippians Colossians

      THE THESSALONIAN CORRESPONDENCE

      First Thessalonians Second Thessalonians First Timothy Second Timothy Titus Philemon

      THE GENERAL EPISTLES

      Hebrews James First Peter Second Peter First John Second John Third John Jude Revelation

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      INTRODUCTION

      Most Christians know that the Bible has two main divisions: the Old Testament and the New Testament, but perhaps not every Christian knows how we got the Bible in the first place.

      Most Christians know the the Bible has 66 separate books in it, but perhaps not every Christian knows who decided what books to include.

      Most Christians have read at least part of the Bible, but perhaps not every Christian knows why the authors wrote what is in it.

      Most Christians can name one or more of the books in the Bible, but perhaps not every Christian can tell you what each book contains.

      Most Christians can read part of the Bible in their own language, but perhaps not every Christian can say what language it was originally written in.

      Most Christians know the name of one or more authors of the Bible, but perhaps not every Christian can say anything about what kind of persons they were.

      And so on. We all know something about the Bible simply by reading it, but there is a great deal of information about the Bible that most of us do not know. That is what this book, Bible Survey, is about: providing supplemental insight into the Bible and all of its books.

      THE BOOK

      The name of the book

      The name Bible is an English term derived from a Greek word (ς, biblos) meaning book.

      The content of the book

      The book we call the Bible is a library of ancient sacred Jewish literature (Old Testament) plus ancient sacred Christian literature (New Testament), sixty-six separate documents in all. That would be a very extensive church library in the early days, considering that they would all be on separate scrolls. It would not be until the invention of the modern book with individual pages that all of those scrolls could be conveniently combined into one massive volume.

      The two main divisions of the Bible are, as we all know, the Old Testament and the New Testament. These terms come from the Latin and in their original meaning indicated the Old Covenant and the New Covenant.

      This division reminds us that the way God trained the ancient descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is different from the way he is training the disciples of Jesus Christ. Not that these two ways are contradictory, but that a major improvement is made from the old to the new. What was written on the tablets of stone and in the ancient Hebrew manuscripts, that is, the law of God, is now written on hearts of flesh, that is on our conscience, the way it should have worked out in the story of Adam and Eve.

      Accordingly, Christianity should not be considered as contradictory of Judaism, New Testament versus Old Testament. Jesus was a good God-fearing Jew, as were all his disciples. The relationship is that Jesus moved the kingdom of God beyond the particular nation of Israel into the full range of human nations. He could not have done this without the long history of the old covenant.

      The history of the book

      Originally the Bible was not one book but sixty-six separate scrolls, thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New Testament.

      However, there were dozens of other documents circulating among Jewish and Christian people besides those we have now in the Bible. A dozen or more of the ancient Hebrew scrolls are sometimes included in our Bibles and listed as Apocryphal books, for example, the books of the Maccabees.

      Apparently the ancient Jews credited Ezra with being the scribe who formed the Hebrew list of books (the Old Testament canon) as they are today. Sometimes Ruth was considered part of Judges, Lamentations considered part of Jeremiah, and all the minor prophets were bundled together, so that the exact number of books might differ somewhat. But only these books now in the Old Testament seem to have been accepted as part of the original Jewish canon, though the Greek translations tended to include the Apocryphal books as well.

      After the coming of Jesus early Christian churches each built up their own libraries with whatever religious documents came their way, and they made copies of scrolls from other libraries. In time, accordingly, various churches owned and used different sets of sacred literature, some of which did not get included into the Bible as we know it today. For example, besides the Apocryphal books in the Old Testament, there were such documents as the Gospel of Thomas and the Epistle of Barnabas.

      So, just how did it happen that only these sixty-six books were included in the Bible, and not others? Actually this came about, not by official church decisions, but by what we might call common consent as time and usage showed which were reliable and which were not. The books included in the Hebrew canon were accepted without much controversy. However, for a long time there were other New Testament books used in the churches and there was dispute concerning some that were finally accepted, like 2 Peter, Jude, Hebrews, and Revelation.

      As it turned out, the first church council to officially list the books we now have in the New Testament was the Council at Carthage in 397, affirming basically what was already decided by common church usage. The main factor in this development seems to be the criterion of apostolicity, whether a given document was written by one of the original disciples or a close associate (e.g. Paul, Mark, Luke).

      The language of the book

      The Old Testament books were originally written in Hebrew or in a similar language called Aramaic. The New Testament books were all written in Greek.

      This is a very interesting development. Almost all the authors of the New Testament literature were of Jewish nationality (all except Luke, who was Greek and who wrote the Gospel bearing his name and its companion volume Acts of the Apostles). How did it happen that these early Jewish Christians, whose native language was Hebrew or Aramaic, wrote their scrolls in a foreign language? Not only that, but in Greek, while living in a Roman empire whose official language was Latin?

      Recall that Alexander the Great had conquered all the eastern lands, from Greece all the way around the eastern Mediterranean Sea to Egypt, and then all the way to India, all the territory of ancient Persia, including all of modern Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. That was way back about 325 BC. During the next three centuries Greek customs, religion, politics, and language gradually permeated all of the three empires that Alexander’s successors constructed: Greece, Syria, and Egypt. The Greek language became the one major language that enabled commerce and politics to continue throughout these three divisions of Alexander’s conquest, what later became the eastern half of the Roman empire.

      So that explains why, when the original disciples and Paul wanted to communicate with the Gentile people in other countries, they used the lingua franca of the day, which was Greek. Even though all that territory was under Roman control at the time, the entire eastern part of the empire was basically still under the prevailing influence of Greek culture because of Alexander’s original conquest. The western part of the Roman empire, Italy, France, Spain, and much of northern Africa, came under Italian influence and used Latin as its common language. Actually, starting with emperor Constantine in 315, the Roman empire was split into two administrative sections, one centered in Rome (or Milan) and the other in Constantinople. That division eventually resulted in the split in Christianity as well, between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church.

      The translations of the book

      SEPTUAGINT Tradition tells us that Ptolemy, ruler of the Egyptian third of Alexander’s empire, summoned seventy scribes to translate the Hebrew Pentateuch (first five books of the Bible) into Greek. This would be in the third century BC, maybe fifty or a hundred years after Alexander. The number seventy explains why this translation is called Septuagint (based on the Greek word for seventy). Then, at various times and in various places, other Hebrew documents were translated into Greek and added to the Septuagint, so that by the time of Jesus this Greek version of the Old Testament was well known even among Jewish people. For example, when the Gospel writers quoted from the Old Testament they frequently used the Septuagint, as did the Apostle Paul.

      VULGATE In the year AD 382 a Pope commissioned Jerome to translate the four Gospels from the Greek language into Latin. Jerome completed this task and then with other translators embarked on the task of translating all the New Testament books. Eventually all of these translations were compiled together into one book known as the Vulgate (meaning: commonly used) and adopted officially as the Latin version of the Bible in the Roman Catholic Church.

      VERNACULAR TRANSLATIONS Early in Reformation times Martin Luther translated the New Testament from Greek (not from the Latin Vulgate) into vernacular German. This was in 1522 and it was published in modern book form using the recently invented printing process made famous by Gutenberg.

      There had been numerous partial translations of the Bible into Old English, but not the entire Bible. John Wycliffe began the translation into Middle English so that it was completed by about 1395 (it was apparently fairly difficult to read even then).

      The first serious translation of the entire Bible into what we might call modern English was begun by William Tyndale. Tyndale was inspired by Luther’s German Bible, and by 1526 he had completed the New Testament into English. This was the first English Bible printed on the printing press for mass production and distribution. Other translators continued his work and eventually the entire Bible was available in English by 1537.

      Several other translations into English were made in later years, notably the Roman Catholic Douay Version, appearing in 1610 and the Authorized King James Version in 1611. Since that time there have been so many translations that one would need a small book to list and describe them, including the New International Version, the Revised Standard Version, and the Jerusalem Bible.

      DEAD SEA SCROLLS (QUMRAN) In 1948 an Arab shepherd boy threw a stone into a cave high up on a cliffside near the north end of the Dead Sea. He heard a noise that sounded like something breaking. He clambered up and discovered, to his surprise, a cave filled with numerous clay jars. One of these had been broken by his stone. Inside these jars were ancient manuscripts.

      In subsequent months merchants began selling these manuscripts, and archaeologists started measures to gather and safeguard them. It turned out that there were several other caves with precious manuscripts. Around 800 manuscripts, many in broken fragments, were found. Of these about 220 are from books of the Old Testament, all of them except Esther.

      It turned out that these manuscripts had been hidden in these caves during the time when the Roman army was in the process of squashing a Jewish rebellion and were besieging a Jewish enclave called Qumran. This would be about the year AD 70. Apparently the people living there hid their manuscripts in these caves so that they would not be destroyed by the Roman soldiers.

      So that tells us something about the age of these manuscripts. They were all copied over prior to AD 70. Scholars tell us that they range in time from about 150 BC. So these documents are as much as one full millennium older than the Old Testaments that were in existence at that time, a thousand years older. One of them was a complete copy of Isaiah that, when unrolled, was 24 feet long.

      Perspective on the Bible

      One could argue that the Bible has been, and continues to be, the most influential book ever written. Christians of all varieties accept it as coming from God and therefore of divine authority. Although the history of the Jewish people all by itself is not all that important, when seen in the process of God’s continuing guidance of human development it is of enormous importance. Similarly the apostolic beginnings of the Christian church.

      We need therefore to recognize that the God who created the universe and planet earth and the human race has a divine plan for the development of his creation. This divine plan takes us through Israelite history to the appearance of Jesus, then to the expansion of the saving work of Jesus to the entire world as the gospel draws the nations into the kingdom of God.

      What we are today is a product of what people were yesterday, all the way back to the nation of Israel and Jesus and the early Christians. Not merely the Christian church, the entire human race. So the Bible teaches us to expand our vision universally to include God’s purpose for the nations of humanity.

      Accordingly it is important that we do not divorce our study of the Bible from God’s work in nature and in the ordinary processes of human history in general. The Bible exists to provide perspective on what God is doing with the creation he made and with the human race he loves. He is making us into his image precisely within the cultural context which exists at any given time. That is what the gospel is doing, shaping the human race into the character God desires. If we miss this orientation of the Bible, we miss its main intent. God sent his Son into the world to save it, not to destroy it.

      All of this can be summarized in one word: theism. Theism is the understanding that God is sovereign, that he created the world for his own purpose, and that he is constantly guiding what happens in its history toward the achievement of that purpose. We need to be God-centered not Christ-centered, not Bible-centered, not church-centered, not man-centered in any variety. This is what the Bible teaches us, to be theists through faith in Jesus Christ and the reception of his Holy Spirit.

      THE OLD TESTAMENT

      The Pentateuch

      The first five books of the Old Testament are often called The Pentateuch, which means a five-fold book: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. These are sometimes called the Books of Moses, or simply Moses.

      Genesis

      The author of the book

      Moses was brought up from infancy in the royal court of Egypt and received as good an education as was available in those days. Moses probably wrote parts of these books, but not all of them. He would hardly have been able to write about his own death, for example. Nobody really knows, but it could very well be that some of the Genesis stories were written long before Moses. Perhaps by somebody like Joseph, who may have had the services of some Egyptian scribe who would take his dictation, or by some unidentified scribes in the twelve tribes.

      The name of the book

      Genesis was written in the Hebrew language, but the name Genesis was not the name of this book when it was first assembled. That’s because this term is a Greek word, not Hebrew. In those ancient times a scroll was identified by the first word in it. In this case the first word was bereshith, Hebrew for In the beginning. When the manuscript was translated into Greek many years later the first word was genesios, which explains why this Hebrew book has a Greek name.

      The outline of the book

      Most readers of Genesis fail to notice, or at least pay much attention to, the way it is divided. There are eleven well defined segments in the book, the first sometimes called the Creation Hymn and the other ten each called a Book of Generations. Here’s the outline of Genesis.

      Genesis 1:1 - 2:3 The Hymn of Creation

      Genesis 2:4 – 4:26 The generations of the heavens and the earth

      Genesis 5:1 – 6:8 The descendants of Adam

      Genesis 6:9 – 9:29 The descendants of Noah

      Genesis 10:1 – 11:9 The descendants of Noah’s sons

      Genesis 11:10-26 The descendants of Shem

      Genesis 11:27 – 25:11 The descendants of Terah

      Genesis 25:12-18 The descendants of Ishmael

      Genesis 25:19 – 35:29 The descendants of Isaac

      Genesis 36:1 – 37:1 The descendants of Esau

      Genesis 37:2 – 50:26 The family of Jacob

      Understand that the book of Genesis was not written by one person telling a consecutive story of the origin of Israel. On the contrary, numerous unknown individuals wrote the stories that they had experienced or that were passed down to them from their parents and grandparents. For example, someone in the tribe of Reuben might have written the story of how Joseph was sold into slavery, emphasizing the part Reuben played in it. Someone else, say from the tribe of Judah, might have written his account of the same event, telling it from the point of view of how brother Judah was involved. Similar stories might have been written about Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. These might be duplicate versions of the same event, written by persons living later and telling the story from slightly different points of view.

      So, as time went on, more and more of these stories began to accumulate, all of them on separate papyri. Eventually some person gathered all these separate scrolls together, sorted them into good order, and combined them into one large volume. This would explain how Genesis is put together into these ten Books of Generations.

      To use a modern analogy, we could look on these divisions as separate manila folders in a filing cabinet, with one or more separate documents filed in each folder. When techniques of putting all of them together into one very long scroll were invented, they became one book, our present book of Genesis.

      The contents of the book

      The easiest way of describing the contents of Genesis is to list the major characters in the book, those who have the most stories about them. So it would go like this: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph.

      ADAM

      The name Adam means humankind, or humanity, or even Everyman. The point being that the stories about Adam are intended to describe something about every human being. Adam is a type of all human beings, so that we should be looking for ways in which the stories about Adam help us to understand our own lives. We are all created in the image of God, we all have the same command from God to subdue the earth, we are all tempted, we all yield to temptation and thus violate God’s intention for us. The rest of the Bible is about how God works with the human race to guide them to become what he created them to be.

      It is important when we read about Adam to try our best to combine what we read in the Bible with what we are learning from the work of our scientists. God created the world in the beginning, and he did so by speaking it into existence. And God said, Let there be …, and there was … (Genesis 1:3, 6)

      That is why everything in the world is God speaking. The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard, yet their voice goes out through all the earth. (Psalm 19:1-4) We live in a world in which God is constantly and unavoidably speaking to us all the time and everywhere. Scientists are the people who make a concerted and disciplined study of this world that God made, so that what they discover is what God put there to begin with. They are listening, whether they realize it or not, to God speaking. Accordingly, we need to connect the Biblical stories with what archaeologists and paleontologists and other scientists are discovering about the origin of the world, of planet earth, of life, and of humanity.

      The definitive item about Adam, however, is the matter of the command that God gives to Adam in Genesis 1:27-28, to the effect that humans are expected to be images of God in the way they go about subduing the earth and gaining dominion over it. This is the controlling concept that is the basis for everything else that God does in human history. It is the goal toward which God is guiding the human race and which is therefore the destiny of history. Everything else in the Bible, including the work of Jesus, is dedicated to achieve that original purpose of the Creator to have a human race dominating planet earth, and doing so in such a way as to reflect, image, himself. God created the universe and he created it good. Similarly, humans are called to be honest, just, loving, patient, hardworking, faithful people in the way they create a good culture and civilization. We are called to construct a good society.

      NOAH

      In the Genesis narrative Noah comes at the climax of a long historical process in which it is shown that all humans, like Adam, have been living in such a way that does not image their creator. Everybody thinks and does only evil continually; all except Noah. So God destroys the human civilization of the time by means of a natural disaster, a catastrophic flood. Noah and his family survive the holocaust in a boat built for the occasion.

      God then establishes a covenant with Noah, sort of like starting human history all over again, but on the same basis as the original creation with Adam. God reassures Noah that a universal disaster like the flood will never happen again, and expects that Noah will get history started on the right track this time, doing what Adam failed to do. God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,’ (Genesis 9:1) a clear repetition of God’s command to Adam.

      Now, when we try to connect these stories about Noah with what our historians tell us, we need to recognize that conditions prior to the great flood, the general wickedness of life, is a picture of the ancient civilizations of human existence. Some of those primitive societies still survive here and there in remote areas of the world. We have old writings of one sort or another giving glimpses of what life in the very ancient world was like. And we have abundant descriptions of the cruelty of the later empires like Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, as well as those of the ancient East and the Americas. The cruelty and immorality and violence and warfare of non-Christian civilizations is still unchecked in some parts of the world. This violence is the same as that pictured in the ante-diluvian chapters of Genesis.

      ABRAHAM

      Between the stories about Noah and those of Abraham comes the story of the Tower of Babel. One would have hoped that life on earth would have improved after the great flood. One would have hoped that the covenant God established with Noah would change the character of human civilization. But it didn’t. The story of the Tower of Babel illustrates that people were just as self-centered, godless really, as they were before the flood. So now in the stories about Abraham we have a truly new way in which God works in the human race to get people to shape their civilizations in a godly way.

      The first step in this new scheme of God was to bring one person out of the rest of the world, with the promise that God will work in him and in his descendants in a special way to get them to become a nation that does image God and does shape a godly national culture. Abraham was that person, and we can well imagine him going through a very long process of thinking about life and the gods and conducting business and getting along with people. He was raised in the Babylonian tradition of polytheism, that is, in the belief that there are numerous gods, each of which is responsible for controlling some aspect of nature.

      Babylonian stories about the gods show the gods intriguing among themselves to gain control over all the others. They scheme and fight and create alliances. They murder grandparent gods and enslave their opponents. In Babylonian culture the upshot of all this struggle amongst the gods is that Marduk becomes supreme and is the national god of the Babylonians. Other nations may have their national god, but Marduk is supreme, and his supremacy shows in the fact that the Babylonian armies conquer all their opponents.

      So we can visualize Abraham thinking about all this and coming to the conclusion that something is radically wrong with it. People imitate the gods. They fight and compete and scheme for personal advantage, and when they succeed they suppress their enemies and keep them enslaved by force and cruelty. People are dishonest, untrustworthy, selfish, cruel, hateful, all because that’s the way they see the gods functioning.

      So Abraham wants out. He recognizes finally that there has to be only one God, one good God who not only created the whole world but who is the God of all people. There cannot be rivalry and scheming and cruelty if there is only one such God. There can only be unity, honesty, reliability, all-round goodness. So Abraham recognizes that it is indeed this one God who has been calling him out of the polytheism of Babylon into the monotheism of truth.

      We can visualize Abraham struggling with himself and his extended family and debating what he could do about it. It’s one thing to become a monotheist but it is another to know what to do about it.

      Abraham finally recognized that God was asking him to move out of his family environment and start an entirely new community based on faith in one God. This new community would, hopefully, be one in which people trusted one another, cooperated, and in which everyone would go about his work in such a way as to reflect the good character of God. Abraham could envision, way off into the future, an entire nation creating a culture that was not violent, not hateful, not cruel, but in which each person could develop in the way God intended for every human to live.

      So the stories of Abraham in Genesis show him trying to avoid conflict with neighboring tribes, doing his best to guide his family and entire business household in this path of faith. He is trying his best to create a small civilization that is truly godly, right in the middle of a lot of surrounding tribes who aren’t. It wasn’t easy.

      It is interesting that when, in later generations, the Jewish people considered their ancestry, they went back to Abraham, not to Noah or to Noah’s son Shem. They recognized that the origin of their unique faith and their separate posture within the human family began with the monotheism of Abraham, and that their later national character was shaped by that original faith of Abraham as he moved out of the polytheism

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