I. Contents of the Scriptures. — The Scriptures are di- vided into the books held sacred by the Jews, and those held sacred both by Jews and Christians. The former are familiarly known by the name of the Old Test., and the latter by that of the New. See Bible. The Old Test., accortling to the oldi'st catalogue extant in the Christian Church, that of Melito, bishop of Sardis in the 2d century, consists of the five books of Moses, or the Pentateuch (viz. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Num- bers, and Deuteronomy), Josliua, Judges, and Kuth ; four books of Kings and two of Pctralipomena (Chroni- cles) ; the Psalms of David ; the Proverbs of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Canticles, and Job; the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah; the twelve Prophets; the books of Dan- iel, Ezekiel, and Ezra, under which head Nehemiah and Esther seem to be included (Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. iv, 26). Origen, in the next century, reckons twenty-two books, calling them by their Hebrew names, which con- sisted generally of the initial word of the book, viz. Bresith, or Genesis; Walmoth, or Exodus; Waikra, or Leviticus: Ammesphekodeim, or Nundjcrs; Ellahade- barim, or Deuteronomy; Joshua ben-Nun; Sophetim, or Judges and Buth; Samuel; Waiiammelech Dabid, or 3 and 4 Kings; Dibre Hajammin, or Clironicles; Ezra, which included Nehemiah; Sepher Tehillim, or Psalms; Misloth, or Proverbs; Koheleth, or Ecclesiastes; Sir Hasirim, orCaniicles; Isaiah; Jeremiah, Lamentations, and the Epistle; Daniel; Ezekiel; Job; and Esther; "besides which," he adds, "is Sarbath Sarbane El, or Maccabees." He omits, perhaps by an oversight, the book of the twelve minor prophets. To the books enu- merated in the preceding catalogue, Origen applies the term canonical Scriptures, in contradistinction to secirt (apocryphal) and heretical books. He does not, how- ever, include in these latter the dcutero-canonical {tv Sevrepiit, see Cyril of Jerusalem, Cutech. iv, 36) or ec- clesiastical books; to which he also applies the terms Scripture, the Divine Word, and the Sacred Books {De Princip. ii, 1 ; in 0pp. i, 16, 79, etc., Cont. Gels, viii, in 0pp. i, 778). Jerome enumerates twenty-two books, viz.: 1. The Pentateuch, which he terms Thoru, or the Law, 2. The eight prophets, viz. Joshua, Judges and Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiali, Ezekiel, and the twelve jirophets. 3. Nine Hagiographa, viz. Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticles, Daniel, Chronicles, Ezra, and Esther. Some, he ad<ls, enimierate twenty- four books, placing Kuth and Lamentations among the Hagiographa. The other books, reatl in tlie churches, but not found in the canon, as Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, and tlie Shepheni, he terms Apocrypha, With IX.— H H
this catalogue agrees his contemporary Rufinus, who accuses Jerome of comjiiiing, or rather plundering (com- pilandi), the Scriptures, in consequence of the rejection by that father of Susaima and tlie Benedicite. Cyril of Alexandria divides the canonical books into five of Moses, seven other historical, tive metrical, and five pro- phetical.
With these catalogues the Jews also agree. Jose- phus enumerates twenty-two books — five of Moses, thir- teen projihets. and four books of morality. The proph- ets were divided by the ancient Jews into the early prophets (viz. Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) and the later prophets, which were again subdivided into the greater (viz. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel) and the twelve lesser prophets. The Talmud and the modern Jews agree with Jerome's division into eiglit prophets and nine Hagiographa {KethiiUiii).
The canon of the Alexandrian version includes the other books, called ecclesiastical, which we have already given in their order. See Deutero-canonical. As the early Christians (who. were not acquainted with Hebrew) received this version, for which they had the sanction of its employment by the New-Test, writers, and as from it flowed the old Latin and several other ancient versions, we must not be surprised at finding that all these books, being thus placed in the Bible without any mark of distinction, were received indis- criminately by the primitive Christians, and were, equal- ly with the canonical, read in the churches, Jerome, in his Latin translation of the Bible from the Hebrew in the 4lh century, introduced a distinction by means of his prefaces, prefixed to each book, which continued to be placed, in all the MSS. and in the early printed editions of Jerome's version, in the body of the text, from which they were for the first time removed to the beginning or end of the Bible after the decree of the Council of Trent in A.D. 1546 (see Rev. G. C. Gotham's Letter to Van Ess [Lond. 1826]). Luther was the first who separated these books from the others, and re- moved them to a place by themselves in his translation, Lonicer, in his edition of the Sept,, 1526, followed his example, but gave so much offence bj' so doing that they were restored to their places by Cephalaeus in 1529. They were, however, published in a separate form by Plantin in 1575, and have been, since that pe- riod, omitted in many editions of the Sept. Although they were never received into the canon either by the Palestinian or Alexandrian Jews, yet they seem to have been, by the latter, considered as an appendix to the canon (De Wette, Einleitung). There are, besides these, many books cited which have long since perished, as the book of .lasher (Josh, x, 13 ; 2 Sam. i, 18), and the book of the Wars of Jehovah (Numb, xxi, 14). Some books bearing these names have been printed, but they are forgeries. Tlie book of Jaslier, however, published at New York in 1810, is not, as would appear from the appendix to Parker's translation of De Wette's Intro- duction, a reprint of the Bristol forgery, but a transla- tion of the much more respectable (though also spuri- ous) book of Jasher wliich we have already referred to as published at Naples in 1625, and written in excellent Hebrew before the close of the 15th century. See the American Christian Examiner for May, 1840. See Jasheh.