Tanach
The Tanach or Tanakh is the Hebrew acronym for the Jewish Bible, taking its name from the initial letters of its three main sections, the Torah, Neviim, and Ketuvim. The Tanach is mostly written in Hebrew; some parts are in Aramaic.The Protestant Old Testament consists only of the Tanach, but with a different arrangement of books and some difference in text. For example, the Old Testament includes some books that have extra paragraphs that do not exist in the Jewish version. The Catholic and Orthodox Old Testament is more extensive than the Tanach, by six books; see deuterocanonical books.
The Tanach consists of 24 books, while the Christian Old Testament (excluding the deuterocanonical book/apocrypha) has 39 books; they both contain the same text but divide it into books differently: Jews often count as a single book what Christians count as several.
As such, academic scholars draw a technical distinction between the text used within Judaism, the Tanakh, and the similar but non-identical text used within Christianity, the Old Testament. These scholars generally prefer to use Hebrew Bible as a term that covers the commonality of the Tanach and the Old Testament while avoiding sectarian bias.
The Tanach is divided into three sections: The Torah (Hebrew for "Teaching"), Neviim (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings, also hagiographa).
The Hebrew text originally consisted only of consonants, together with some inconsistently applied letters used as vowels (matres lectionis).
Around the sixth century A.D, the Masoretes added vowel points to the text to indicate the pronunciation. Until then the pronunciation could only be learnt from a teacher.
The books of the Torah have generally-used names which are based on the first prominent word in each book. The English names are not translations of the Hebrew; they are based on the Greek names created for the Septuagint which in turn were based on Rabbinic names describing the thematic content of each of the Books.
(It should be noted that the terms Torah, Chumash, Pentateuch and "five books of Moses" refer to the same works.)
The Torah consists of:
Sections of the Tanach
The books of Neviim (The Prophets) are:
- 6. Joshua(יהושע)
- 7. Judges(שופטים)
- 8. Books of Samuel
- I Samuel I
- II Samuel II
- 9. Books of Kings
- I Kings
- II Kings
- 10. Isaiah
- 11. Jeremiah
- 12. Ezekiel
- 13. The Minor Prophets
- 14. Psalms
- 15. Proverbs
- 16. Book of Job
- 17. Song of Songs
- 18. Ruth
- 19. Lamentations
- 20. Ecclesiastes
- 21. Book of Esther
- 22. Daniel
- 23. Ezra-Nehemiah
- 24. Books of Chronicles
- 1 Chronicles
- 2 Chronicles
- In Christian Bibles, Daniel sometimes includes extra material that is not accepted as canonical by Judaism (the material is part of the Apocrypha, so also not accepted by most Protestants).
- The breaking of Samuel (Shmuel), Kings (Melachim), and Chronicles (Divrei hayamim) into two parts is strictly an artifact of the printers who first issued the books. They were simply too big to be issued as single volumes.
