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Hebrew Bible

 The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh is the canonical collection of Hebrew scriptures, including the Torah, the Nevi'im, and the Ketuvim. These texts are almost exclusively in Biblical Hebrew, with a few passages in Biblical Aramaic (in the Books of Daniel and Ezra, the verse Jeremiah 10:11, and some single words).

The authoritative form of the Hebrew Bible for Rabbinic Judaism is the Masoretic Text (7th to 10th century AD), which consists of 24 books, divided into pesuqim (verses). The contents of the Hebrew Bible are similar to those of the Protestant Christian Old Testament, in which the material is divided into 39 books and arranged in a different order. Catholic Bibles, Eastern/Greek Orthodox Bibles and Ethiopian Orthodox Bibles contain additional materials, derived from the Septuagint (texts translated in Koine Greek) and other sources.


In addition to the Masoretic Text, modern scholars seeking to understand the history of the Hebrew Bible use a range of sources. These include Septuagint, the Syriac language Peshitta translation, the Samaritan Pentateuch; the Dead Sea Scrolls collection and quotations from rabbinic manuscripts. These sources may be older than the Masoretic Text in some cases and often differ from it. These differences have given rise to the theory that yet another text, an Urtex of the Hebrew Bible, once existed and is the source of the versions extant today. However, such an Urtex has never been found, and which of the three commonly known versions (Septuagint, Masoretic Text, Samaritan Pentateuch) is closest to the Urtex is debated.

Christianity has long asserted a close relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, although there have sometimes been movements like Marcionism (viewed as heretical by the early church), that have struggled with it. Modern Christian formulations of this tension include supersessionism, covenant theology, new covenant theology, dispensationalism, and dual-covenant theology. All of these formulations, except some forms of dual-covenant theology, are objectionable to mainstream Judaism and to many Jewish scholars and writers, for whom there is one eternal covenant between God and the Israelites, and who therefore reject the term "Old Testament" as a form of antinomianism.

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