Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible is the standard canon of Jewish sacred texts, composed in a period that falls across the second and first millennia BCE. It is also referred to as the Tanakh, an acrostic portmanteau of the three major sections of the Hebrew Bible: the Torah (“teaching”), the Nevi’im (“prophets”), and the Ketuvim (“writings”). The Hebrew Bible is a collection of 24 major texts, in which there are 39 books. These 39 books correspond to the 39 books of the Christian Old Testament (not counting the deuterocanonical writings in some Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles), though Jewish tradition arranges them in a different order than Christian tradition does. While different versions of the Jewish canon have been used by various groups throughout history, the standard text tradition is the Masoretic Text, a set of medieval manuscripts believed to best reflect the Hebrew form of the original compositions. The Hebrew Bible is thus, as its name suggests, written almost entirely in Hebrew, with a few additional passages in Aramaic (an ancient cousin of the Hebrew language). 

The Hebrew Bible tells the ancient history of the Jewish people, including accounts of the creation of the world, the ancient Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, the giving of the Law of Moses, and the ministry of judges, kings, and prophets, all leading up to the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians and its subsequent restoration under the Persians. It includes a wide variety of literary genres, including history, prophecy, ceremonial laws, ethical instructions, songs, proverbs, and poetry. The Hebrew Bible’s texts offer an important primary source on the history and culture of the ancient Near East and stand among the core religious and philosophical foundations of several major world religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

This study guide uses the English translation of the Hebrew Bible produced by the Jewish Publication Society (JPS), from the JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh (New JPS Translation, Second Edition, 1999). References to the text are standardized across all Jewish translations in a book-chapter-verse format (e.g., Genesis 1.1), so this study guide can be used alongside any version of the text. Wherever the Hebrew title for a book differs in spelling or meaning from the traditional English title, the Hebrew title will be provided in italics. 

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of child death, animal death, death, and pregnancy loss.

Language Note: To make this study guide useful to all readers interested in the Jewish tradition, it uses a common Jewish practice for referring to the divinity, eliding a portion of the name to show reverence and respect, i.e., “G-d” and “L-rd,” even in cases where the JPS translation would have rendered the full word. 

Summary

The Hebrew Bible recounts the story of G-d’s relationship with the Jewish people and their ancestors over a chronological span from the creation of the world to the mid-first millennium BCE. Most of the material (aside from the primeval history of early Genesis) relates to a discrete period from about 2000 BCE to 400 BCE, narrated in both historical and prophetic texts. The Hebrew Bible has a loose chronological arrangement among its three major sections, but much of the ordering of the books within each section has to do with genre rather than chronology.

The first major section is the Torah (sometimes called the law or teaching of Moses and referred to as the Pentateuch in Christian tradition), and it contains the five books that were traditionally ascribed to the authorship of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The first 11 chapters of Genesis deal with the primeval history of the world and contain the classic stories of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Noah’s ark, and the Tower of Babel. From that point on, the remainder of Gensis offers a historical overview of the lives of the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph (early second millennium BCE). The following four books are all concerned with the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt during the ministry of Moses (falling somewhere between the 15th and 13th centuries BCE, depending on one’s chronological interpretation). All five books of the Torah are of substantial length, and alongside historical narratives, they also include the many laws of the Mosaic code, dealing both with social case laws and ritual/religious practices. 

The second major section is the Nevi’im (“prophets”), which consists of eight major texts, further subdivided into 21 books. The arrangement of these texts is differently ordered from those in the Christian Old Testament, comprising both what Christians would call books of history and books of prophecy. The major texts are Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and The Twelve. Within those texts, Samuel and Kings are traditionally subdivided into doubled books (1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings), and The Twelve is a collection of 12 small prophetic books: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Most of the texts of the Nevi’im relate the history of ancient Israel from the time of its entrance into the land of Canaan (the southern Levant), through the period of the judges and the monarchy, and up to the fall of the kingdom of Judah to the Neo-Babylonian Empire in the sixth century BCE. A few of the prophetic texts in The Twelve extend beyond that historical range, corresponding to the period of the Jews’ return from exile under the Persian Empire. The narratives of the Nevi’im include the stories of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, of the judges Gideon and Samson, and of great kings like David and Solomon. 

The third major section is the Ketuvim (sometimes spelled Kethuvim, meaning “writings”), which consists of 11 major texts, further subdivided into 13 books. As with the Nevi’im, the ordering of these books is different from that in the Christian Old Testament, and some variation exists even within Jewish ordering systems. The major texts of the Ketuvim are Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, and Chronicles. The final two texts are each subdivided, making four books instead of two (Ezra, Nehemiah, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles). The five small books from Song of Songs to Esther can collectively be referred to as the Five Megillot (“scrolls”), but they are always treated as separate books rather than a single text. The books of the Ketuvim represent a variety of genres, including poetry, wisdom literature, history, and prophecy. They correspond to much of the chronological period covered by the Nevi’im and offer a more robust view of the latter part of that history, with Esther, Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah each presenting historical stories from the exilic and post-exilic periods. 

The historical narrative presented by all three sections of the Hebrew Bible is bound together by the narrative arc of G-d’s relationship with the people of Israel. It is not so much a national history as a theological history, defined more by G-d’s actions than by a simple sequence of events. G-d is presented as the initiator and the active agent at every stage of Israel’s history. In the Hebrew Bible, religion and political history are not two separate realms of social existence but are inextricably interwoven. This direct and intentional connection between religion and history can be seen from the outset of the story of the patriarchs in Genesis, when G-d calls Abraham (first known as Abram) out of Mesopotamian society, making a covenant with him and instructing him to move to the land of Canaan, which his descendants will inherit. His son and grandson, Isaac and Jacob, live in Canaan while their households grow, but by the time Jacob’s 12 sons are grown, they are forced to leave Canaan for Egypt because of a famine. Jacob’s sons are the patriarchs of the 12 tribes of ancient Israel (“Israel” itself being a biblical nickname for Jacob), and their families prosper in Egypt until the Egyptian pharaoh decides to force them into slavery. Generations later, G-d raises up Moses to be the deliverer of the enslaved Israelites, enacting miraculous plagues of judgment against Egypt until the pharaoh releases them. Delivering the freed slaves via a dramatic race through an opening in the Red Sea, G-d leads the Israelites through the wilderness to Mount Sinai, where G-d delivers the Ten Commandments and the other instructions of the covenant to Moses. Despite G-d’s favor upon them, the Israelites disobey G-d and hesitate entering Canaan, their “promised land.” As a result, they are forced to wander in the desert for 40 years, until the next generation is ready to take up the mantle of obedience. Moses dies on a mountainside just before their entrance into Canaan, at which point his protégé Joshua takes command of the Israelites.

With the narrative of the Torah complete, the books of the Nevi’im take up the story. Joshua leads the Israelites across the Jordan River and into Canaan, where G-d delivers a series of powerful Canaanite city-states into their hands. Thus established in their promised land, the Israelites settle in their apportioned tribal areas, maintaining a loose coalition that is occasionally called together for united military action under judges like Barak and Gideon. The Israelites are perpetually harried by the regional powers around them, so they ask Samuel, a prophet and judge, to give them a centralized monarchy. G-d allows this arrangement, and the period of the united monarchy begins, in which all 12 tribes of Israel are ruled by a single king. Saul is the first such king, but the results of his kingship are mixed, and he ultimately loses the throne through disobedience to G-d and defeat in battle. David, who has already become famous as a young man by defeating the Philistine giant Goliath in single combat, next rises to claim the kingship. His success as king and his devotion to G-d (as evidenced by the Psalms, many of which are attributed to him) give him a legacy as the great paragon of ideal kingship. This golden age of Israelite monarchy extends into the reign of David’s son Solomon, who in the 10th century BCE raises Israel to its historical apex of power, stability, and fame. Solomon is remembered for his wisdom (much of Proverbs is attributed to him) and for being the builder of the great temple in Jerusalem, which will serve as the center of the worship of G-d until its destruction four centuries later.

After Solomon, the monarchy splits in two: a northern kingdom, thenceforth called Israel, and a southern kingdom, called Judah after its dominant tribal group. Both the capital city, Jerusalem, and the Davidic family line remain in the southern kingdom of Judah until its fall. The northern kingdom, Israel, suffers through a long period of poor rulers who refuse to submit to G-d’s law or to the prophets whom G-d sends to them. Israel eventually falls to the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the eighth century BCE, while Judah presses on for nearly another century and a half, until its own fall to the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Judah also suffers from many wayward kings who reject the word of G-d delivered by the prophets, but it has a few faithful kings—Hezekiah and Josiah among them—who keep the kingdom stable for a time. 

Jerusalem falls to the Babylonians in 586 BCE, a historical cataclysm that sees the destruction of Solomon’s temple on Tisha b’Av (a day that would come to be a memorial of national tragedy in later Jewish practice). The remaining Jews (so called because they came from Judah) are mostly taken into exile in Babylon, which, after a few decades, changes hands due to the rising power of the Persian Empire. G-d continues to send prophets to the Jews during their exile (the books of Ezekiel, Esther, and Daniel are all set in this period), and eventually, the Persians permit the exiled Jews to return to their homeland and begin the rebuilding process. Guided by leaders like Ezra and Nehemiah, a group of Jews re-establishes themselves in their ancestral promised land and rebuilds (in a somewhat diminished form) the city of Jerusalem and the temple of G-d. This story of restoration to the promised land brings the story of the Hebrew Bible full circle, as the Jewish people once again take possession of the land that G-d first pledged to their forefather Abraham.