Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible is the standard canon of Jewish sacred texts, composed in a period that falls across the second and first millennia BCE. It is also referred to as the Tanakh, an acrostic portmanteau of the three major sections of the Hebrew Bible: the Torah (“teaching”), the Nevi’im (“prophets”), and the Ketuvim (“writings”). The Hebrew Bible is a collection of 24 major texts, in which there are 39 books. These 39 books correspond to the 39 books of the Christian Old Testament (not counting the deuterocanonical writings in some Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles), though Jewish tradition arranges them in a different order than Christian tradition does. While different versions of the Jewish canon have been used by various groups throughout history, the standard text tradition is the Masoretic Text, a set of medieval manuscripts believed to best reflect the Hebrew form of the original compositions. The Hebrew Bible is thus, as its name suggests, written almost entirely in Hebrew, with a few additional passages in Aramaic (an ancient cousin of the Hebrew language). 

The Hebrew Bible tells the ancient history of the Jewish people, including accounts of the creation of the world, the ancient Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, the giving of the Law of

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