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CHAPTER IV. NUMBER AND ORDER OF THE SEPARATE BOOKS. 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.1 The enumeration in question has Ruth with Judges, and Lamentations with Jeremiah. In Epiphanius2 the number twenty- seven is found, made by taking the alphabetenlarged 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,1 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.2 After the anonymous collection or second part of Isaiah had been joined to thefirst 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 pr...
