At the same time the canons have important similarities:  1) The first 9/11 books are identical  2) Although some of the books are numbered and arranged differently in the two collections, the content of canons is exactly the same.

 1.12  Which canon is the oldest arrangement?  There is quite a debate as to which truly is the oldest but it is generally considered that the TaNaK is the oldest of the two.  It needs to be remembered though that there was no one book which comprised the Bible but 24 separate scrolls that would have been kept in the temple and synagogue libraries.  The earliest evidence for the Old Testament order comes from 5th Century Greek manuscripts which were obviously the work of  Christian scribes.  This evidence was found in codices which--in contrast to separate scrolls- necessitated a fixed order since the entire content of the scrolls was placed in a book format.  There are some scholars who have argued that the invention of the codex around the second century BC placed pressure on the Jewish community to come to a n agreement regarding the order of the scrolls.  Although there probably is truth to this argument, it is nonetheless equally true that there is substantial evidence to a previously existing Jewish arrangement of canonical scrolls.  For the antiquity of the Jewish order there is the following terminology found in early texts (pre 100 A.D.).  The terminology generally occurs in two forms, a short form--a bipartite designation for the canon, and a long form-- a  tripartite designation.  These can be used alongside each other but they clearly refer to the same content:

 Towards the end of the 7th century BC there is the first evidence of book-burning in history.  A large scroll was being cut up systematically and thrown into a fire by a high ranking censor who did not want the public to gain access to what he considered as very dangerous information.   The scroll contained information that was damaging to the health of the nation as far as the official bureacracy was concerned.  It might startle you to know that the book being burned was part of  what later came to be known as the Old Testament.  It was the scroll of the prophet Jeremiah and the one doing the burning was the king of Judah.  Jehoiachin knew what all despots have come to know:  the words of the prophets are dangerous!  People in authority and power generally dislike them because these words tend to burn them, reminding them of a Higher Power and Higher Authority to which they must be accountable. 

 

The words of  the Bible can be censored in other ways too.  There are different means of control.  In the modern world we are familiar with the book-burning thought control type of censorship popularized in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.  We are probably not sufficiently aware of a more subtle type of censorship which  is described by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World.  In the Orwellian World information external to the person is rigidly controlled and censored; reading is strictly limited.  In the Huxleyan version the person is stimulated so much that there is no interest in reading.  Reading becomes unimportant.  Truth becomes trivialized. 

 

  But there are even further ways to censor.  Texts can be so laden with a system of interpretation that their original meaning can be distorted or even relegated to unimportance.  Soren Kierkegaard lamented this situation in his own time:

Imagine a country.  A royal command is issued to all the offfice-bearers and subjects, in short to the whole population.  A remarkable change comes over them all.  They all become interpreters, the office bearers become authors, every blessed day there comes out an interpretation more learned than the last, more acute, more elegant, more profound, more ingenious, more wonderful, more charming,  more wonderfully charming.  Criticism which ought to survey the whole can hardly attain the survey of this prodigious literature, indeed criticism itself has become a literature so prolix that it is impossible to attain a survey of criticism.  Everything became interpretation but no one reads the royal command with a view to acting in accordance with it.

 

The Danish philosopher realised there were respectable ways to avoid the bare meaning of the text. To truly understand the Bible one of the requirements is that you will have to read the text itself in its purest form and wrestle with the bare meaning as much as possible. To be sure there is a textbook--interpretation. But this is simply to aid in understanding, not to mask it.  Every effort should  be made to bring you into contact with the text itself so it can do its dangerous work.

 

There are ways in which the text is censored simply by reading it through the lens of our own time and place without being conscious of this fact.  Thus the medieval paintings  depicted the ancient world in the garb of the Middle Ages; modern westerners read the ancient text through the eyes of people with middle class western values and find that Abraham is much like them.  The context of the 20th century is collapsed  with that of the 20th century B.C. and many times the message of the Bible become muted or censored.  Thus for Abraham to leave his family  is nothing much for a highly mobile, rootless culture living at the turn of the 3rd millennium AD.  But for Mesopotamian culture living at the turn of the 2nd millenium BC, the decision is stupendous.  Not to appreciate the radical significance of Abraham's action is not to understand it.  Similarly, westerners who swim in a sea of information know very little about the use of words invested with power such as the blessing and the curse.  Failure to understand this is to fail to understand texts such as Genesis 27 which are filled with life and death significance, as souls are tormented over the failure to receive blessing.  Similarly, the stories of Baalam, are momentous stories in the text for ancient listeners as the destiny of the Israelites hangs on the very words of the ancient prophet.

 

      Scott Peck cites a contemporary example of cross-cultural miscommunication which illustrates the dangers involved in misinterpretation.   Two marines stationed in Okinawa completely misinterpreted the reaction of a young mother by assuming her reaction to a near tragedy would be the same as an American's.  The soldiers had just missed  killing  her young child who was playing on the road when their jeep drove recklessly by.  They stopped to see if he was all right and his mother rushed out from a nearby house laughing hysterically, picked up her child and retreated laughing uncontrollably into her house.  The marines returned to their jeep in disgust at how the natives had such a low regard for human life.  Peck makes the point that they had completely misinterpreted her reaction.  Laughing hysterically in Okinawan culture is an indicator of profound grief and shock.  As faithful interpreters of scripture, the student must necessarily learn about the biblical culture so that similar misunderstandings may not occur.  This means not only paying attention to the text but also to any information which helps elucidate the culture in which the text received its first expression.  This means reading other texts from the same general time period and culture:  inscriptions, epics, letters, seals, creation stories, disaster stories, etc.  It also means paying attention to artifacts unearthed by archaeologists from the culture:  pottery, art, buildings, monuments, aqueducts, etc.  This can help shed light on the culture and help flesh it out for understanding.  So we not only need to listen to the biblical text, we must listen to in its own particular historical and cultural context in order to make any sense of it.

•    There are some interpreters that would censor the text by stressing the last point to the ultimate degree.  They would say that there so much distance between modern culture and the culture that produced the Bible that communication is inherently impossible.  We must remember, however, that human beings in many respects are the same.  There is a consistent human nature:  joy, grief, catastrophe, ecstasy were the experience of ancient Mesopotamians as well as modern Westerners.  Ancient idolatry took one form; who would deny that modern idolatry takes another?  Whether one murders with the arrow, the catapult or the atom bomb, all these actions are  united by the desire to kill.  Whether infants are sacrificed on the altars of Moloch by being burned to death, or sacrificed on the altars of Sexual Pleasure and Convenience by being aborted, the intent is the same.  Whether someone helps a victim fallen prey to thieves in an ancient time or helps a victim of loneliness in a modern elevator, there is a consistency that unites the actions.  Love and hate can be expressed differently in different eras but they are nonetheless recognized because of the unity of human nature.  Never forget that your humanity can help you bridge the distance between the message that is found in the Bible and your own time.
 
 
Finally I mention an important factor interpretation that Christians will appreciate, prayer and obedience  The Bible claims to be the Word of God.  If this is true, then the truth will be uneasily disclosed to a mind that is not humbled by the act of prayer, nor even to the disobedient  disciple.  To the unbeliever, the secular equivalent to these spiritual disciplines, is an open and enquiring mind, that wishes to learn the truth as much as possible.  A king who had a more positive example of what it means to read the Old Testament was the father of Jehoachin, who had burned the copy of the scroll of Jeremiah.  When the father  read the book of the Torah he ripped his clothes rather than the book and he trembled with fear.  He knew that he was not master of the book but rather that the book was master of him.  Immediately he began to change his life and the life of the nation.  He furnishes an example of a proper reading of the Bible.  He was mastered by the text rather than  a master of the the text.  The literary scholar,  Erich Auerbach, furnishes a profound observation about the scriptures that provides a fitting conclusion to this section:
 
   The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historically true reality--it insists that it isi the only  real world and is destined for autocracy...The scripture stories do not like Homer's court our favour, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us--they seek to subject us and if we refuse to be subjected, we are rebels.