General knowledge · Religion & belief

The books of the Bible

Hebrew canon settled by the 2nd century CE; Christian canon listed in full in 367

Scripture — the shelf of books that Judaism and Christianity read as one library

Not a book but a library, gathered over roughly a thousand years and counted differently by different communities. Jews arrange the same Hebrew material as 24 books in three parts — Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim, giving the acronym Tanakh — while Protestants divide the identical content into 39 books of the Old Testament and Catholics and the Orthodox add further works from the Greek tradition. All Christians share the 27 books of the New Testament, a list first set out in full by Athanasius of Alexandria in an Easter letter of 367.

How to spot them

▸Counted as 24 books in the Hebrew arrangement, 39 in the Protestant Old Testament, 46 in the Catholic
▸Tanakh is an acronym — Torah, Nevi'im, Ketuvim: Law, Prophets, Writings
▸Twenty-seven in the New Testament, from Matthew to Revelation
▸'Minor' prophets means short, not unimportant: the Twelve, from Hosea to Malachi
▸Questions love the extremes — first, last, longest, shortest, the one that never mentions God

Key facts

Seven priests with rams' horns, seven circuits on the seventh day, and the walls come down

Joshua chapter 6 — the fall of Jericho, the first city attacked by the Israelites after crossing the Jordan; the prostitute Rahab was spared for sheltering the spies

The first five, called in Greek the Pentateuch, running from Genesis to Deuteronomy

The Torah; traditionally ascribed to Moses

Matthew, Mark and Luke — the three that can be set side by side in parallel columns

The Synoptic Gospels, from Greek for 'seen together'; John stands apart

Athanasius of Alexandria's Easter letter of 367 is the first surviving list of exactly these twenty-seven (367)

The New Testament canon; the Council of Trent fixed the Catholic Old Testament in 1546

'Jesus wept' — the shortest verse in the King James version

John 11:35, at the tomb of Lazarus

One hundred and fifty poems, including both the longest and the shortest chapters

The Psalms: Psalm 119 is the longest chapter, Psalm 117 the shortest

The books Protestants call the Apocrypha and Catholics the deuterocanon — Tobit, Judith, Maccabees and the rest

Present in the Greek Septuagint, absent from the Hebrew canon

The last one: a vision seen on Patmos, of seals, trumpets, bowls and a new Jerusalem

Revelation, also called the Apocalypse of John

Key ideas

Canon comes from a Greek word for a measuring rod. The lists were not so much decided at a single meeting as settled by long use, with the disputed edges — Hebrews, James, Revelation, the Greek additions — argued over for centuries.

Quick-fire facts

•The Hebrew Bible contains the same text as the Protestant Old Testament but counts it as 24 books rather than 39, joining Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah and the Twelve into single volumes
•A Catholic Bible has 73 books in all: 46 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New
•The first five books are the Torah or Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy
•Obadiah is the shortest book of the Old Testament, at 21 verses; 2 and 3 John are the shortest in the New
•The Book of Esther in Hebrew never mentions God, and was among the last admitted to the Jewish canon
•In the Book of Joshua, Jericho is the first city the Israelites attack in Canaan; its walls fall after the Ark is carried round them for seven days
•The four major prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel; the twelve minor prophets run from Hosea to Malachi
•Thirteen New Testament letters are addressed as from Paul; the authorship of Hebrews is anonymous and disputed
•The Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures is the Septuagint, from the tradition that seventy-two scholars made it in Alexandria
•Chapter divisions are credited to Stephen Langton in the early 13th century; the verse numbering of the New Testament to the printer Robert Estienne in 1551

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Sources

BBC Religion & Ethics — The Bible
World History Encyclopedia — Jericho