Page:Selections. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray (1919).djvu/207

 is here met with for the first time, but reappears as the dominant reckoning in early Eastern Church writers (Melito, Origen, etc.), who connect it with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. As these writers were in touch with Palestinian tradition and Melito expressly states that he derived his information from the East (ap. Eus. H.E. IV. 26), it seems that this reckoning had the support of at least one section of the synagogue. The normal tradition, however, made the total 24, a number which first appears in a work almost contemporary with the Contra Apionem, 2 Esdras (or the Apocalypse of Ezra) xiv. 45 (Oriental text). The smaller number was reached by treating Ruth and Lamentations as supplements respectively to Judges and Jeremiah. The arrangement in 24 books possibly arose in Babylonia.

It is uncertain which of these two reckonings is the older, but in favour of the priority of the number 24 it may be said that (i) the equation with the number of Hebrew letters is artificial and therefore likely to be late, although as Josephus does not allude to this it may be an after refinement; (ii) it is easier to understand the subsequent attachment of Ruth and Lamentations to prophetical books with which their contents or supposed authorship connected them than how, having once gained admission among the Prophets, they could afterwards be relegated to the lower category of "Writings," in which they now stand.

A third and later arrangement names 27 books, a number arrived at by dividing the double books, while the parallelism with the Hebrew alphabet is retained by reckoning separately the "final" forms of those letters which possessed them. Jerome in his preface to the Books of Samuel and Kings shows acquaintance with all three systems.