Hebrew Bible, OT, Tanak

A. Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, Tanak

If your frame of reference is the Jewish tradition, the Old Testament is the collection of sacred writings from ancient Israel and is called the Hebrew Bible, or Hebrew Scriptures, or Written Torah (to distinguish it from the Oral Torah of the rabbis).
    If your frame of reference is the Christian tradition, the Hebrew Bible is referred to as the Old Testament--old because Christians view it as the indispensable prologue to the New Testament. Recently some people have suggested the use of Older Testament or First Testament in order to avoid any suggestion that it is obsolete. The Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament may contain the same collection of books depending on which Christian Bible you are using, though the sequential order of individual books may differ. Though the title of this textbook refers to this collection of texts as the Old Testament (because this is the more recognizable term), the textbook more frequently refers to it as the Hebrew Bible. The latter term is increasingly being used in academic and religious circles because of its non-sectarian quality.
    From another angle, the Old Testament could be many different things depending on why and how you are reading it. Viewed as literature, the Old Testament is a rich and varied collection of poetry, drama, story, and legal prose. Viewed linguistically, it is an ancient text written in foreign tongues, mostly Hebrew, but also with some Aramaic. Viewed as history, it provides a wealth of information about the culture and times of ancient Israel. Viewed as sacred text, it reveals Israel's concept of God and communicates spiritual truth. Although the Old Testament can be apprehended in a variety of ways, all make reference to the same collection of texts.
    This next observation is potentially confusing. The Hebrew Bible is one book, judging by the fact that it is typically bound as a single volume. At the same time, it is an anthology of books--a virtual library of twenty-four originally separate works. In fact, the term Bible derives from the Greek ta biblia (itself from biblion, "papyrus") which means "the books." The individual books came from a variety of authors who wrote over a span of one thousand years or more. They were gathered together and included in a single work we call the Hebrew Bible. Early God-fearing Jews judged this particular collection of writings to contain an authoritative record of God's instruction for their community.
    The Jewish community that gave rise to the Hebrew Bible divided the various books into three collections: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. The Hebrew names of these collections are Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim. Taking the first letter of each of these three words, and inserting the vowel "a," the Jewish community gave the name Tanak (sometimes spelled "Tanakh") to their Bible. RTOT takes its basic structure from these three main collections of the Hebrew Bible and uses the labels Torah, Prophets, and Writings.