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The Bible as Many Books The Bible clearly indicates that it contains other books within itself. Frequently, the Bible refers to the “book of the law of Moses” (2 Kings 14:6) or the “book of Moses” (Mark 12:26). Mention is also made of other specific documents, such as the “book of the words of the prophet Isaiah” (Luke 3:4; cf. 4:17), the “book of the prophets” (Acts 7:42), the book of “Hosea” (Rom. 9:25), and the “book of Psalms” (Acts 1:20).3 The Gospel of John also refers to itself as a “book” (John 20:30; Greek biblion). Likewise, the author of the Acts of the Apostles tightly knits that document to the story about Jesus that the same person had presented “in the first book” (or “account”; Greek logon)—namely, the Gospel according to Luke (Acts 1:1; cf. Luke 1:1–4). This little journey of discovery alerts us to the truth that the Bible is not really just one book. In fact, we can speak quite appropriately of it as a library of books. The Bible as Library In a library, individual books are usually organized according to particular topics. There are sections for science, philosophy, religion, history, art, music, biography, fiction, and so on. An educated person has certain expectations about what information would be contained in the books grouped in these various sections of the library. Since library books are not generally organized by the dates they were written, two books by two authors who lived twenty centuries apart can stand side by side. For example, we might find a philosophical work by Plato (430– 347 BCE) on the same shelf as a commentary on that work by a modern philosopher and published just last year. Despite the vast difference in time, both books focus on the same literature of Plato. We benefit greatly when we read both works together, even though they were written more than two millennia apart. In the Bible, individual books containing material spanning many decades (in the case of the New Testament, abbreviated NT) or even many centuries (in the case of the Old Testament, abbreviated OT) are joined together in collections. For example, the first five books in the Jewish collection (the Christian Old Testament) are usually associated with Moses, whose story links four of them (all but Genesis) together, yet the books were not written at the same time. Other books from different periods are grouped together because of their association with the ministry of individual Hebrew prophets. A smaller group of writings from various centuries concerns itself with provocative topics of a general nature, such as the challenge of belief in a God of love and justice while believers live in a world where innocent people suffer and their oppressors prosper. The book of Psalms gathers together 150 hymns written over many centuries. Gospels attributed to four different Christian authors stand side by side, even though many factors, including date of composition, distinguish them from one another. The same is true of letters by various Christian missionaries. The profound religious relationship among all of these writings from various time periods is not always immediately evident. The diversity in the Bible with respect not only to date but also to literary genre (type) is thus quite remarkable. As the previous paragraph suggests, the Bible contains historical works, prophetic books, quasi-philosophical writings, hymns, biographies (the Gospels),4 and letters. There are also legal documents, short stories, collections of proverbs, sermons, records of visions, and other kinds of literature. Within each of these kinds of books, we find numerous additional literary forms, such as the well-known parables. Having all the books of the Bible gathered together between two covers of one book makes them all available to us at the same time. Even though they have much in common with one another, we should never forget that each book has its own history of development and its own unique perspective. Despite some strong literary ties among them, most of the books in the Bible are quite independent of one another, just like the books in any other kind of library. In Search of a Name What’s in a name? We are all sensitive to people who misspell or mispronounce our personal names. Thus, people of Jewish and Christian faith who cherish these collections of religious books are justifiably sensitive to the names other people use to designate their sacred writings. For example, Jews organize their twenty-four books (thirty-nine as counted in the Christian Bible) into three collections that they call Torah (tradition/instruction/law), Nevi’im (prophets), and Ketuvim (writings). Together, this library of Jewish sacred texts is often called TaNaK, or Tanak, which is an acronym formed from the initial Hebrew letter of each collection—the equivalent of the English letters T, N, and K.5 Jews may also call this collection simply “the Bible” or “the Scriptures.” Christians usually refer to it as “the Old Testament” or “the Christian Old Testament” (see further discussion below). Some Christians and biblical scholars who prefer a more neutral or nuanced term than “Old Testament” designate these same documents as the Scriptures of Israel or the Hebrew Bible (abbreviated HB), since most of the collection was originally written in Hebrew, though there are several portions in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Persian Empire and the language that gradually replaced spoken Hebrew after the Babylonian exile (586–539 BCE).6 The cessation of Hebrew as a spoken language and the rise of the empire under Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE)—which spread Greek culture, religion, and language—threatened the religious and cultural heritage of Jews scattered around the Mediterranean and further East.7 Under these circumstances, Jews had to find a way to preserve their sacred texts for a new cultural and linguistic reality.