The Old Testament: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

By the end of the first century CE, these three parts—the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings—had become the Bible of ancient Judaism, its “sacred scriptures,” that is, writings believed to be divinely inspired and thus having a special authority. For Jews today, they are simply the Bible. Modern scholars often use the term Hebrew Bible to distin

Despite naïve views to the contrary, the Bible was not handed down by God as a complete package but was the result of a series of decisions made over the course of centuries by the leaders of different religious groups, decisions concerning a variety of works written by many authors also over the course of centuries.

The second part of the Jewish scriptures is the Prophets, divided into the Former and Latter Prophets. The Former Prophets consists of the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. These books continue the narrative where the Torah ended, relating the Israelites’ history in the Promised Land of Canaan, from their conquest of that land under Moses

The word Bible originally meant “book,” but the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament is not one book but many, an anthology of ancient Israelite and early Jewish religious writings. Different religious communities have different versions of this anthology, as well as different names for it. Jews and Protestant Christians have the same conten

Perceived as an attack on the doctrine that Moses had written the Torah, and implicitly on the authority of the Bible itself, the Documentary Hypothesis was repeatedly challenged, and many of its early proponents were condemned or forced to leave their teaching positions. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, it was widely accepted among P

Christianity began as one of several subsets of Judaism in the first century CE. It quickly moved away from its parent in beliefs and practices, in part because many non-Jews also became Christians.

Myth and history, then, were not necessarily unrelated genres. History had a mythical dimension, and myth had a historical dimension. We can observe this in the first dozen books of the Bible. From the creation of the cosmos in Genesis 1 to the destruction of Jerusalem at the end of 2 Kings, the narrative has a continuous and often carefully calibr

But as in parent-child relationships, the separation was never complete. Early Christian writers accepted the Jewish scriptures as authoritative—there was not yet a “New” Testament, for they were still writing it.

The Documentary Hypothesis is, first of all, a hypothesis, a theoretical explanation of data. The data that it explains are the inconsistencies, the repetitions, the anachronisms, and other details that suggest not one but several different authors. In its classic formulation, these are explained by the existence of hypothetical documents or source