What is the Catholic Old Testament?

Answer 1

Actual Differences

There are three general types of differences between the Catholic Old Testament and the Jewish Tanakh.

1) Order of the Books: The Catholic Old Testament and the Jewish Tanakh do not order their various books (even when they agree on whether a book should be in the canon) in the same way. For example, the Book of Ruth and Chronicles 1 & 2 are at the end of the Tanakh, but are close to the beginning in the Catholic Old Testament.

2) Additional Books: The Catholic Old Testament has every book in the Jewish Tanakh (24), plus another 22 books.

3) Additional Content: The Catholic Old Testament has sections in Books that the two Bibles share (such as Daniel and Esther) that the Jewish Tanakh lacks.

An actual comparison can be found at the link below.

Rationales for such differences

Catholic Answer:

The Old Testament used in the Catholic Church is based on the Septuagint, which was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that was used at the time of Christ by the Jews. It was the most common Bible and was nearly universal throughout the world at that time, it had been translated I believe in the fourth century B.C. in Egypt, most of the quotes in the New Testament are taken from the Septuagint, so it was used not only by Our Blessed Lord, but by His Apostles as well. The Hebrew Bible today is based on a reduced version of the Scriptures that the Jews formulated in about a century after Christ. The problem with this is that they had lost their authority over the Scriptures when they rejected Christ, and their mutilation of the Sacred Scriptures was based on a need to reject what they saw as supporting the Christian Church, thus they removed the deuterocanon from the Old Testament to form the Hebrew Bible used today. This problem was further exacerbated in the sixteenth century, when M. Luther sought to start his own Church. He had the same problem as the first century Jews - the Scriptures supported the Church, so he did the same thing they did, and followed their version of the Scriptures that they made up a century after Christ. For a complete discussion of the difference and how it came about, get the book: Why Catholic Bibles are Bigger at the link below:

Jewish Answer:

During the mid 300s B.C.E. there were two dominant strains of the Biblical text in Hebrew and Aramaic. In the East (Mesopotamia and Persia) there was a tradition that was called the Masoretic Tradition. In the West, (Levant and Egypt) there was a second tradition which would be translated into Greek (and only survive in that form) called the Septuagint. The Septuagint had textual embellishments that the Masoretic Tradition did not have. Since the Christian compilers of the Bible had much more access to the Septuagint than the Masoretic Tradition, they used the Septuagint as the basis of their Bible. They also added a number of other religious books to the canon that were written contemporaneously with the Septuagint translation as the deuterocanon to the Old Testament. The Jews based their Tanakh exclusively on the Masoretic Tradition since the Babylonian Jewish community was (at that point) the center of Jewish learning and scholarship. The Masoretic Text still forms the basis of Jewish practice.

Answer 2

Catholic AnswerThe Catholic Old Testament was defined at the Councils of Hippo, and Carthage in the fourth and fifth century, and infallibly confirmed by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century is the Old Testament Canon of the Jews, as used by Our Blessed Savior, Jesus Christ, which is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Scriptures, which was made in the fourth century B.C. and from which most of the New Testament quotes are taken from, and which Jesus and His Apostles used. It has been in continuous use since its acceptance in the early centuries.

from The Catechism of the Catholic Church, second edition, English translation 1994

IV. The Canon of Scripture

120. It was by the apostolic Tradition that the church discerned which writings are to be included in the list of the sacred books. (Cf. Dei Verbum 8§ 3) This complete list is called the canon of Scripture. It includes 46 books for the Old Testament (45 if we count Jeremiah and Lamentations as one) and 27 for the New. (Cf. Denzinger-Schonmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum{1965})

The Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, Tobit, Judith, Ester, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Wisdom, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hose4a, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi.

The New Testament: the Gospels according toMatthew, Mark, Luke and John, the Acts of the Apostles, the Letters of St. Paul to the Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, the Letter to the Hebrews, the Letters of James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2, and 3 John, andJude, and Revelation (the Apocalypse).