Judaism's Original Texts 1: The Tanakh vs. the Christian Old Testament

Thank you for visiting. This article is the first installment in a series explaining the original texts of Judaism.

This time, I take up Judaism’s written scripture, “the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible).” You may think, “Isn’t it the same as the Christian Old Testament?” — but in fact its arrangement, counting, and positioning differ greatly. Knowing that difference is the first step to understanding Judaism.

For an overview map of Judaism’s original texts as a whole, please see this summary article.

Judaism's Original Texts: A Complete Guide to the Tanakh and Talmuden.senkohome.com/myths-religions-origins-judaism/

What Is the Tanakh — the Initials of Three Parts

“The Tanakh” is the name referring to the whole of the Jewish Bible. This strange-sounding word is an abbreviation (acronym) joining the initials of the three parts that make up the Bible.

That is, the three letters “T, N, K” are read with vowels added as “Tanakh.” This three-part structure is the very foundation of the Jewish understanding of the Bible, and leads to a great difference from the Christian Old Testament (arranged by theme), as we see later.

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The Torah — the Most Sacred Core (5 Books)

The most sacred of the three parts is the first, “the Torah (the Law).” Also called the “Five Books of Moses,” it consists of five books that Moses is held to have received from God.

• Genesis: the creation, Adam and Eve, Noah’s flood, the stories of the patriarchs such as Abraham
• Exodus: the exodus from Egypt by Moses, and the giving of the Ten Commandments and the Law at Mount Sinai
• Leviticus: the priests’ duties, and the fine laws of purity rules and festivals
• Numbers: the record of the 40-year journey wandering the wilderness
• Deuteronomy: Moses’ sermons, which can be called his testament, before the promised land

The Torah is not a mere “first five books.” In Judaism, it is held to record the 613 commandments that God set, and is the absolute foundation of faith and life. In the synagogue, a scroll handwritten on parchment (the Torah scroll) is still carefully kept, and the whole is read aloud over the course of a year. The Torah itself is explained in detail in the next Article 2.

The Nevi’im — the Books of the Prophets (8 Books)

The second, “the Nevi’im (the Prophets),” divides further into two.

One is the “Former Prophets,” books of history depicting from the settling of the promised land to the rise and fall of the kingdom (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings). The other is the “Latter Prophets,” a gathering of the words of the prophets who were entrusted with the word of God.

The Latter Prophets, in addition to the major prophetic books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, are characterized by counting the 12 short prophetic books from Hosea to Malachi together as one book, the “Book of the Twelve (Minor) Prophets.” This is the part Christianity divides and counts as 12 books, and is one cause of the “difference in book count” we see later.

The Ketuvim — the Books of Poetry and Wisdom (11 Books)

The third, “the Ketuvim (the Writings),” is a gathering of diverse books of differing character.

It includes the “Psalms,” a gathering of hymns to God, the “Proverbs” and “Job,” which tell of life’s wisdom, and the five scrolls called the “Five Megillot,” read aloud at festivals (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther). Further, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles follow.

What I want to note here is that the Jewish Bible closes with this “Chronicles.” This is an ending greatly different from the Christian Old Testament, which we look at in detail later.

A List of the Tanakh’s 24 Books

Let me organize the three-part structure so far into a table. In Judaism, these are counted as 24 books in total.

Differences from the Christian “Old Testament”

Now, here is the core of this article. The Tanakh and the Christian Old Testament, while the content of the texts they hold is nearly the same, have three great differences.

Difference 1: The “Counting” of the Books Differs

The Jewish Tanakh is 24 books; the Protestant Old Testament is 39 books. Why does the count differ though the content is the same? It is because the way of dividing (counting) differs.

What Judaism counts as one book, Christianity divides into several. For example, it divides Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles each into “1 and 2,” separates Ezra and Nehemiah, and above all divides and counts the “Twelve Prophets” as 12 books. By the accumulation of such divisions, 24 books become 39 books.

Difference 2: The “Order” and “Ending” of the Books Differs

This tends to be overlooked, but it is a very important difference.

The Jewish Tanakh quietly draws to a close with Chronicles, ending by looking back on the journey of the Jewish people. Christianity, on the other hand, rearranges the order and ends the Old Testament with Malachi (the prophecy that the Lord’s messenger will come). This is no accident. It is an arrangement unique to Christianity, made to create the flow in which “the savior the Old Testament foretold appears as Jesus in the following New Testament.”

Difference 3: It Is Not Called the “Old Testament” in the First Place

This is the most fundamental difference. The name “Old Testament” is, to the last, a designation from the Christian standpoint.

Because Christianity thinks that a “new covenant (New Testament)” between God and humans was made through Jesus, it calls the Bible before that the “old covenant (Old Testament).” But to Judaism, this is not an “old” Bible at all, but the one and complete Bible itself. It does not acknowledge the New Testament, nor Jesus as the savior. Precisely for this reason, Jews never call it the “Old Testament,” but call it “the Tanakh” or simply “the Bible.”

Note that the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testament further adds the “Deuterocanon (Apocrypha)” such as Tobit and Maccabees, but these are not included in the Jewish Tanakh. Even the same “Old Testament” differs a little in the range of its contents among Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism.

The Masoretic Text — the Inheritance of the Hebrew Original

Finally, let me touch on how the Tanakh has been inherited. The Tanakh is, as a rule, written in Hebrew (partly Aramaic).

Ancient Hebrew was written with consonants alone, with no vowel marks. So around the 7th to 10th centuries, scholars called the “Masoretes” attached marks to the text showing the accurate pronunciation and reading, doing the work of transmitting every single letter strictly. The authoritative text established in this way is the “Masoretic Text,” the basis of the present Hebrew Bible. Judaism’s thoroughgoing stance of trying to transmit the sacred words to later generations without the slightest deviation can be glimpsed here.

The Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Original texts older than the Masoretic Text, conveying an older form of the Bible, are also important. One is the Greek translation of the Bible, the “Septuagint,” made in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC. Translated for Jews who had come to speak Greek, its name derives from the legend that “72 elders translated it.” This was later widely used as the “Old Testament” of the early Christian church, which used Greek, and is also notable for differing from the Masoretic Text in arrangement and range, including the Deuterocanon touched on earlier.

The other is the “Dead Sea Scrolls,” held to be one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century. From 1947 on, a great quantity of manuscripts written in the 3rd century BC to 1st century AD were discovered in the caves of Qumran by the shore of the Dead Sea. Among them were included some of the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, and it was confirmed that they had hardly changed from the Masoretic Text of over a thousand years later. This was a groundbreaking discovery that backs up how accurate Judaism’s manuscript inheritance was.

To Learn More

Here are some related books. Reading them alongside this series lets you savor this world even more deeply.

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Conclusion

In this article, I explained in detail Judaism’s written scripture, “the Tanakh,” and its differences from the Christian Old Testament. How was it?

The Tanakh is a Hebrew Bible consisting of three parts and 24 books — Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim. Its content does overlap with the Christian Old Testament, but its counting, arrangement, and positioning differ, and above all Judaism does not call it the “Old Testament,” regarding it as the one and complete Bible.

This difference directly reflects the fundamental difference in standpoint between Judaism, which says “the savior has not yet come,” and Christianity, which says “Jesus was the savior.”

In the next Article 2, I will explain in detail the Torah (the Five Books of Moses), the core of this Tanakh, and the idea of the “covenant,” which forms the foundation of Judaism.

Judaism's Original Texts: A Complete Guide to the Tanakh and Talmuden.senkohome.com/myths-religions-origins-judaism/

I hope you’ll read the next article too.