HarperCollins Study Bible

by Harold W. Attridge

  The Two-Source Hypothesis is still taken as the working hypothesis by most critical scholars of the NT, though everyone acknowledges that it does not explain all the peculiarities of the relationships among the first three Gospels. Attempts to revive earlier hypotheses, such as the proposal that Matthew wrote first, Luke adapted Matthew’s Gospel, and Mark excerpted rather idiosyncratically from both, have not won wide acceptance. Also unconvincing have been the many attempts to fine-tune the Two-Source Hypothesis by adding yet other hypothetical sources. The remaining problems with the hypothesis are better solved by considering the impact of oral tradition, on the one hand, and the skill and freedom of the Gospel writers, on the other.

  Form criticism too was employed by students of the NT in attempts to reconstruct the process by which the stories about Jesus and the sayings attributed to him were shaped, transmitted, and modified by their uses in the life of the early Christian communities. Applied to the Letters of the NT, similar techniques isolated some passages that seemed to be excerpts from liturgical poetry or from simple creeds or confessional formulas.

  In NT scholarship too there have been reactions against what many have come to see as an overemphasis on the hypothetical prehistory of writings to the neglect of the rhetorical and literary qualities of the books as we have them. Many recent commentators have emphasized the role of the Gospel writers as authors, fully in command of whatever sources they used and creating from them coherent literary wholes. Others have warned against forcing these ancient writings into modern categories by imposing on them literary theories derived from the study of the modern novel or modern poetry. At the same time, extensive study of ancient genres of writing and patterns of rhetoric has provided sturdier models with which to compare the biblical documents.

  Biblical Scholarship Today

  The issues mentioned in this brief survey are only examples of the issues raised in the several phases of modern critical study of the Bible. Historical and literary studies have affected our understanding of the other parts of the Bible as well, raising analogous problems. Some of the issues are discussed in the introductions and notes to individual books.

  The present moment in scholarly investigation of the Bible is a time when many different methods are in use. That diversity of method is reflected to some extent in the notes in this study Bible. The scholar chosen to annotate each book is an expert on that particular document and may emphasize the results of one or another method that seems most useful in understanding that book. Characteristic of the best scholarship is a healthy degree of self-criticism and skepticism about any rigid hypotheses. All our annotators, even when they differ from one another on theoretical matters, have in common a primary focus on the text. Their notes are designed to help readers make sense of that text, in its parts and as a whole.

  Some questions raised by material in the Bible, however, cannot be answered on the basis of our present knowledge. For example, despite the impressive results and continuing discoveries of archaeology in the Middle East, some places mentioned in the Bible cannot be located with certainty on a modern map. Some discrepancies in chronology cannot be resolved. In a few instances where experts differ on such matters, we have allowed inconsistencies between one scholar’s notes and another’s to stand, as a reminder that our knowledge of the ancient world remains imperfect.

  Bibles and Their Communities

  Despite the Bible’s diversity, most readers do feel that as a whole it somehow makes sense. There is an odd concentricity about its diverse stories and its various genres. The tensions within it are held within some common framework. In some more than trivial way, “the Bible” is one book.

  Yet our perception of the Bible’s unity may obscure a complicated reality. If one asks a reader exactly what gives the Bible its oneness and wholeness, the answer will depend in part on the religious community to which that reader belongs. Our notes try to come to terms with the fact that we have, so to speak, at least two Bibles between the same covers: a Jewish Bible and a Christian Bible. This is not a superficial difference. It is not merely that the Christian Bible adds a New Testament and therefore calls the Jewish scriptures “the Old Testament.” The Jewish scriptures are not the same as the OT. The order is different (see the table on Names and Order of Books of the Bible in Several Traditions). The text has been transmitted by different means and with different approaches to establishing authoritative readings. For example, the Bible of most of the early Christians was the Septuagint. Even the list of books included has differed.

  More important than these external differences, however, is the different sense of the whole that is engendered when, on the one hand, we read the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings of the Hebrew Bible as complete in themselves, the foundation of the life of Israel through the ages, or when, on the other hand, we read them as open toward a future that was “fulfilled” in the events of the NT and still awaits an “end.” In the latter case, the Christian Bible presents us with a single narrative line that unites all the diverse episodes and different kinds of writing into a sweeping epic, almost a giant novel claiming to embrace the entire story of humanity. It begins “in the beginning,” treats of God electing a special people, recounts their disobedience, punishment, and hope, declares the story’s climax in the appearance of God’s Son, and looks to a final “coming.”

  When read independently of the Christian additions and Christian habits of reading, the unity of the Hebrew scriptures looks quite different. They do not have a single plot or a single center, but many. The many voices that speak are not united in a single hope, nor do they point to a single future. Their unity lies rather in a continuous counterpoint. The multiple plots of the narratives move forward with odd echoes of the past, repetitions and rehearsals, reminders and foreshadowings. The wisdom gathered and cultivated by professional elites and servants of kings rubs against the sensibilities of peasants. Codes from the time when “there was no king in Israel” stand beside laws of monarchy and laws of a temple state. Prophets name the injustice done to the common poor by petty local tyrants and perceive in the march of great empires the chastening hand of God. The people Israel sings in the manifold occasions of its national and cultic life, and it sings the complaints, fears, and hopes of its individuals. All this variety, and more, is woven together by complex threads, but its rhythms are quite different from the dominant pulse of the Christian Bible.

  The overall arrangement of the NRSV is that of Protestant Bibles, because that is the arrangement that has dominated the public use of the Bible in English-speaking countries since the seventeenth century. The NRSV has, however, included the books that are variously called apocryphal or deuterocanonical and are found in the Bible used by one or more of the Roman Catholic, Greek, and Slavonic churches. In this respect the NRSV is the most inclusive English version now commonly available. (For the several canons, see the tables on Names and Order of Books of the Bible in Several Traditions as well as the introductions to the books of the Apocrypha.) Readers thus have in hand not merely two Bibles, the Jewish and the Christian, but several Bibles that have spoken and continue to speak to historically diverse Jewish and Christian communities.

  The Society of Biblical Literature

  The editors and annotators who have worked together to produce the HarperCollins Study Bible themselves exemplify the diversity of confessional traditions for which the Bible is foundational. What unites them, however, is the tradition of historical, critical, and open scholarship that has been fostered for more than a century by the Society of Biblical Literature, the sponsor of the present project.

  The Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis was founded in 1880 and is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. Its purpose is to stimulate the critical investigation of classical biblical literatures, together with other related literatures, by the exchange of scholarly research both in published form and in public forum. It has at present over seven thousand members from more than eighty cou
ntries.

  The HarperCollins Study Bible is one of a series of publishing projects undertaken by the SBL in conjunction with HarperCollins. Others include HarperCollins Bible Dictionary, HarperCollins Bible Commentary, and HarperCollins Bible Pronunciation Guide. Users of the HarperCollins Study Bible who wish to pursue their studies further will find more detailed information on many biblical topics in the articles of those companion volumes. All of these joint projects represent the commitment of the Society to share the results of scholarly research with a wide public who are interested in the Bible and the religious traditions associated with it.

  On the Revised Edition

  The present revised edition of the HarperCollins Study Bible has updated and expanded the annotations with the latest perspectives on the biblical text derived from historical, archaeological, and literary sources. The notes also provide more complete information on the ways in which various biblical books echo other parts of scripture. A series of introductory essays offer reflections about the contexts within which biblical books are currently read.

  To the Reader

  THIS PREFACE IS ADDRESSED TO YOU by the Committee of translators, who wish to explain, as briefly as possible, the origin and character of our work. The publication of our revision is yet another step in the long, continual process of making the Bible available in the form of the English language that is most widely current in our day. To summarize in a single sentence: the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible is an authorized revision of the Revised Standard Version, published in 1952, which was a revision of the American Standard Version, published in 1901, which, in turn, embodied earlier revisions of the King James Version, published in 1611.

  In the course of time, the King James Version came to be regarded as the “Authorized Version.” With good reason it has been termed “the noblest monument of English prose,” and it has entered, as no other book has, into the making of the personal character and the public institutions of the English-speaking peoples. We owe to it an incalculable debt.

  Yet the King James Version has serious defects. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the development of biblical studies and the discovery of many biblical manuscripts more ancient than those on which the King James Version was based made it apparent that these defects were so many as to call for revision. The task was begun, by authority of the Church of England, in 1870. The (British) Revised Version of the Bible was published in 1881–85; and the American Standard Version, its variant embodying the preferences of the American scholars associated with the work, was published, as was mentioned above, in 1901. In 1928 the copyright of the latter was acquired by the International Council of Religious Education and thus passed into the ownership of the churches of the United States and Canada that were associated in this council through their boards of education and publication.

  The Council appointed a committee of scholars to have charge of the text of the American Standard Version and to undertake inquiry concerning the need for further revision. After studying the questions of whether revision should be undertaken and, if so, what its nature and extent should be, in 1937 the Council authorized a revision. The scholars who served as members of the Committee worked in two sections, one dealing with the OT and one with the NT. In 1946 the Revised Standard Version of the NT was published. The publication of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, containing the OT and NT, took place on September 30, 1952. A translation of the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books of the OT followed in 1957. In 1977 this collection was issued in an expanded edition containing three additional texts received by Eastern Orthodox communions (3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151). Thereafter the Revised Standard Version gained the distinction of being officially authorized for use by all major Christian churches: Protestant, Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox.

  The Revised Standard Version Bible Committee is a continuing body, comprising about thirty members, both men and women. Ecumenical in representation, it includes scholars affiliated with various Protestant denominations as well as several Roman Catholic members, an Eastern Orthodox member, and a Jewish member who serves in the OT section. For a period of time the Committee included several members from Canada and from England.

  Because no translation of the Bible is perfect or acceptable to all groups of readers, and because discoveries of older manuscripts and further investigation of linguistic features of the text continue to become available, renderings of the Bible have proliferated. During the years following the publication of the Revised Standard Version, twenty-six other English translations and revisions of the Bible were produced by committees and by individual scholars—not to mention twenty-five other translations and revisions of the NT alone. One of the latter was the second edition of the RSV NT, issued in 1971, twenty-five years after its initial publication.

  Following the publication of the RSV OT in 1952, significant advances were made in the discovery and interpretation of documents in Semitic languages related to Hebrew. In addition to the information that had become available in the late 1940s from the Dead Sea texts of Isaiah and Habakkuk, subsequent acquisitions from the same area brought to light many other early copies of all the books of the Hebrew scriptures (except Esther), though most of these copies are fragmentary. During the same period early Greek manuscript copies of books of the NT also became available.

  In order to take these discoveries into account, along with recent studies of documents in Semitic languages related to Hebrew, in 1974 the Policies Committee of the Revised Standard Version, which is a standing committee of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., authorized the preparation of a revision of the entire RSV Bible.

  For the OT the Committee has made use of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (1977; ed. sec. emendata, 1983). This is an edition of the Hebrew and Aramaic text as current early in the Christian era and fixed by Jewish scholars (the “Masoretes”) of the sixth to the ninth centuries. The vowel signs, which were added by the Masoretes, are accepted in the main, but where a more probable and convincing reading can be obtained by assuming different vowels, this has been done. No notes are given in such cases, because the vowel points are less ancient and reliable than the consonants. When an alternative reading given by the Masoretes is translated in a footnote, it is identified by the words “Another reading is.”

  Departures from the consonantal text of the best manuscripts have been made only where it seems clear that errors in copying had been made before the text was standardized. Most of the corrections adopted are based on the ancient versions (translations into Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, and Latin), which were made prior to the time of the work of the Masoretes and which therefore may reflect earlier forms of the Hebrew text. In such instances a footnote specifies the version or versions from which the correction has been derived and also gives a translation of the Masoretic Text. Where it was deemed appropriate to do so, information is supplied in footnotes from subsidiary Jewish traditions concerning other textual readings (the Tiqqune Sopherim, “emendations of the scribes”). These are identified in the footnotes as “Ancient Heb tradition.”

  Occasionally it is evident that the text has suffered in transmission and that none of the versions provides a satisfactory restoration. Here we can only follow the best judgment of competent scholars as to the most probable reconstruction of the original text. Such reconstructions are indicated in footnotes by the abbreviation Cn (“Correction”), and a translation of the Masoretic Text is added.

  For the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books of the OT the Committee has made use of a number of texts. For most of these books the basic Greek text from which the present translation was made is the edition of the Septuagint prepared by Alfred Rahlfs and published by the Württemberg Bible Society (Stuttgart, 1935). For several of the books the more recently published individual volumes of the Göttingen Septuagint project were utilized. For the book of Tobit it was decided to follow the form of the Greek text found in Codex Sinaiticus (s
upported as it is by evidence from Qumran); where this text is defective, it was supplemented and corrected by other Greek manuscripts. For the three Additions to Daniel (namely, Susanna, the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Jews, and Bel and the Dragon) the Committee continued to use the Greek version attributed to Theodotion (the so-called Theodotion-Daniel). In translating Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), although constant reference was made to the Hebrew fragments of a large portion of this book (those discovered at Qumran and Masada as well as those recovered from the Cairo Geniza), the Committee generally followed the Greek text (including verse numbers) published by Joseph Ziegler in the Göttingen Septuagint (1965). But in many places the Committee has translated the Hebrew text when this provides a reading that is clearly superior to the Greek; the Syriac and Latin versions were also consulted throughout and occasionally adopted. The basic text adopted in rendering 2 Esdras is the Latin version given in Biblia Sacra, edited by Robert Weber (Stuttgart, 1971). This was supplemented by consulting the Latin text as edited by R. L. Bensly (1895) and by Bruno Violet (1910) as well as by taking into account the several Oriental versions of 2 Esdras, namely, the Syriac, Ethiopic, Arabic (two forms, referred to as Arabic 1 and Arabic 2), Armenian, and Georgian versions. Finally, since the Additions to the Book of Esther are disjointed and quite unintelligible as they stand in most editions of the Apocrypha, we have provided them with their original context by translating the whole of the Greek version of Esther from Robert Hanhart’s Göttingen edition (1983).