Archpriest

Nikolay Sokolov

Old Testament

Course of lectures

Part One

(Initial page numbers are in curly brackets)

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INTRODUCTION

LECTURE 1

Today we begin a series of lectures on one of the greatest books in the world – the Bible, or rather its first part, which is called the Old Testament. The theme of our lectures over the course of two years will be the experience of theological comprehension and revelation of the meaning of the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament as an enduring value in the realm of spiritual values, as a value that receives its interpretation in the light of the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament and in the general context of the Church's understanding of the ways of salvific Divine Providence.

I did not make a mistake – namely the New Testament. All our lectures will have, as a rule, references to the New Testament, since we are already people of the New Testament and should not and cannot think in terms of the Old Testament. Everything that we will study in the course of the Old Testament, we will consider from the point of view of the New Testament, the Gospel teaching of Christ the Savior.

For us, Christians of the twentieth century, St. The Scriptures of the Old Testament remain of great value, because in them we find the unchanging, enduring truth revealed to us by God for the sake of the vital connection and the personal relationship that God was pleased to establish between Himself and man. Such connections between God and man are established through the word.

If I meet you for the first time, then we will get to know each other through the word. I will say a word to you, you will answer me, and in this way we will get to know each other, give each other the information necessary for closer communication. Therefore, the name "Word of God" befits the Holy Scriptures. Scriptures. St. For us, Christians, the Scriptures are a source in the spiritual, dogmatic and moral senses. It is in the Holy Scriptures. In the Scriptures, one can find—and people do—the way, the truth, and the life that are the essence of Christianity.

In the lectures we will reveal the significance of the Old Testament as the history of the people of God, the history of the Old Testament moral teaching, as the history of the transmission of revelation to mankind, and we will try, as far as possible, to point out the main moments in the history of the Old Testament as the testimony of God Himself. We should not perceive the Bible as an abstract book, we should see in it not just a monument of ancient culture, but something more – an eternally living, relevant word that contributes to the rebirth and transformation of the personality of each person.

So, before us is the Bible. Try to have your Bible with you while lecturing. In any case, each of you, of course, should have it at home. When we started reading this course of lectures for the first time a few years ago, many of us had never even seen this book, they just knew that it existed. And the first questions that were asked at the lectures were as follows: is it possible to read this or that edition of the Bible, is it not a sin to use, say, a Protestant edition? Any edition of the Bible is a normal edition. If it says "Holy Scripture of the Old (or New) Testament" or "Bible", then any publication – Vatican, Orthodox, Protestant, translated into Russian – can be read. Sometimes, however, you can hear: "My Bible is not Orthodox, I will not read it, it lacks several books."

Let's open the Bible and look at the table of contents. For example, I have a Catholic Bible, but it was published according to the text of the Synodal edition in 1968. There are 50 Old Testament books here. And in the Hebrew Bible there are 22 books. The Protestant edition contains 39 books. There are other publications, where the number of books is also different. There is, for example, where there are 45 books.

What is the matter here? Whatever the edition, then a different number of books. Maybe they are deliberately thrown out of this or that publication? Is it possible to read a Bible with 39 or 45 books as one in which the Old Testament contains 50 books, and the New Testament contains 27? Note that the number of books in the New Testament is always, in any edition, unchanged. The Old Testament edition depends on the publisher. If a complete Old Testament is published—canonical and non-canonical books—it means that it includes all the texts that have ever been published under the name "Old Testament."

We can take any Bible, since the texts of all the books that are printed in it are unchanged. It's just that some books are absent in certain publications, since they are not spiritual authority for the publishers that published them. These are mainly Protestant publishing houses that do not recognize non-canonical books. We will talk about them in more detail later. So you can read and study any Bible, and if it lacks certain books, you can find them in other publications.