The notes at the ends of books

Scattered through the Old Testament are short notices that do not belong to the text around them. They are editorial marks — the ancient equivalent of a colophon, the note a scribe put at the end of a document.

The clearest is at the end of Psalm 72.

Thus conclude the prayers of David son of Jesse.

That is a note about the collection, not a line of the psalm — and it is not even accurate about the whole Psalter, since psalms attributed to David appear later in Books IV and V.

Which tells you what it is: a seam. The mark left where an earlier, smaller collection ended and was folded into a larger one.

Job has one too, in the middle of the book, and it is even blunter.

Thus conclude the words of Job. Three chapters of Elihu follow, and then the voice from the whirlwind, so the note marks the end of Job’s speeches rather than the end of the book.

And Jeremiah closes his oracle against Babylon with the same kind of line — thus far are the words of Jeremiah — followed by a chapter of historical appendix drawn from Kings.

Which is the last observation this slot has to make, and it is a quiet one.

Nineteen weeks of writers have said what they were doing. And running alongside their claims is a second, humbler set of voices: the people who assembled, arranged, copied and marked the books. Hezekiah’s men. The Levites who held the deposited scroll. Baruch with a pen. Whoever wrote the prayers of David are ended and then kept copying.

They left their marks in the text rather than smoothing them out, and the marks are still there in every printed Bible.

A document that had been groomed would not have them. The seams would have been sanded off, the inaccurate note about David’s prayers quietly corrected, the Job colophon moved to the end where it belongs.

It is worth being careful about what these notices do and do not prove. They tell us the books were assembled and marked by people doing ordinary editorial work. They do not tell us who those people were, when they worked, or by what authority. Scripture is unembarrassed about the process and largely silent about the personnel.

Instead the Book arrives with its joinery showing — which is what an honestly transmitted collection looks like, and which is the same testimony the writers themselves keep giving: the words were not theirs to tidy.

A colophon in the ancient world was a scribal note at the end of a tablet or scroll, often giving the title, the owner, the scribe’s name, or the fact of completion. Mesopotamian tablets carry them routinely, and several passages in the Old Testament function the same way.

The Psalter is arranged in five books, each ending with a doxology — Psalms 41, 72, 89, 106 and 150. The note at 72:20 sits with the second doxology, which is part of the evidence that it marks a collection boundary.

Genesis has been read by some scholars as structured around a repeated formula — these are the generations of — which occurs eleven times and may function as a series of headings or colophons. The proposal is contested and worth knowing about rather than asserting.

The Hebrew of Psalm 72:20 uses a verb meaning to be finished or completed. The heading of Psalm 72 itself says of Solomon, which makes the closing note about David’s prayers more interesting rather than less, and commentators have proposed several explanations.

Ecclesiastes 12:9–10 from Week Nine is the fullest example of the kind: a third-person note about how the book was made, preserved inside the book. Read alongside Psalm 72:20 and Job 31:40, it forms a small pattern of editorial honesty running through the wisdom books and the Psalter.

Look it upH3615 כָּלָה kalah, to be finished, completed · H8605 תְּפִלָּה tephillah, prayer · H1697 דִּבְרֵי divrei, the words of · H5704 עַד ad, thus far, up to

Where this touchesPsalm 72:20 · Job 31:40 · Jeremiah 51:64 · Proverbs 25:1 (Week Nine, Day Four) · Ecclesiastes 12:9–10 · Deuteronomy 31:24 (Week Six, Day Four). Jeremiah, Luke, John, Revelation, Peter, Moses, Paul, the prophets, the Proverbs collectors, Peter on Paul, the chronicler, the Song of Moses, the Jerusalem council, the psalm headings, Luke's second preface, Peter and Jude, the writers who left in their failures, and the prophets searching their own writing gave the earlier accounts.