Ветхий Завет

The earliest division of the Bible, dating back to the times of the first Christian Church, was its division into two, far from equal parts, called the Old and New Testaments. This division of the entire composition of biblical books was due to their relationship to the main subject of the Bible, i.e., to the personality of the Messiah: those books that were written before the coming of Christ and only prophetically depicted Him were included in the “Old Testament”, and those that arose after the coming of the Savior to the world and are devoted to the history of His redemptive ministry and the exposition of the foundations established by Jesus Christ and His holy apostles The churches formed the “New Testament”. All these terms, that is, both the word “testament” itself and its combination with the adjectives “old” and “new”, are taken from the Bible itself, in which, in addition to their general meaning, they also have a special meaning, in which we also use them when talking about famous biblical books. The word “covenant” (Heb. - bêrit, Greek - διαθήκη, Lat. - testamentum), in the language of Holy Scripture and biblical usage, first of all, means a well-known decree, condition, law on which two contracting parties agree, and from here - this agreement or union itself, as well as those external signs that served as its certification, a bond, as if a seal (testamentum). And since the sacred books in which this covenant or union of God with man was described were, of course, one of the best means of authenticating it and consolidating it in the people’s memory, the name “covenant” was also transferred to them very early on. It already existed in the era of Moses, as can be seen from Exodus 24.7, where the record of the Sinai legislation read by Moses to the Jewish people is called the book of the covenant (sefer habberit). Similar expressions, denoting not just the Sinai legislation, but the entire Mosaic Pentateuch, are found in subsequent Old Testament books (2 Kings 23.2–21; Sir 24.25; 1 Mac 1.57). The Old Testament also contains the first, still prophetic indication of the New Testament, namely, in the famous prophecy of Jeremiah: “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah” (Jer 31.31). Subsequently, the term New Testament was repeatedly used by Jesus Christ himself and His holy apostles to designate the beginning of the history of redeemed and blessed humanity (Matthew 26.28; Mark 14.24; Luke 22.20; 1 Cor 11.25; 2 Cor 3.6, etc.), from where it was transferred to the sacred books written during this period. The name Old Testament, as applied to certain books, originates from the particularly clear testimony of the Apostle Paul: but their (Jews) minds are blinded: for the same veil remains untaken to this day when reading the Old Testament, because it is removed by Christ (2 Cor 3.14). As part of the “Old Testament,” the Orthodox Church, as we said above, has 38 canonical and 9 non-canonical books, differing in this from the Roman Catholic Church, which has 46 canonical books in its Vulgate (they consider Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon and the two books of Maccabees to be canonical). As for, finally, the very order of arrangement of the books of the “Old Testament”, there is a rather sharp difference between the Hebrew Bible, on the one hand, and the Greek translation of the LXX translators, and hence our Slavic-Russian Bible, on the other hand. To understand this difference, it is necessary to know that the ancient Jews divided their books not so much according to the homogeneity of their content (like the LXX and Slavic-Russian), but rather according to the degree of their meaning and importance. In this sense, they divided all the Old Testament books into three groups: “law” (“Torah”), “prophets” (“nebiim”) and “hagiographers” (“ketubim”), especially emphasizing the importance of the first two groups, i.e. “law” and “prophets” (Matthew 5.17, 7:12, 22:40). We now, following the LXX translators and the Vulgate, have adopted another division, based on the nature of the very content of the Old Testament books, into the following four groups: 1) books of law; 2) historical; 3) teaching and 4) prophetic. This arrangement and division of books in the Hebrew and Slavic-Russian Bibles will be most visible from the following table: You might be interested in: