The Bible is an anthology of religious texts that are central to Christianity and Judaism, and important in other Abrahamic religions such as Islam. The texts include instructions, stories, poetry, letters, prophecies, and other genres. The religious texts, or scriptures, were compiled by different religious communities into various official collections, called biblical canons. Believers generally consider the Bible to be a product of divine inspiration, but the way they understand what that means and how they interpret the text varies.
The Hebrew Bible, originally written in Hebrew, with some parts in Aramaic, is divided into three sections: the Torah ("Teaching"), Nevi'im ("Prophets") and Ketuvim ("Writings"). The acronym Tanakh () is an alternate term for the Hebrew Bible. The Masoretic Text, a medieval edition of the Tanakh, is considered the authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible by all branches of modern Rabbinic Judaism. The oldest parts of the Bible may be as early as BCE.
The Christian Bible is divided into the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament is a reorganization of the books of the Hebrew Bible and the deuterocanonical books, derived from historical editions of those texts. Christianity began as an outgrowth of Second Temple Judaism and the early Church continued the Jewish tradition of writing and incorporating what it saw as inspired, authoritative religious books. The gospels, which are narratives about the life and teachings of Jesus, along with the Pauline epistles and other texts quickly coalesced into the New Testament, originally written in Koine Greek, mostly in the 1st century CE.
With estimated total sales of over five billion copies, the Christian Bible is the best-selling publication of all time. Biblical texts have had a profound influence both on Western culture and history and on cultures around the globe. The study of these texts through biblical criticism has also indirectly impacted culture and history. Some view biblical texts as morally problematic, historically inaccurate, or corrupted by time; others find it a useful historical source for certain peoples and events or a source of ethical teachings. Biblical archaeology uses archaeological and textual evidence to assess the Bible’s historical claims, with evidence supporting some events but leaving others conclusively refuted. The Christian Bible is currently translated or in the process of being translated into about half of the world's languages.
Etymology The term 'Bible' can refer to the Hebrew Bible (which corresponds to the Christian Old Testament) or to the Christian Bible, which includes both the Old Testament and the New Testament.
The English word Bible is derived from , meaning 'the books' (singular ). The word itself literally means 'scroll' and came to be used as the ordinary word for book. It is the diminutive of byblos, 'Egyptian papyrus', possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician seaport Byblos (also known as Gebal) whence Egyptian papyri would be exported to Greece.
The Greek ta biblia was "an expression Hellenistic Jews used to describe their sacred books". The biblical scholar F. F. Bruce notes that John Chrysostom appears to be the first writer (in his Homilies on Matthew, delivered between 386 and 388 CE) to use the Greek phrase ta biblia ('the books') to describe both the Old and New Testaments together.
The Latin biblia sacra ('holy books') is a translation of the Greek (tà biblía tà hágia), which also means 'the holy books'. Medieval Latin is short for biblia sacra 'holy book'. It gradually came to be regarded as a feminine singular noun (, gen. ) in medieval Latin, and so the word was loaned as singular into the vernaculars of Western Europe.
Development and history
The complex development of the various texts that make up the Bible is still not completely understood. The oldest books began as songs and stories orally transmitted from generation to generation. Scholars of the twenty-first century are only in the beginning stages of exploring "the interface between writing, performance, memorization, and the aural dimension" of the texts. Current indications are that writing and orality were not separate as much as ancient writing was learned in communal oral performance.Carr, David M. The formation of the Hebrew Bible: A new reconstruction. Oxford University Press, 2011. p. 5 The Bible was written and compiled by many people, who many scholars say are mostly unknown, from a variety of disparate cultures and backgrounds.
British biblical scholar John K. Riches wrote:
The books of the Bible were initially written and copied by hand on papyrus scrolls. No originals have survived. The age of the original composition of the texts is, therefore, difficult to determine and heavily debated. Using a combined linguistic and historiographical approach, Hendel and Joosten date the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible (the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 and the Samson story of Judges 16 and 1 Samuel) to having been composed in the premonarchial early Iron Age (). The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the caves of Qumran in 1947, are copies that can be dated to between 250 BCE and 100 CE. They are the oldest existing copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible of any length that are not fragments.
The earliest manuscripts were probably written in paleo-Hebrew, a kind of cuneiform pictograph similar to other pictographs of the same period. The exile to Babylon most likely prompted the shift to square script (Aramaic) in the fifth to third centuries BCE. From the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Hebrew Bible was written with spaces between words to aid reading. By the eighth century CE, the Masoretes added vowel signs. Levites or scribes maintained the texts, and some texts were always treated as more authoritative than others. Scribes preserved and changed the texts by changing the script, updating archaic forms, and making corrections. These Hebrew texts were copied with great care.
Considered to be scriptures (sacred, authoritative religious texts), the books were compiled by different religious communities into various biblical canons (official collections of scriptures). The earliest compilation, containing the first five books of the Bible and called the Torah (meaning "law", "instruction", or "teaching") or Pentateuch ("five books"), was accepted as Jewish canon by the fifth century BCE. A second collection of narrative histories and prophesies, called the Nevi'im ("prophets"), was canonized in the third century BCE. A third collection called the Ketuvim ("writings"), containing psalms, proverbs, and narrative histories, was canonized sometime between the second century BCE and the second century CE. These three collections were written mostly in Biblical Hebrew, with some parts in Aramaic, which together form the Hebrew Bible or "TaNaKh" (an abbreviation of "Torah", "Nevi'im", and "Ketuvim").
Hebrew Bible
The historical version of the Hebrew Bible used by modern Jewish communities is the Masoretic Text. The Samaritan community uses the Samaritan Pentateuch, which contains only the first five books.
The Masoretes began developing what would become the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible in Rabbinic Judaism near the end of the Talmudic period (–), but the actual date is difficult to determine. In the sixth and seventh centuries, three Jewish communities contributed systems for writing the precise letter-text, with its vocalization and accentuation known as the mas'sora (from which we derive the term "masoretic"). These early Masoretic scholars were based primarily in the Galilean cities of Tiberias and Jerusalem and in Babylonia (modern Iraq). Those living in the Jewish community of Tiberias in ancient Galilee (–950) made scribal copies of the Hebrew Bible texts without a standard text, such as the Babylonian tradition had, to work from. The canonical pronunciation of the Hebrew Bible (called Tiberian Hebrew) that they developed, and many of the notes they made, therefore, differed from the Babylonian. These differences were resolved into a standard text called the Masoretic text in the ninth century. The oldest complete copy still in existence is the Leningrad Codex dating to c. 1000 CE.
The Samaritan Pentateuch is a version of the Torah maintained by the Samaritan community since antiquity, which European scholars rediscovered in the 17th century; its oldest extant copies date to c. 1100 CE. Samaritans include only the Pentateuch (Torah) in their biblical canon. They do not recognize divine authorship or inspiration in any other book in the Jewish Tanakh. A Samaritan Book of Joshua partly based upon the Tanakh's Book of Joshua exists, but Samaritans regard it as a non-canonical secular historical chronicle.
The first codex form of the Hebrew Bible was produced in the seventh century. The codex is the forerunner of the modern book. Popularized by early Christians, it was made by folding a single sheet of papyrus in half, forming "pages". Assembling multiples of these folded pages together created a "book" that was more easily accessible and more portable than scrolls. The first complete printed press version of the Hebrew Bible was produced in 1488.
Old Testament The Septuagint is a translation of the Hebrew scriptures and some related texts into Koine Greek. The Septuagint, or the LXX, is believed to have been carried out by approximately seventy or seventy-two scribes and elders who were Hellenic Jews,The Old Testament in Greek – Greek manuscripts. British Library. Retrieved 20 May 2023. begun in Alexandria in the late third century BCE and completed by 132 BCE. Probably commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus, King of Egypt, it addressed the need of the primarily Greek-speaking Jews of the Graeco-Roman diaspora. Existing complete copies of the Septuagint date from the third to the fifth centuries CE, with fragments dating back to the second century BCE. Revision of its text began as far back as the first century BCE. Fragments of the Septuagint were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls; portions of its text are also found on existing papyrus from Egypt dating to the second and first centuries BCE and to the first century CE.
New Testament
During the rise of Christianity in the first century CE, new scriptures were written in Koine Greek. Christians eventually called these new scriptures the "New Testament" and began referring to the Septuagint as the "Old Testament". The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work. Most early Christian copyists were not trained scribes. Many copies of the gospels and Paul's letters were made by individual Christians over a relatively short period of time, very soon after the originals were written. There is evidence in the Synoptic Gospels, in the writings of the early Church Fathers, from Marcion, and in the Didache that Christian documents were in circulation before the end of the first century. Paul's letters were circulated during his lifetime, and his death is thought to have occurred before 68 during Nero's reign. Early Christians transported these writings around the Empire, translating them into Old Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Latin, and other languages.