Tanakh

Tanakh is a Hebrew acronym formed from the names of its three divisions. Torah is the five books of Moses. Neviim, the Prophets, splits into the Former Prophets, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which read as narrative history, and the Latter Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve Minor Prophets counted as one book. Ketuvim, the Writings, is the most miscellaneous: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the five scrolls read at festivals (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther), Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles.

The Jewish count is 24 books. Protestant Old Testaments contain exactly the same text but reach 39 by splitting Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah into pairs and counting the Twelve as twelve. The difference is arithmetic, not content. Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments add further books not in the Hebrew collection at all.

The ordering difference is not arithmetic. The Tanakh ends with Chronicles, whose final verses are Cyrus's permission for the exiles to go up to Jerusalem and rebuild, the collection closes on return and restoration. Christian Old Testaments, following the arrangement of the Greek and Latin Bibles, regroup the material into law, history, poetry and prophecy, and end with Malachi and its promise of a messenger to come, which runs straight into the gospels. Both sequences are ancient; the choice between them is a theological one, and each tradition reads its own scripture through the shape it has given the whole.

Hebrew was written without vowels. For centuries the consonantal skeleton of the biblical text was stable while its pronunciation, phrasing and chant were carried orally. Between roughly the seventh and tenth centuries, scribal scholars called the Masoretes built that oral knowledge into the written page, working in several centres but decisively at Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. They could not touch the consonants, so everything they added went above, below and beside them: niqqud, the system of dots and strokes fixing the vowels; teamim, cantillation accents that mark stress, divide clauses and encode the melody for public chanting; and marginal and end-notes, the Masorah proper, recording letter counts, unusual spellings and every place where the written text and the text as read differ.

The ben Asher family of Tiberias produced the tradition that prevailed. Two manuscripts carry it. The Aleppo Codex, written in the tenth century with its consonants copied by Shlomo ben Buya'a and its pointing and notes added by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, was regarded as the standard; Maimonides used it. Roughly a third of it, including almost all the Torah, was lost after the 1947 riots in Aleppo. The Leningrad Codex of 1008, copied in Cairo in the same tradition, is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible and is the base text of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and therefore of most modern scholarly editions and translations.

The result is a text transmitted with extraordinary control. The Masoretes counted letters precisely so that copying errors could not accumulate silently, and the apparatus they built is why a modern Hebrew Bible can print vowels, accents and variant readings on a consonantal text nobody was permitted to change.

Long before the Masoretes, the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek for Jewish communities in Egypt. The Septuagint began with the Torah in the third century BCE and grew over the following two centuries to cover the rest, sometimes translating a Hebrew text noticeably different from the one the Masoretes later fixed, its Jeremiah is around an eighth shorter and differently ordered. It became the Bible of the early church, and the divergences between it and the Hebrew are one of the reasons Christian and Jewish canons parted.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, found at Qumran from 1947 and dating from roughly the third century BCE to the first century CE, put the question to a direct test. They include fragments of every book of the Tanakh except Esther, and they are about a thousand years older than the Aleppo and Leningrad codices. The great Isaiah scroll agrees with the Masoretic Isaiah closely enough that almost no differences affect the sense. But the scrolls also preserved copies aligned with the Septuagint and with the Samaritan Pentateuch, showing that several text-types circulated side by side and that the Masoretic form was one stream among others before it became the only one.

When the collection closed is unsettled. Older textbooks credit a Council of Jamnia around 90 CE with fixing the canon. That reconstruction, proposed by Heinrich Graetz in 1871, was dismantled from the 1960s by Jack P. Lewis, Sidney Leiman and others: the rabbinic sources describe discussion of whether Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs render the hands unclean, not a council closing a list. Most scholars now treat the canon as settling gradually, with the Torah and Prophets long established and parts of the Writings still argued over into the second century CE.