The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

JAMES A. SANDERS 27
hands of the One God of All. The Prophetic Corpus comes fourth or last,
however, in the quadripartite Christian canon, not so much to explain
God’s uses of adversity as to point to Christ. Even in the Septuagint text,
the words are essentially in broad perspective the same, but the intertextual
structure conveys quite a different hermeneutic by which people
expect to read the text in the believing community. This observation is
all the more poignant when the actual text is the same in the two canons,
Jewish and Protestant, because of the Jerome/Luther heritage.
Not only is the Prophetic Corpus placed last in the Christian canon to
point to the Gospel of Jesus Christ; the second or historical section also
provided the churches with a story line that went from creation down in
history far enough so that they could append the Gospels and Acts, the
Christian sacred history, to that long-established Jewish sacred history.
Such a structure served well the developing Christian argument that the
God of creation was the God incarnate in Jesus Christ, the same God
who had abandoned the old ethnic Israel and adopted the new universal
Israel in Christ and church. In this sense, the Prophets coming last in the
Christian canon not only pointed to God’s work in Christ and the
church; it also could serve the Christian argument that God had rejected
the old Israel in favor of Christ and church, God’s new Israel.
By contrast, the third section of the Jewish Tanak makes an entirely
different kind of statement for surviving rabbinic Judaism. Starting with
Chronicles, as in all the classical Tiberian manuscripts, or ending with
Chronicles, as in b. B. Bat. 14b and received printed texts of the Tanak,
the Ketuvim well served a Judaism that was retreating from history. The
withdrawal from common cultural history came after three disastrous
defeats at the hands of Rome from 4 B.C.E. to 135 C.E., thereafter to
subsist in stasis in an increasingly alien world. Various parts of the
Ketuvim reflect on past history, including Daniel and his friends in the foreign
royal court of long-ago Babylon. The placement of Daniel in the
Ketuvim provided an entirely different hermeneutic by which to read it
and reflect on it, than its placement among the Prophets in Christian
canons. But the Ketuvim, even with its many reflections on past history,
otherwise supports the movement of surviving rabbinic Judaism to
depart from history, to live in closed communities and pursue lives of
obedience and service to a God who had during the course of early
Judaism become more transcendent and ineffable, no longer expected to
intrude into human history until the Messiah would appear. 5
5. See Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, eds., The Canon Debate (Peabody,
MA: Hendrickson, 2002), especially the latter’s contribution: “The Issue of Closure
in the Canonical Process,” 252–63.