The number of the books was variously estimated. Josephus gives
twenty-two, which was the usual number among Christian writers in the
second, third, and fourth centuries, having been derived perhaps from the
letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Origen, Jerome, and others have it. It
continued longest among the teachers of the Greek Church, and is even in
Nicephorus’s stichometry.(83) The enumeration in question has Ruth with
Judges, and Lamentations with Jeremiah. In Epiphanius(84) the number
twenty-seven is found, made by taking the alphabet enlarged with the five
final letters, and dividing Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles into two books
each. This is probably an ingenious combination belonging to the father
himself. The Talmud has twenty-four,(85) a number which did not originate
in the Greek alphabet, else the Palestinian Jews would not have adopted
it. The synagogue did not fix it officially. After the Pentateuch and the
former prophets, which are in the usual order, it gives Jeremiah as the
first of the later, succeeded by Ezekiel and Isaiah with the twelve minor
prophets. The Talmud knows no other reason for such an order than that it
was made according to the contents of the prophetic books, not according
to the times of the writers. This solution is unsatisfactory. It is more
probable that chronology had to do with the arrangement.(86) After the
anonymous collection or second part of Isaiah had been joined to the first
or authentic prophecies, the lateness of these oracles brought Isaiah into
the third place among the greater prophets. The Talmudic order of the
Hagiographa is Ruth, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticles,
Lamentations, Daniel, Esther, Ezra, Chronicles. Here Ruth precedes the
Psalter, coming as near the former prophets as possible; for it properly
belongs to them, the contents associating it with the Judges’ time. The
Talmudic order is that usually adopted in German MSS. What is the true
estimate of it? Is it a proper Talmudic regulation? Perhaps not, else the
Hebrew MSS. of the French and Spanish Jews would not so readily have
departed from it. Bloch supposes that Baba Bathra, which gives the
arrangement of the books, is one of the apocryphal Boraithas that
proceeded from an individual teacher and had no binding authority.(87)
The Masoretic arrangement differs from the Talmudic in putting Isaiah
before Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The Hagiographa are, Psalms, Proverbs, Job,
Canticles, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra (with
Nehemiah), Chronicles.(88) This is usually adopted in Spanish MSS. But
MSS. often differ arbitrarily, because transcribers did not consider
themselves bound to any one arrangement.(89) According to some, a very old
testimony to the commencing and concluding books of the third division is
given by the New Testament (Luke xxiv. 44; Matthew xxiii. 35), agreeably
to which the Psalms were first and the Chronicles last; but this is
inconclusive.
The Alexandrian translators, as we have seen already, placed the books
differently from the Palestinian Jews. In their version Daniel comes after
Ezekiel, so that it is put beside the greater prophets. Was this done by
Jews or Christians? Perhaps by the latter, who put it between the greater
and lesser prophets, or in other words, out of the third into the second
division, because of dogmatic grounds, and so effaced a trace of the
correct chronology. Little importance, however, can be attached to the
order of the books in the Septuagint; because the work was done at
different times by different persons. But whatever may have been the
arrangement of the parts when the whole was complete, we know that it was
disturbed by Protestants separating the apocryphal writings and putting
them all together.