The Old Testament, the Tanakh, and the Hebrew Bible

Robert Burns’s famous couplet came to mind as I read this book: “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!” In this case, the “Power” is two Jewish scholars, Amy-Jill Levine, who teaches New Testament and Jewish studies at Vander­bilt University, and Marc Zvi Brettler, who teaches Jewish studies at Duke. Together, they examine roughly a dozen biblical passages that the New Testament cites from the Old, employing three lenses: a historical-critical reading in search of the text’s “original meaning,” the appropriation of that text in the New Testament (and often by early Christian writers), and the appropriation of the same text in the early rabbinic tradition (usually ending with the Mishnah but sometimes extending through the Talmud or even medieval commentators).

The authors plainly state their objective: to enlighten both Jews and Christians (but clearly primarily the latter) as to how adherents of the other tradition have both in good faith and within reasonable interpretive boundaries read the same texts in very different ways. Such differences, they aver, should stimulate not polemics but “possibilities” of mutual respect and enlightenment. They are overtly not interested in simply finding commonalities between Christian and Jewish readings (although I found myself intrigued by how often later interpretations overlapped for reasons entirely internal to their respective faith traditions).

Levine and Brettler deal almost immediately with the problem of nomenclature: What shall we call the source collection of texts? Any term in use by one tradition is problematic to the other. In the end, they settle on “Old Testament” when discussing Christian appropriation of the collection, “Tanakh” for Jewish usage, and “Hebrew Bible” when examining the texts in their original context. The latter comes across as their least bad choice, as no faith community employs a body of writings by this name; it’s a term favored by scholars for its supposed neutrality. But it has its own baggage. Indeed, Levine has elsewhere written: “The so-called ‘neutral’ term is actually one of Protestant hegemony.”