Bible. A.T. (hébreu)

The text that libraries catalog under the heading "Bible. O.T. (Hebrew)" refers to the Old Testament in its original language — that is, the complete body of sacred books that the Jewish tradition calls the Tanakh — an acronym formed from its three constituent sections: the Torah (the Law), the Nevi'im (the Prophets), and the Ketouvim (the Writings) [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. This bibliographic designation, inherited from Western cataloging conventions grounded in the Christian perspective, in fact covers a corpus whose identity, for Judaism, has nothing of an "old testament" about it: it is the whole of Scripture, the Mikra ("that which is read"), the foundation of revelation and of halakha.

Composed principally in Biblical Hebrew — with some passages in Aramaic, notably in the books of Daniel and Ezra — this corpus took shape over nearly a millennium, from the earliest oral and written traditions of the second millennium before the common era through the gradual closing of the canon in the first centuries of the common era. The history of this text is twofold: it is at once the history of a literary and theological composition, and that of an extraordinarily faithful material transmission, ensured by generations of scribes and then of Masoretes. The present work aims to trace this double trajectory, distinguishing what Memory transmits, what the archive establishes, and the points at which the two come into confrontation with each other.

The tripartite structure of the Tanakh is attested from Antiquity. The Torah gathers the five books attributed by tradition to Moses — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy —, hence the Greek name Pentateuch. The Nevi'im are divided into Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) and Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve "minor" prophets). The Ketouvim bring together a heterogeneous collection: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the five scrolls (Meguillot: Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther), Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

This organization differs from that of the Christian Old Testament, which follows the order of the Greek translation known as the Septuagint and adds, depending on the confession, deuterocanonical books absent from the Hebrew canon. The traditional Jewish count retains twenty-four books, a grouping obtained by counting the twelve minor prophets as a single unit, along with the pairs Samuel, Kings, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles. The earliest mention of a tripartite division appears in the Greek prologue of the book of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), in the 2nd century before the common era, which refers to "the Law, the Prophets, and the other writings" — a testimony that historians regard as a decisive milestone for dating the recognition of the first two sections. The scholarly designation "Hebrew Bible" has established itself in modern research as a neutral term, preferable to "Old Testament" when studying the corpus in its own coherence [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The question of the origins of the biblical books has been one of the great undertakings of philology since the seventeenth century. Historical criticism, developed notably by Julius Wellhausen in the nineteenth century, proposed for the Pentateuch the "documentary hypothesis," according to which the Torah would result from the combination of several distinct redactional sources, composed at different periods and then assembled by editors. While the precise modalities of this model are today the subject of lively debate within academic exegesis, the idea of a formation through successive strata remains widely accepted [according to the work of modern biblical criticism].

The prophetic books bear, for their part, the mark of historical figures active between the eighth and sixth centuries before the common era, whose oracles were gathered, supplemented, and organized by disciples. The Ketouvim cover a very broad chronological range: certain psalms sink their roots into the liturgy of the First Temple, while the book of Daniel, in its current form, is generally dated to the Hellenistic period, around the second century before the common era. This stratification explains the diversity of genres — narrative, law, poetry, wisdom, apocalyptic — gathered under a single binding. Research thus distinguishes the voice of Memory, which attributes each book to a founding author, and that of the philological archive, which reconstructs collective and progressive processes [according to the work of modern biblical criticism].

The fixing of the list of books recognized as sacred — the canon — was a long and gradual process, not a single act. The Torah appears to have acquired its authority as early as the Persian period, around the 5th century BCE, during the restoration led by Ezra. The Prophets were recognized thereafter, and the Writings remained the section whose boundaries stayed uncertain the longest. Rabbinic tradition long associated the closure of the canon with an alleged "Council of Jamnia" (Yavné), toward the end of the 1st century CE; but this notion, popularized by 19th-century scholarship, is today considered a historiographical construction: there was no formal synod, but rather a series of rabbinic discussions spread over time, bearing notably on the status of books such as the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes [according to Development of the Hebrew Bible canon, Wikipedia].

It is precisely here that Memory and archive answer one another. The traditional narrative of a solemn decision runs up against documentary evidence, which suggests instead a long period of maturation. The rabbinic sources of the Mishna and the Talmud preserve traces of debates concerning books that "defile the hands" — a technical phrase designating the sacred character of a text. The discovery of the Manuscripts de la mer Morte came to confirm that at the turn of the era, the list of authoritative books had not yet been entirely and uniformly settled, with certain Jewish groups making use of texts that would not enter the final canon. The historian thus recognizes a diffuse closure, accomplished for the most part in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE within nascent rabbinic Judaism [according to Development of the Hebrew Bible canon, Wikipedia].

The discovery, between 1947 and 1956, of the scrolls concealed in the caves of Qumrân, near the Dead Sea, constituted the most profound revolution in the history of textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. These manuscripts, copied between the 3rd century before the common era and the 1st century of the common era, include fragments of nearly all the biblical books and push back by approximately one thousand years the date of the oldest known Hebrew witnesses until then. The celebrated great Isaiah scroll, recovered in nearly complete form, stands as its crowning achievement [according to the editions and studies of the Dead Sea Manuscripts].

The contribution of Qumrân is twofold. On the one hand, it reveals an unsuspected textual plurality: alongside a type of text very close to what would become the Masoretic text, one finds readings related to the Greek Septuagint and to the Samaritan Pentateuch, a sign that several "families" of text coexisted before standardization. On the other hand, and in a striking manner, the comparison of the Isaiah scroll with medieval manuscripts has demonstrated a remarkable stability of the textual tradition over more than a millennium, validating the fidelity of the scribes' work. The material archive thus confirms both the ancient diversity and the subsequent fixing of the text, providing scholars with an incomparable anchor point for reconstructing the history of the Mikra [according to the editions and studies of the Dead Sea Manuscripts].

The Hebrew text received and printed in modern editions is the Masoretic text, the fruit of the labor of the Masoretes — families of scholars active primarily between the 6th and 10th centuries of the Common Era, in the centers of Tiberias, Babylonia, and Palestine. Biblical Hebrew, originally written without vowels, risked losing its correct reading; the Masoretes invented and perfected systems of vowel signs (niqqoud) and cantillation accents (te'amim), as well as an apparatus of marginal notes, the Massora, intended to fix spelling, the counting of words and verses, and to prevent any alteration [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

Among these schools, that of Tiberias, and in particular the Ben Asher family, ultimately established itself as the reference. Two manuscripts embody this tradition. The Aleppo Codex (Keter Aram Tsova), copied around the 10th century and vocalized by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, was regarded as the most perfect of codices; severely damaged during the 1947 riots in Aleppo, only a portion of it survives. The Leningrad Codex (Firkovitch B19a), dated to 1008–1009 and preserved in Saint-Pétersbourg, is by contrast the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, and serves as the basis for modern critical editions such as the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia [according to the notices of the major critical editions]. The Masoretic work represents the culmination of an unparalleled effort at preservation, which transmitted the consonantal text with an accuracy that the Qumrân manuscripts have retrospectively confirmed.

From the Hebrew text established by the Masoretes, the Bible has achieved a worldwide dissemination that makes it the most translated work in history. In Antiquity, the Greek translation of the Septuagint, produced in Alexandria from the 3rd century before the common era, had offered Hellenistic Judaism and then nascent Christianity access to the corpus; the Aramaic targoumim, read in synagogues, offered paraphrased versions; and Jerome's Latin Vulgate, in the 4th–5th century, was established in part from the hebraica veritas — that is, the Hebrew text itself [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The invention of printing marked a new stage. The first complete printed edition of the Hebrew Bible came to light in Soncino, Italy, in 1488, followed by the great rabbinic Bibles (Mikraot Guedolot) published in Venice by Daniel Bomberg at the beginning of the 16th century, which brought together the text, the Massora, the targoumim, and the classical commentaries. These editions durably fixed the presentation of the text studied in yeshivot as well as in universities. Contemporary scholarship, enriched by the discoveries of the 20th century, continues the work of producing rigorous critical editions that set the Masoretic text against the Qumran witnesses and ancient versions. Thus the tradition of transmission and learned investigation continue to speak to one another, the one ensuring the continuity of the received text, the other illuminating its genesis [according to the notes of the major critical editions].

The "Bible. O.T. (Hebrew)" that catalogs designate is not a simple bibliographic object: it is the result of a multi-century process of composition, gradual canonization, and textual transmission of exceptional fidelity. From the stratification of sources to the diffuse closure of the rabbinic canon, from the textual families revealed by Qumrân to the vocalic and critical work of the Masoretes of Tiberias, then to printed diffusion from Soncino and Venice, this corpus offers the historian a terrain where the Memory of tradition and the evidence of the archive illuminate one another. The Hebrew text remains, at once, the living foundation of Jewish religious practice and one of the most scrutinized objects of Western philology — a witness to what the patient preservation of a book can accomplish across the millennia.