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By Root 1222 0

the course of a thousand years, primarily in ancient Hebrew, the Jewish Bible is the equivalent of Christianity’s Old Testament. For Jews, there is no New Testament. They recognize only those Scriptures that Christians call the Old Testament. Both the Jewish Bible and Christian Old Testament contain the same books, although arranged and numbered in a slightly different order. Unless you hold the Jerusalem Bible, popular among Roman Catholics; it contains about a dozen books that Jews and Protestants don’t consider “Holy Scripture.” But that’s another story, one that comes a little later in the Bible’s history. In Jewish traditions, their Bible is also called the Tanakh, an acronym of the Hebrew words Torah (for “law” or “teaching”), Nevi’im (“the Prophets”) and Kethuvim (“the Writings”). These are the three broad divisions into which the thirty-nine books of Hebrew scripture are organized.

BOOKS OF THE HEBREW BIBLE OR OLD TESTAMENT

TANAKH The order of the books of Hebrew scriptures

TORAH

Genesis

Exodus

Leviticus

Numbers

Deuteronomy

PROPHETS

Joshua

Judges

First Samuel

Second Samuel

First Kings

Second Kings

Isaiah

Jeremiah

Ezekiel

Hosea

Joel

Amos

Obadiah

Jonah

Micah

Nahum

Habakkuk

Zephaniah

Haggai

Zechariah

Malachi

WRITINGS

Psalms

Proverbs

Job

The Song of Songs (Song of Solomon)

Ruth

Lamentations

Ecclesiastes

Esther

Daniel

Ezra

Nehemiah

First Chronicles

Second Chronicles

KING JAMES VERSION The standard order of the Old Testament books in most Christian Bibles

Genesis

Exodus

Leviticus

Numbers

Deuteronomy

Joshua

Judges

Ruth

1 Samuel

2 Samuel

1 Kings

2 Kings

1 Chronicles

2 Chronicles

Ezra

Nehemiah

Esther

Job

Psalms

Proverbs

Ecclesiastes

Song of Solomon

Isaiah

Jeremiah

Lamentations

Ezekiel

Daniel

Hosea

Joel

Amos

Obadiah

Jonah

Micah

Nahum

Habakkuk

Zephaniah

Haggai

Zechariah

Malachi

These thirty-nine books lay out the law, traditions, and history of the Jewish people and their unique relationship with their God. Starting “In the beginning,” with the very Creation of “the heavens and earth,” these thirty-nine books follow the lives of the ancient founders of the Jewish faith—the Patriarchs and the Matriarchs—and recount the story of the people of ancient Israel in good times and bad. While many of us recall childhood stories of such Israelite heroes as Abraham, Moses, Joshua, and David, the true centerpiece of these books is the code of divine laws primarily laid out in the first five books, or Torah, that both Jews and Christians believe was given by God to the prophet Moses more than three thousand years ago. Far more than just the familiar Ten Commandments—at least, they should be familiar—these laws regulated every aspect of Jewish religious and daily life, and provide the core of that “Judeo-Christian ethic” everybody’s always talking about.

For Christians, who worship the same One God of Judaism, this Old Testament is a significant part of their religion and traditions, but it it is only part of the story. Because their Bible also includes a “second act” or sequel, the New Testament, which tells the story of Jesus, a man Christians believe was the son of God. Its twenty-seven additional books recount how Jesus’ followers, most of them devout Jewish men and women, established the Christian church just about two thousand years ago.

But this quick, literal answer to the basic question of what the Bible is dodges the main issue. Some people would confidently reply that the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God, given to humankind through God’s prophets. In other words, God dictated these Bible books word for word to men in his divine “stenography pool.”

Centuries of research into the Bible presents a far more complicated picture: the Bible is the culmination of an extended process—covered with centuries of inky human fingerprints—of storytelling, writing, cutting and pasting, translating, and interpreting. That process began about four thousand years ago, and involved many writers working at different times—a fact that may still