Twenty-Two Books

Witness Four in the investigation The Sealed Count — back to the case.

The First Count Outside Scripture

The earliest writer outside the Bible who states the number of Israel’s Scriptures is Josephus. He was born into a priestly family in Jerusalem in 37 AD, lived through the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, and wrote in Rome in the decades after. Around 95 AD he wrote a defense of his people, known as Against Apion, and in its first book he described the Scriptures of Israel.

His account, in plain summary, runs like this. Israel does not have thousands of books that disagree with one another. It has twenty-two books, which contain the record of all past times and are justly believed. Five belong to Moses and contain the Law and the history from creation to the death of Moses. The prophets who came after Moses wrote the events of their own times in thirteen books, down to the reign of the Persian king Artaxerxes. The remaining four books contain hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of life.

Josephus added two things that matter. First, in all the ages that had passed, no one had dared to add anything to these books, take anything away, or change a word. Second, books written after Artaxerxes were not held to the same authority, because the exact line of prophets had ended. In other words, the collection was closed, and Israel knew it was closed.

Josephus wrote this some twenty-five years after the temple fell and roughly three hundred years before the councils of Hippo and Carthage. The count was already fixed, already stated, and already defended against outsiders.

The Church Writers Kept the Same Count

For the next three centuries, the church writers who studied the question kept the same number.

• Melito of Sardis, around 170 AD, traveled east to the land where these things were preached and done, so that he could learn the books accurately. His list, preserved by the church historian Eusebius, contains none of the extra Greek books, and it does not contain Esther.
• Origen, around 230 AD, stated that the books handed down by the Hebrews are twenty-two, matching the number of their letters, and he listed them by their Hebrew names.
• Cyril of Jerusalem, around 350 AD, taught new believers in Jerusalem to read the twenty-two books and to leave the others aside.
• Hilary of Poitiers, in the 360s, counted twenty-two.
• Athanasius of Alexandria, in 367 AD, wrote a letter listing the books of Scripture. He counted twenty-two for the Old Testament and said he had heard that this matched the letters of the Hebrews. He counted Ruth as a book of its own and left Esther out of the twenty-two. He placed Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, and Tobit outside the count as books that could be read for instruction but were not Scripture.
• Jerome, around 391 AD, the most careful Hebrew scholar of the early church, wrote that just as the Hebrews have twenty-two letters, so they count twenty-two books.

These lists do not all draw the edges in the same place. Origen and Jerome included Esther and joined Ruth to Judges to keep the count at twenty-two. Melito and Athanasius left Esther out and let Ruth stand alone, and still reached twenty-two. Athanasius also attached a portion called Baruch to Jeremiah, one of the Greek additions taken up in Witness Five. But the number holds at twenty-two in every one of these lists, and Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and Maccabees stand outside it in every one of them.

How the Books Were Joined

Following the count of Melito and Athanasius, with Ruth on its own and Esther outside, the twenty-two books fall into the three parts Yahushua named in Luke 24:44: the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, which head the third part.

The Law, five books:

• Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.

The Prophets, eight books:

• Joshua.
• Judges.
• Samuel, as one book.
• Kings, as one book.
• Isaiah.
• Jeremiah, with Lamentations joined to it.
• Ezekiel.
• The Twelve, Hosea through Malachi, as one book.

The Writings, nine books:

• Psalms.
• Proverbs.
• Job.
• Song of Songs.
• Ruth.
• Ecclesiastes.
• Daniel.
• Ezra, with Nehemiah joined to it.
• Chronicles, as one book.

Five, eight, and nine make twenty-two. Chronicles stands last, as it did in the collection Yahushua held when He named the blood of Abel and the blood of Zacharias (Luke 11:51).

Why the Books Were Joined

The joins are not arbitrary. They follow the scrolls and the story.

Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles were each written as single works in Hebrew. The split into First and Second came with the Greek translation, because Greek writes out its vowels and takes more room, so the books no longer fit comfortably on one scroll. The twelve shorter prophets were copied together on a single scroll; a Greek scroll of the Twelve found in the Judean desert and a Hebrew scroll of the Twelve found at Wadi Murabba’at both carry them as one collection. Ezra and Nehemiah tell one continuous account of the return from Babylon.

Lamentations mourns the fall of Jerusalem that Jeremiah had prophesied and witnessed, so it naturally belongs with Jeremiah.

The epigraph of this study comes from Isaiah 34:16. In its own setting it speaks of the creatures of a ruined land, each with its mate, none missing. It fits the count well. Seek out the book of Yahuah and read. None of its parts is missing, and the ones that belong together are kept together.

The Question of Esther

Esther is the one book whose place in the count was argued from the start, and the reasons are found in the book itself.

First, Esther never once names Yahuah. It does not even use the word God. No book of the Hebrew Scriptures is more often singled out for that silence. In ten chapters about the deliverance of His people, Esther is silent about the One who delivers.

Second, Esther sets up a feast that Torah never commanded. In Esther 9:20-32, Mordecai and Esther send letters establishing Purim as a yearly observance for all generations. The appointed times of Yahuah are listed in Leviticus 23, and Purim is not among them. Torah is plain on this point: “What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it” (Deuteronomy 12:32). A book that adds a feast to the calendar by royal letter sits uneasily beside the Law that forbids adding.

Third, Esther is the one book of the Hebrew Scriptures not found among the scrolls in the caves near the Dead Sea. Every other book turned up in at least a fragment. Esther did not.

The doubt did not end with the early church. Martin Luther is recorded saying he was so hostile to Esther that he wished it did not exist, though he left it in his Bible. And as Witness Five shows, the Greek translators felt the lack so strongly that they added long prayers and repeated mention of God to the Greek copies of Esther, supplying what the Hebrew book never said.

Including Esther or leaving it out does not change the case on trial. Either way the count is twenty-two, and either way it was fixed long before the councils. But the witnesses who left Esther out, and the reasons found in Esther itself, make the shorter count the stronger one.

Jerome’s Five Doubles

Jerome added one more observation. Five Hebrew letters have a second form, used when they fall at the end of a word: kaph, mem, nun, pe, and tsade. Jerome noted that, in the same way, five of the books are double books: Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra with Nehemiah, and Jeremiah with Lamentations. The count of twenty-two letters with five doubled forms matched the count of twenty-two books with five doubled books.

The Count of Twenty-Four

Jerome also recorded that some took his own list, the one with Esther and with Ruth joined to Judges, and counted Ruth and Lamentations as separate books, which brings the total to twenty-four. Not one book is added and not one is removed. The count of twenty-four later became the more common way of numbering among the Jews, but it is plainly a recount of the twenty-two, not a different Bible.

From Twenty-Two to Thirty-Nine

The Protestant Old Testament makes the same collection into thirty-nine books by undoing every join and adding Esther.

• Splitting Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra-Nehemiah adds four.
• Separating the Twelve into twelve books adds eleven.
• Separating Lamentations from Jeremiah adds one.
• Esther is set among them as one more.

Twenty-two and sixteen make thirty-eight, and Esther makes thirty-nine. The other books are word for word the same. Only the numbering changed, and with it the reader lost sight of the count.

Where the Pulpit Buried It

The pulpit says the church decided which books belonged in the Bible, and that before the councils the matter was unsettled. The record says otherwise. A priest of Jerusalem wrote the count down around 95 AD and said no one had dared to change it. The church’s own scholars repeated the same number for three centuries, matched it to the letters, and placed the Greek additions outside. The count was settled before the councils were called. What the councils did was set aside the testimony of their own scholars.

The believer who opens a Bible with thirty-nine books in the front is holding the twenty-two, cut apart. Nothing is lost in the content. What is lost is the knowledge that the collection was counted, closed, and kept by those to whom the oracles were committed (Romans 3:2).

Revelation, the prophecy Yahuah gave to John, opens with a blessing on the one who reads and keeps what is written: “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein” (Revelation 1:3). The written word was meant to be read and kept, not voted on.

One of five witnesses in a single case. The five together make the case of The Sealed Count.