Tanah is ... Composition and characteristics of the Hebrew Bible

According to statistics, the Bible is one of the most published and sold books in the world. It combines many written monuments from different regions and times. One of the most important sections of the Bible is the Old Testament. In the tradition of Judaism, it is called Tanakh. About what he is, what is the composition and content of Tanakh, we'll talk about this article.

The Jewish Bible

It is known that there are two Bibles - Christian and Jewish. The first, in addition to the Old Testament, includes the body of texts, which is called the New Testament. But the Hebrew Bible is limited only by the Old. Of course, the very definition of the "decrepit", that is, obsolete, the Jews do not recognize and consider it somewhat insulting to their Holy Scripture. The Jews call their canon the word "Tanah". This is actually an abbreviation, which comes from the words "Torah", "Neviim", "Ketuvim" - components of the Bible of the Jews. We will talk about them in more detail, but for now let us turn to history.

The Origin of the Tanakh, Language and Historical Development

As already mentioned above, Tanakh is a collection of texts that had different authors who lived at different times and places. The most ancient layers of Scripture have an approximate age of 3000 years. The youngest ones were written just over two thousand years ago. Anyway, the age is quite impressive and respectable. According to the most common version, the formation of the Old Testament began in the 13th century BC. E. In the Middle East and ended by the 1st century BC. E. The language of writing is Hebrew. Some parts are also written in a later Aramaic dialect. In the 3rd century BC. E. In Alexandria for the Jews of the Diaspora was made a Greek translation, called the Septuagint. He was on the move among Greek-speaking Jews until a new Christian religion entered the world arena, the followers of which began actively translating sacred texts into all languages of the world, considering all of them equally sacred. Supporters of Judaism, though they use translations, but canonical recognize only the authentic Jewish text.

Contents of the Tanakh

The contents of the book of the Old Testament are very diverse. But first of all Tanakh is a narrative about the history of the Israeli people and its relationship with the Creator God, which bears the name of Yahweh. In addition, the Jewish Bible contains cosmogonic myths, religious instructions, hymnographic material and prophecies directed to the future. Believers believe that the whole of the Tanakh is an inspired whole text in which no letter can be changed.

Component parts of Tanakh

There are 24 books in the Hebrew Scripture. In fact, they are almost identical to the Christian canon, but differ in the nature of the classification. In addition, some books, considered by Christians as different texts, are united into one in Tanakh. Therefore, the total number of books among Jews is 24 (sometimes they are reduced even to 22 to justify the correspondence of Tanakh's books with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which, as is known, there are 22), whereas Christians have a minimum of 39.

As already mentioned, all the books of Tanakh are divided into three classes: Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim. The first of these - the Torah - is the most important. This part is also called the Pentateuch, because it consists of five books, the authorship of which is attributed to the prophet Moses. However, this is a religious attribution, which is questionable from a scientific point of view.

The word "Torah" means a law that you need to know and do exactly. These books tell about the creation of the world, people, their fall, the history of ancient humanity, the birth and election of God by the Jewish people, the conclusion of a covenant with him and the way to the Promised Land - Israel.

Section Neviim means literally "prophets." But, in addition to the prophetic books, it includes some historical narratives. In itself, Neviim is divided into two parts: the early prophets and the late prophet. The early category includes works attributed to Joshua, the Prophet Samuel, and others. On the whole, they are more historical in nature than prophetic. Later prophets include the books of the three so-called great prophets - Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel - and twelve small prophets. Unlike the Christian tradition, the latter are combined into one book. In total, there are eight books in Nevaem.

Ketuvim is the section that encloses Tanakh. In Russian it means "writings". It includes prayer and hymnographic texts, as well as literature of wisdom - instruction of religious and moral character, the authorship of which is attributed to the wise men of Israel, for example to King Solomon. In total, there are 11 books in this section.

Tanah in Christianity

The whole Tanakh is recognized as the Holy Scripture in the Christian world, with the exception of some heterodox currents, for example the Gnostics. However, if the followers of Judaism included in the canon only texts that have a Hebrew original, then Christians recognize some other scriptures as sacred, the original in Hebrew either not preserved or did not exist at all. All such texts date back to the Septuagint - the Greek version of the Tanakh. On the rights of the sacred text they enter the Orthodox Bible. In Catholicism they are recognized conditionally and are called second canonical. And in Protestantism is completely rejected. In this sense, the Protestant canon is more like the Christian versions of the Tanakh than the Jewish one. In fact, the Protestant version of the Old Testament is simply a translation of the late Jewish canon. In all three Christian traditions, the classification of books has been changed. Thus, the three-part structure was replaced by a four-part structure, borrowed from the same Septuagint. It includes the Pentateuch, historical, teaching and prophetic books.