begin, it is important to recognize that the Bibles of different faith communities contain somewhat different books, put those books in different order, and call their Bibles different things. Your Bible reflects one of those collections or a mix of them. These are often referred to as different “canons” of the Bible, with “canon” meaning a collection of books that are recognized as divinely inspired scripture by a given religious community. Such books are recognized as “canonical.”
In Judaism, the scriptures are called the “Tanakh” (with the kh pronounced like the ch in Bach). Tanakh is a word formed out of the first letters of the Hebrew names of the three main parts of the Jewish Bible: Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), Neviim (“prophets”), and Ketuvim (“writings”). See the box on p. 4 for an overview of the contents of each of these three parts. Judaism focuses particularly on the Torah, otherwise known as the Pentateuch, with most synagogues reading the Torah’s five books all across the year, starting with Genesis at the outset of the Fall (the Jewish New Year) and concluding with Deuteronomy 12 months later. Jews certainly read other parts of the Tanakh, for example singing psalms (part of the “Writings”) and reading portions of the “Prophets” to accompany the Torah reading. Nevertheless, the Torah takes pride of place within the Jewish Bible, while other parts of the Tanakh are often seen as commentary on it.
The Christian version of these scriptures, the “Old Testament” (OT), is part of a two‐part Bible that also includes specifically Christian scriptures, the New Testament (NT). The Christian Old Testament is organized differently from the Jewish Tanakh. Though both the Tanakh and the Christian Old Testament start with the biblical narrative‐historical books of Genesis to 2 Kings, the Christian Old Testament follows those books with the parallel narration of that history in Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah. It then sequences the other biblical books in the order of their traditional authors, starting with the book of Job (an early Edomite sage), and moving through Psalms (David as traditional author), Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs (Solomon as traditional author), and on to the major (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) and minor (Hosea, etc.) prophets. As in the case of the Jewish Tanakh, the ending of the Christian Old Testament is revealing. It concludes with the last chapter of Malachi, a prediction of the second coming of Elijah (Mal 4:5). This ending leads nicely into the first book of the New Testament, the Gospel of Matthew, which describes the coming of John the Baptist, who is clothed like Elijah and prophesies the coming of Jesus (Matt 3:1–6).
You also should know that there are differences between the books included in different Christian Old Testament collections. The Protestant Old Testament contains the same books as the Jewish Tanakh, though in the above‐noted different order leading up to the New Testament. The Roman Catholic Old Testament includes some additional books such as 1 and 2 Maccabees, Sirach, and the Wisdom of Solomon. The Ethiopic church recognizes the book of Enoch as part of its Old Testament, and various forms of Orthodox Christianity likewise recognize slightly different groups of additional books. For Roman Catholics, such additional books (not in the Jewish Tanakh) are “deuterocanonical,” which means that they belong to a “second canon.” For Protestants, such books not in the Jewish Tanakh are not considered true scripture, but “apocrypha,” which means “books hidden away.” I will not hide such books away in this textbook, but neither will I discuss them at length. Instead, I briefly discuss a sampling of them: Ben Sira/Sirach, Enoch, and Judith. In addition, toward the end of this introduction I will return to discuss how Jewish and Christian communities ended up with these slightly different collections of scriptural books.
“Hebrew Bible” is yet another term that is often used to designate the scriptures shared by Jews and Christians. Many teachers and scholars prefer the expression “Hebrew Bible” because it avoids the pejorative connotations that the term “Old Testament” has assumed in some Christian circles. The terms “Old” and “New Testament” derive from Greek and Latin terms that have been used by Christians to contrast an old covenant (with Israel) and new covenant (through Jesus Christ). Often this has been part of a Christian supersessionist assumption that God’s covenant with the world through Christ superseded any prior covenant that God made with Israel. For Christians who subscribe to this idea, the Old Testament is often treated as the old and superseded Testament. It is negatively cast as the outdated book of the “law,” as opposed to the New Testament, which is understood to be the truly scriptural word about Jesus, love, and grace. Such views reflect a lack of close reading of both the Old and New Testament, but they are widespread and influential. This is why many people avoid the term “Old Testament,” with its possible implications of supersessionism, and use terms such as “Hebrew Bible” or “First Testament” instead. Others, however, find these terms odd and/or inaccurate (for example, several chapters in the Tanakh/Old Testament are not in Hebrew, but Aramaic). They prefer sticking with the Christian term “Old Testament,” at least within specifically Christian contexts, but emphasize the more ancient understanding of “Old” as implying something good, rather than the more contemporary idea of “Old” being something that is outdated.
The important thing for academic study of the Bible is to understand the meanings of these different terms for the Tanakh/Old Testament/Hebrew scriptures and the slight differences in contents and order of these otherwise similar collections. These differences reflect the fact that these scriptures have come to belong to multiple faith communities. In addition, Islamic tradition sees the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity as possessing a secondary authority to that of its central text, the Qur’an. From the Muslim perspective, the Qur’an represents the final part of a long line of Divine revelations to human communities, including the Jewish Tanakh and Christian Old and New Testaments. This Qur’an is quite different in contents and form from the Tanakh/Old Testament, containing 114 chapters (surahs) of primarily ethical and theological exhortations that were communicated by Prophet Muhammad. It is not a parallel “Old Testament” or “Tanakh.” Nevertheless, parts of the Qur’an reflect post‐biblical Jewish traditions about history up to Moses (e.g. about Abraham, Ishmael, Mary), and other Muslim traditions (e.g. the biography and example of the prophet Muhammad).
From this discussion, we can see that there is no one “Bible,” not even one “Hebrew Bible,” shared by Judaism and Christianity, let alone Islam. Even if we focus on the overlapping contents of the Jewish Tanakh and Christian Old Testament, there are significant differences in order and (occasionally) content as well. This is an initial indicator of the quite different readings that Christians and Jews give to the texts they hold in common. We will see others along the way. Moreover, this diversity of Jewish and Christian Bibles is preceded by a diversity of perspectives and voices found within the Hebrew scriptures themselves. In the following chapters, we will see this diversity in texts written at different times and even in texts offering different perspectives on the same time.
Becoming an Informed User of a Contemporary Bible Translation
So let us assume that you have in your hands a Jewish Tanakh or some contemporary version of a Christian Old Testament. Unless you read Hebrew fluently, you will be working with an English translation of the Bible. Let us prepare for this study of the Hebrew scriptures by looking at the different components that go into this Bible above).
First, as discussed above, every translation builds on a number of decisions about which Hebrew text to translate. There is no single authoritative ancient copy of the Hebrew scriptures, even in the original Hebrew. Instead, we have several different sorts of ancient Hebrew manuscripts and ancient translations that used old Hebrew manuscripts, all of which are the products of centuries of hand‐copying and occasional miscopying. Scholars preparing to do translation must engage in the practice of “textual criticism” or (more often) build on textual criticism by text‐critical experts (see box). Biblical verses
