Tanakh is Composition and characteristics of the Jewish Bible

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

According to statistics, the Bible is one of the most published and best-selling books in the world. It combines many written monuments from different regions and times. One of the most important sections of the Bible is the Old Testament. In the tradition of Judaism, it is called the Tanakh. We will talk about what it is, what are the composition and content of the Tanakh in this article.

Jewish Bible

It is known that there are two Bibles - Christian and Jewish. The first, in addition to the Old Testament, includes a body of texts, which is called the New Testament. But the Hebrew Bible is limited only to the Old. Of course, the very definition of "old", that is, obsolete, the Jews do not recognize and consider it somewhat offensive in relation to their Holy Scriptures. The Jews refer to their canon as the Tanakh. This is actually an abbreviation that comes from the words "Torah", "Neviim", "Ketuvim" - the components of the Bible of the Jews. We will talk about them in more detail, but for now let's turn to history.

The origin of the Tanakh, language andhistorical development

As mentioned above, the Tanakh is a collection of texts that had different authors who lived at different times and in different places. The most ancient layers of Scripture have an approximate age of 3000 years. The youngest ones were written a little over two thousand years ago. One way or another, the age is quite impressive and respectable. According to the most common version, the formation of the Old Testament began in the 13th century BC. e. in the Middle East and ended by the 1st century BC. e. The language of writing is Hebrew. Some parts are also written in later Aramaic. In the 3rd century BC e. in Alexandria, a Greek translation was made for the Jews of the diaspora, called the Septuagint. It was in use among Greek-speaking Jews until a new Christian religion entered the world stage, the followers of which began to actively translate sacred texts into all languages of the world, considering all of them equally sacred. Supporters of Judaism, although they use translations, recognize only the authentic Jewish text as canonical.

Tanakh contents

In terms of content, the books of the Old Testament are very diverse. But first of all, the Tanakh is a story about the history of the Israeli people and their relationship with the Creator God, who bears the name of Yahweh. In addition, the Hebrew Bible contains cosmogonic myths, religious instructions, hymnographic material and prophecies directed to the future. Believers believe that the entire Tanakh is an inspired integral text in which not a single letter can be changed.

Components of the Tanakh

There are 24 books in the Jewish Scriptures. In fact, they are almost identical to the Christian canon, but differ in the nature of the classification. In addition, some books, considered by Christians to be different texts, are combined into one in the Tanakh. Therefore, the total number of books among the Jews is 24 (sometimes even reduced to 22 to justify the correspondence of the books of the Tanakh to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which, as you know, there are 22), while the Christians have at least 39.

As already mentioned, all the books of the Tanakh are divided into three classes: Torah, Nevi'im, Ketuvim. The first of these, the Torah, is the most important. This part is also called the Pentateuch, because it consists of five books, the authorship of which is attributed to the prophet Moses. However, this is a religious attribution that is scientifically questionable.

The word "Torah" means the law that must be known and followed exactly. These books tell about the creation of the world, people, their fall into sin, the history of ancient mankind, the birth and election of the Jewish people by God, the conclusion of a covenant with them and the path to the Promised Land - Israel.

The section Nevi'im literally means "prophets". But, in addition to prophetic books, it includes some historical narratives. Within itself, Nevi'im is divided into two parts: the early prophets and the late prophets. The early category includes works attributed to Joshua, the Prophet Samuel, and others. In general, they are more historical than prophetic. The later prophets include the books of threecalled great prophets - Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel - and twelve small ones. Unlike the Christian tradition, the latter are combined into one book. There are a total of 8 books in Nevi'im.

Ketuvim is the section that concludes the Tanakh. In Russian, it means "scriptures". It includes prayer and hymnographic texts, as well as wisdom literature - instructions of a religious and moral nature, the authorship of which is attributed to the wise men of Israel, for example, King Solomon. There are 11 books in total in this section.

Tanakh in Christianity

The entire Tanakh is recognized as Holy Scripture in the Christian world, with the exception of some heterodox movements, such as the Gnostics. However, if the followers of Judaism included in the canon only texts that have a Jewish original, then Christians recognize as sacred some other writings, the original in Hebrew of which either did not survive or did not exist at all. All such texts go back to the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Tanakh. As a sacred text, they are included in Orthodox Bibles. In Catholicism, they are recognized conditionally and are called deuterocanonical. And in Protestantism they are completely rejected. In this sense, the Protestant canon is more similar to the Jewish canon than other Christian versions of the Tanakh. In fact, the Protestant version of the Old Testament is simply a translation of the later Jewish canon. In all three Christian traditions, the classification of books has been changed. Thus, the three-part structure was replaced by a four-part structure borrowed from the same Septuagint. She isincludes the Pentateuch, historical, teaching and prophetic books.