Home - The Israel Bible
I've not heard of this before and wondered why passages from the same books/chapters/verses are completely different. Any insight?
It follows the book ordering of the Jewish Tanakh, rather than the Septuagint which Christian Old Testaments typically do.
The Jewish Bible (the Tanakh) and the Christian Old Testament are quite similar. All the books in the Tanakh are in the Old Testament, though traditionally and historically the Christian Old Testament has included books which have not been included in the Jewish Bible. The Jewish Canon and the Christian Canon developed largely side-by-side in the years following the destruction of Jerusalem. Christians by-and-large accepted the Septuagint, a translation of Jewish Scripture into Greek made several centuries before Christ, which is what the earliest Greek-speaking Christians would have probably been most familiar with; in fact where the New Testament quotes the Old Testament it is sometimes, even frequently, word-for-word from the Septuagint. With the fall of Jerusalem the center of Jewish learning moved eastward from Palestine to Mesopotamia, and a standardization and centralizing of Jewish teaching, practice, and belief formed which included several factors, one of these was a definitive Jewish Canon, the writing down of the Mishna and Gemera (together known as the Talmud), and the synagogue and rabbi becoming the locus of Jewish community (since there was no longer a Temple, a priesthood, etc).
The Septuagint follows an ordering of books by Law, History, Wisdom, and Prophets; whereas the Tanakh follows an ordering of books by Law, Prophets, and Writings. Christian Old Testaments have continued to use the Septuagint ordering over the centuries, which is why modern Bibles continue to use that same ordering.
Books which are in the Septuagint, but not the Tanakh, are often known as "Deuterocanonicals" or "The Apocrypha". These books were often usually accepted but often treated as perhaps not equal to the rest of the Old Testament, and sometimes disputed. But it wasn't really until the Protestant Reformation in the 1500's that the issue came to the forefront. Martin Luther, in his translation of the Bible into German, was of the opinion that these Deuterocanonical books, though good and worthy to be read by Christians, were not on the same level as the rest of the Old Testament; as such he relocated these books to a special location between the Old Testament and the New Testament and referred to them as "The Apocrypha". Protestant Bibles, Luther onward, followed this precedent. Protestant English Bibles stopped being printed with the Apocrypha in the mid-late 1800's, which is why most Protestants won't find them in their Bibles unless they go out of their way to get a Bible with them included; this move to stop printing them was probably largely a matter of saving money by the publishers, but it was also a period of rather intense anti-Catholic sentiment in both Britain and America which quite possibly played a role. On the other hand, the Roman Catholic Council of Trent, which was convened in large part in response to the Protestant Reformation, asserted that the Deuterocanonical books are holy and inspired Scripture and Catholic Bibles continue to be published with them. They are also fully accepted by the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox church.
A perhaps helpful chart can be found here:
What's In Your Bible
-CryptoLutheran
