The Sealed Count

The Teaching on Trial

Ask almost any believer where the Bible came from, and the answer will point to a church meeting. The details change with the pew, but the picture stays the same.

The Catholic answer is open about it. The Bible came from the church. Bishops met at Hippo in 393 and at Carthage in 397 and wrote down which books belonged. The Council of Trent in 1546 sealed that list and placed a curse on anyone who rejected it. In this teaching the church’s authority comes first, and the book comes second, because the church is the one that decided what the book would hold.

The Protestant answer sounds humbler, but it lands in the same place. One version, repeated in Sunday schools and on the internet for a generation, says the Council of Nicea picked the books of the Bible in 325. That council never did any such thing. It met over the teaching of Arius and the date of the spring festival, and it issued no list of books at all. The more careful Protestant version says the early church slowly “recognized” the right books over four centuries until the matter was settled. Either way, the believer walks away thinking the Old Testament was an open question until the church closed it.

Both camps also speak of the Old Testament as thirty-nine books, as if that number were its original shape. The Catholic Bible counts forty-six. Neither number is the count Israel kept.

What Scripture Says First

Paul answered the question before any council was called. Writing to the assembly at Rome around 57 AD, he asked what advantage belonged to the Jew, and answered:

ROMANS 3:2 — KJV

Much every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God.

The oracles were already committed. They were already in hand, already entrusted, already a closed deposit that could be named in one word. Paul did not say the oracles would be gathered someday by the church. He said they had been placed with Israel. A council meeting three centuries later could receive that deposit or tamper with it. It could not create it.

Yahushua spoke the same way. After His resurrection He opened the minds of His disciples to everything written about Him “in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms” (Luke 24:44). That is the three-part shape of the Hebrew Scriptures, named by its parts. He did not leave the disciples guessing which scrolls counted. He named the shelves.

He also named the bookends. Rebuking the scribes of His day, He said the blood of every prophet would be required of that generation:

LUKE 11:51 — KJV

From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation.

Abel is murdered in Genesis, the first book. Zechariah, son of Jehoiada, is stoned in the court of the house of Yahuah in 2 Chronicles 24:20-21. In the Hebrew order of the books, Chronicles stands last. Yahushua named the first martyr in the first book and the last martyr in the last book of the Hebrew Scriptures, the books Christians now call the Old Testament. The collection He held in His hands had a front cover and a back cover, and He knew where both were.

The Count

The Scriptures Israel kept were counted as twenty-two books. The Hebrew alphabet has twenty-two letters. The first writer outside Scripture who states the count, the priest-historian Josephus, wrote it down around 95 AD. The church writers who followed him repeated the same number for three hundred years, and several of them said outright that the twenty-two books answer to the twenty-two letters.

That number did not appear from nowhere. Five witnesses stand behind it, each from a different direction.

• Witness One, The Almond Watch. The golden lampstand that burned before the Law carried twenty-two almond bowls, a count set at Sinai.
• Witness Two, Letters in Stone. Dig sites in the land show the twenty-two-letter alphabet written out in order from the days of the judges through the days of the kings.
• Witness Three, The Alphabet Psalms. Scripture writes some of its own chapters on a frame of twenty-two letters, from aleph to tav, with Psalm 119 giving the whole alphabet to the Law.
• Witness Four, Twenty-Two Books. The men who counted the books, and how the books were joined into twenty-two.
• Witness Five, The Greek Addition. Where the extra books came from, and how a Greek translation made in Egypt grew into the list the councils voted on.

How Twenty-Two Became Thirty-Nine

The difference between twenty-two and thirty-nine is mostly a difference in counting. The Hebrew count kept Samuel as one book, Kings as one, Chronicles as one, and Ezra with Nehemiah as one. It kept the twelve shorter prophets, Hosea through Malachi, together as one book called the Twelve. It joined Lamentations to Jeremiah. Ruth stood as a book of its own.

One book stands outside the count. The earliest church writer to name the books one by one, Melito of Sardis around 170 AD, did not include Esther. Athanasius of Alexandria, writing in 367 AD, counted twenty-two books with Ruth on its own and Esther left out. Esther never once names Yahuah, it sets up a yearly feast that Torah never commanded, and it is the one book of the Hebrew Scriptures not found among the scrolls in the caves near the Dead Sea. Witness Four takes up the question in full.

Cut the joined books apart and the count climbs. Splitting Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra-Nehemiah adds four. Separating the Twelve adds eleven. Separating Lamentations adds one. Twenty-two plus sixteen is thirty-eight, and adding Esther makes thirty-nine. The Protestant Old Testament is the twenty-two, word for word, renumbered, with Esther set among them.

The Catholic forty-six is a different matter. It takes the same thirty-nine and adds seven more books, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and First and Second Maccabees, along with extra chapters in Esther and Daniel. Those books were never part of the twenty-two. Witness Five follows them back to where they entered.

What Is Not on Trial

This investigation concerns the Scriptures committed to Israel, the books Christians call the Old Testament. The apostolic writings, the eyewitness accounts and letters gathered into what is called the New Testament, are a separate question and are not on trial here. When “Greek books” are mentioned in this case, the phrase means Old Testament books carried in Greek copies, such as Tobit, Judith, and Maccabees, not the apostolic writings.

Revelation stands apart from the eyewitness accounts. It does not present itself as a memoir. It opens as “the Revelation of Yahushua the Messiah, which God gave unto him” (Revelation 1:1), calls itself a prophecy (Revelation 1:3; 22:7, 10), and was written down by command, the way Yahuah commanded the prophets before it to write (Revelation 1:11, 19; Jeremiah 30:2; Habakkuk 2:2). It is cited in this investigation as a prophecy given by Yahuah, carrying the same seal Torah carried.

The Method

Scripture is the authority in this investigation. The count of twenty-two appears in the text itself, in the almonds of the lampstand and in the alphabet poems of the Psalms, Proverbs, and Lamentations. History is called as a second witness, never as the judge. Its job is to show that the count Scripture already carried was known, stated, and kept by the people who handled the scrolls. Torah requires more than one witness to establish a matter (Deuteronomy 19:15). This case calls five.

Where the Pulpit Buried It

The pulpit teaches that the church gave the world its Bible. The record runs the other way. The oracles were committed to Israel before the first assembly met in Jerusalem. The count was stated in writing three hundred years before Hippo. Yahushua named the first book and the last book while the councils were still centuries away.

What the councils did do was add and renumber. They took books from a Greek translation and set them beside the Hebrew Scriptures, and later generations cut the remaining books apart until no reader could see the count. Deuteronomy 4:2 forbids both moves. Yahuah’s word is not to be added to, and it is not to be diminished. A count that is sealed does not need a vote. It needs to be kept.

The prophecy Yahuah gave to John carries the same seal over its own words. Revelation 22:18-19 warns that anyone who adds to the words of the book of this prophecy will receive the plagues written in it, and anyone who takes away will lose his part in the book of life. The rule that guarded the Law at Sinai still guards the word of Yahuah at the end. What He seals, no council may open.