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Which Books Make Up the Old Testament? 47
I think Robert Stein is right when he says that the use of the word
“Psalms,” instead of “Writings,” is owing to the fact that Psalms was
the first and the largest book in the Writings and probably came to
stand for the whole. 5 Having mentioned the three parts of the Hebrew
Scriptures, Luke says in the next verse, “Then he opened their minds to
understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:45). In other words, what Jesus
had just designated “Law of Moses, Prophets, and Psalms,” Luke now
calls “the Scriptures.” This is a strong indication that Jesus’s Bible was
not the Septuagint, with its added books and its different arrangement,
but the Hebrew Bible, the structure of which he took for granted.
The most significant demonstration that Jesus’s Bible contained only
the books of the Hebrew Bible, not including the apocryphal books of
the Septuagint, is the assumption he shared with his people that the
Bible began with Genesis and closed with 2 Chronicles (unlike the Septuagint).
We can see this in Luke 11:49–51:
The Wisdom of God said, “I will send them prophets and apostles,
some of whom they will kill and persecute,” so that the blood of
all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, may be
charged against this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood
of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary.
Yes, I tell you, it will be required of this generation.
At first, we may be puzzled why Jesus spoke of the blood of the prophets
extending “from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah.”
Calling Abel a prophet is probably explained in that his blood cried out
prophetically against his murderer: “The Lord said, ‘What have you
[Cain] done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the
ground’” (Gen. 4:10).
But what about Zechariah? His stoning is recorded in the Old Testament
book of 2 Chronicles 24:20–21:
Then the Spirit of God clothed Zechariah the son of Jehoiada the
priest, and he stood above the people, and said to them, “Thus says
God, ‘Why do you break the commandments of the Lord, so that
5
R. H. Stein, Luke (Nashville: B&H, 1992), 620. Psalms “probably refers to the third major section
of the Old Testament, called the ‘Writings,’ which contains the rest of the books in the Old Testament
[after the Law and the Prophets]. The first (in the Hebrew arrangement) and largest book in this section
is the Psalms.”