Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 24:3 (Fall 2020)
Article: Chaos Theory And The Text Of The Old Testament
Author: Peter J. Gentry

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Chaos Theory And The Text Of The Old Testament1

Peter J. Gentry

Peter J. Gentry is Donald L. Williams Professor of Old Testament Interpretation and Director of the Hexapla Institute at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has served on the faculty of Toronto Baptist Seminary and Bible College and also taught at the University of Toronto, Heritage Theological Seminary, and Tyndale Seminary. Dr. Gentry is the author of many articles and book reviews, the co-author of Kingdom through Covenant, 2nd ed. (Crossway, 2018) and God’s Kingdom through God’s Covenants (Crossway, 2015), and the author of How to Read and Understand the Biblical Prophets (Crossway, 2017), and he recently published a critical edition of Ecclesiastes for the Göttingen Septuagint (2019).

Introduction

Canon and Text are closely related. For those who believe in divine revelation mediated by authorized agents, the central questions are (1) which writings come from these agents authorized to speak for God and (2) have their writings been reliably transmitted to us? Although my inquiry is focused on the latter question, the former is logically prior. How one answers the first question will determine evaluation of evidence relating to the second.

What defines a canonical text according to Nahum Sarna, is “a fixed arrangement of content” and “the tendency to produce a standardized text.”2 Since the very first biblical text constituted a covenant, this automatically implies a fixed arrangement of content and a standard text. I am referring to the Covenant at Sinai, a marriage between Yahweh and Israel. A marriage contract does not have a long oral pre-history. Its content is fixed from the start. The current view today is that the content and text of the Old Testament (OT) was not standard until the second century AD. So Jesus could

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not really know for sure what writings were inspired by God nor did he have a stabilized text. This is what I am calling, “chaos theory.”

Analysis of the evidence has led me to conclude that the text of the OT in content, arrangement, and stability was fixed probably at the beginning of the fourth century BC by Ezra and Nehemiah.3 It is the history of this text that I attempt to treat in what follows.

Understanding The History Of The Text

The authors of the OT produced their work between the fifteenth and fourth centuries BC. How can we know that the final form of the text regarded as canonical by the seco...