BOOKS 1 TO 39 · 39 BOOKS · WRITTEN IN HEBREW

The Old Testament

The promise made

BOOKS: 39 books: 5 books of Moses, 12 books of history, 5 books of poetry and wisdom, and 17 books of prophecy.
WRITTEN: Over about a thousand years, from the time of Moses to the prophet Malachi around 430 BC, by the traditional count.
LANGUAGE: Mostly Hebrew. A few chapters of Ezra and Daniel and one verse of Jeremiah are in Aramaic, a sister language.
ANCIENT MANUSCRIPTS: The Dead Sea Scrolls, found from 1947 to 1956, hold pieces of every Old Testament book except Esther. They are about a thousand years older than the copies scholars had before.
EARLIEST MANUSCRIPT: Two tiny silver scrolls from Ketef Hinnom in Jerusalem, from about 600 BC. They hold the priestly blessing from Numbers 6:24 to 26, Yahweh bless you and keep you, and they spell out God's name YHWH.
THE LIST OF 39: Jesus called these Scriptures the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms in Luke 24:44. Jewish Bibles have the same books but count them as 24 by grouping some together.

What Does Testament Mean

Testament is an old word for covenant, a binding promise. The Old Testament is the story of God's covenants: with Noah, with Abraham, with Israel at Mount Sinai and with King David. Each one moves the story forward, and each one points to the new covenant Jesus would bring.

One Big Story

Thirty nine books look like a library, but they tell one story. God makes a good world, and people break it. God picks one family, Abraham's, to bring the fix. He rescues them from Egypt, gives them His law and a land, and sends prophet after prophet every time they wander off. The Old Testament ends with the people waiting for the Messiah. The New Testament opens with His arrival.

Not in Time Order

English Bibles group the books by type, not by date. Job may be one of the oldest stories in the Bible, and many of the prophets lived during the events in Kings and Chronicles. When a prophet's book confuses you, look up which king was on the throne. The last three pages of this Introduction explain the order and show every book on a timeline.

The Books

THE LAWGenesis to Deuteronomy

The five books of Moses: creation, the fathers of Israel, the escape from Egypt and the law.

HISTORYJoshua to Esther

Israel enters the land, gets kings, splits in two, goes into exile and comes home.

POETRY AND WISDOMJob to Song of Solomon

Songs, prayers and wise sayings for real life.

MAJOR PROPHETSIsaiah to Daniel

Five longer books. Major means long, not more important.

MINOR PROPHETSHosea to Malachi

Twelve shorter books. Minor means short, not less important.

Why We Say Yahweh

God told Moses His personal name in Exodus 3:15. In Hebrew it is spelled YHWH, and it shows up about 6,800 times in the Old Testament. Out of respect, Jewish readers stopped saying it out loud and said Lord instead, so most English Bibles print LORD in capital letters. The Owner's Manual puts His name back. Where you see Yahweh, the Hebrew says YHWH. Where you see Lord, the Hebrew usually says Adonai, which means master. Where you see God, the Hebrew usually says Elohim, the mighty Creator.

How This Bible Marks the Old Testament

PROPHECY: Prophecies are highlighted in green, orange, purple or blue, depending on how they came true. The note at the bottom of the column tells you where.
QUOTED IN THE NEW: When the New Testament quotes an Old Testament verse, that verse is printed in italics, and the note tells you where it is quoted. When the New Testament only points back to a verse without quoting it, the verse gets a note but no italics.
GOD SPEAKING: Words spoken by God are printed in red. Only the words He actually said are red.
THE FAMILY LINE: Names in the bloodline of Jesus are underlined in red, from Adam and Eve all the way to Judah and Perez.

FIELD NOTES · ARCHAEOLOGY · CONFIDENCE: HIGH

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Cave 4 at Qumran, near the Dead Sea, where most of the scroll pieces were found.

FOUND BY A SHEPHERD: In late 1946 or early 1947 a young Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed edh Dhib was looking for a lost goat near the Dead Sea. He threw a rock into a cave, heard pottery break and found clay jars holding ancient scrolls. From 1947 to 1956 searchers found scrolls in eleven caves near a place called Qumran.
WHAT WAS FOUND: Pieces of about 900 scrolls, many broken into tens of thousands of fragments. About 230 of them are books of the Bible, and every Old Testament book shows up except Esther. The rest are Bible commentaries, community rules and other religious writings, including 1 Enoch.
HOW OLD THEY ARE: The scrolls were copied from about 250 BC to AD 68, the year the Romans destroyed the settlement at Qumran. Scholars dated them by handwriting, radiocarbon tests and coins found at the site.
THE GREAT ISAIAH SCROLL: One scroll holds all 66 chapters of Isaiah. It is about 24 feet long and was copied around 125 BC. Before 1947 the oldest complete Hebrew copies of Isaiah were from about AD 900 to 1000. This scroll is about 1,000 years older, and when scholars compared them the words were nearly identical. Most differences are spelling and small slips of the pen, and none of them change a major teaching of the faith.
WHERE ARE THE VOWELS: Hebrew was written with consonants only. Readers knew the vowel sounds by heart, the way you can read txt msgs. Jewish scribes called the Masoretes added written vowel marks between about AD 600 and 1000. So the scrolls have no vowel marks, but the letters match.
BUT WASN'T THE BIBLE CHANGED?: Skeptics often say the Bible was changed over and over until it no longer says what it first said. The Dead Sea Scrolls let us test that claim, and copies made before Jesus was born read almost the same as the Hebrew Bible we use today. To be fair, some scrolls show small differences, and a few books like Jeremiah existed in a shorter and a longer form. But the big picture is clear: the text was copied with amazing care.
ISAIAH 53 BEFORE JESUS: The Isaiah Scroll includes Isaiah 53, the chapter about a Servant who is pierced for our sins. It was copied more than a hundred years before Jesus was born, so no one can say Christians wrote it after the fact.
WHERE THEY ARE TODAY: Most are kept by the Israel Antiquities Authority. The Great Isaiah Scroll is in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, a building shaped like the lids of the jars the scrolls were found in. In 1954 four of the scrolls were offered for sale in a Wall Street Journal ad, and Israel quietly bought them for $250,000.

FIELD NOTES · MANUSCRIPTS · CONFIDENCE: HIGH

The Masoretic Text

The Aleppo Codex open to the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy, photographed by Joseph Segall around 1910. These pages went missing after 1947, so this old photo is now the only way to see them. Public domain.

WHAT IT IS: The Masoretic Text is the standard Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Jewish Bibles use it today, and so do almost all English Old Testaments, including this one. The name comes from the Hebrew word masorah, which means tradition, the things handed down.
ONE TEXT BEFORE THEM: The Masoretes did not stitch the Bible together. The letters were already settled long before them. By about AD 100, Jewish scribes copied one standard set of letters that scholars call the proto Masoretic text. Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the scrolls found at Masada, already match it.
WHO THE MASORETES WERE: Families of Jewish scribes and scholars who worked from about AD 600 to 1000, mostly in Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, and also in Babylonia and Jerusalem.
THE VOWELS: Hebrew was written with consonants only. So the Masoretes added tiny dots and lines above, below and inside the letters to show the vowel sounds. They did not change a single letter. The system from Tiberias, called the Tiberian system, won out and is still used today.
THE ACCENTS: They also added accent marks that show how to chant each verse in the synagogue, which word gets the stress, and where to pause. They work a lot like our commas and periods.
THE NOTES: In the margins, and at the end of each book, they wrote notes called the masorah. They counted the letters, words and verses of each book and marked the middle of the Torah, so a copy could be checked like a bank count. When the written word looked odd, they did not fix it. They left the letters alone and wrote in the margin how to read it.
BEN ASHER: The most famous Masorete was Aaron ben Asher of Tiberias, in the early 900s, the last of a family of Masoretes. A rival named Ben Naphtali disagreed with him in about 875 small places, mostly accent marks. Ben Asher's version won. In the 1100s, the great Jewish teacher Maimonides used a Ben Asher codex, a book with pages instead of a scroll, as his model.
THE ALEPPO CODEX: Copied about AD 920 to 930. A note in the book says Ben Asher himself added its vowels and notes. It was kept in a synagogue in Aleppo, Syria, for about 600 years. In 1947, rioters set the synagogue on fire, and about 40 percent of it, including most of the Torah, went missing. What survived was brought to Israel in 1958 and is kept at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

FIELD NOTES · MANUSCRIPTS · CONFIDENCE: HIGH

From the Masoretes to Your Bible

A decorated page from the Leningrad Codex, AD 1008. The words in the center star name the scribe, Samuel ben Jacob. Public domain.

THE LENINGRAD CODEX: Copied in Cairo in AD 1008 by a scribe named Samuel ben Jacob, from Ben Asher copies. It is the oldest complete Hebrew Bible in the world. It is kept at the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, a city once called Leningrad.
1488: The first complete printed Hebrew Bible came off the press in Soncino, Italy.
1524 TO 1525: The Second Rabbinic Bible, printed by Daniel Bomberg in Venice and edited by Jacob ben Hayyim. It was the Hebrew behind the King James Old Testament of 1611 and the standard printed text for about 400 years.
1906: Rudolf Kittel, a German scholar, published Biblia Hebraica, still based on the Bomberg text.
1937: The third edition of Biblia Hebraica switched to the Leningrad Codex, a copy hundreds of years older than the manuscripts behind Bomberg.
1967 TO 1977: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, the edition most scholars and translators use today. Its footnotes list differences found in other old copies and old translations, and fixes scholars have suggested.
2004 TO TODAY: Biblia Hebraica Quinta, still being finished one book at a time. It adds what scholars learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
NEW FINDS, SAME TEXT: When older copies like the Dead Sea Scrolls turned up, scholars did not rewrite the Masoretic Text. They printed better and older copies of it and listed the differences in footnotes, so translators can see every reading and decide.
WHY IT MATTERS: The Hebrew you are reading in translation was guarded by scribes who counted letters for a living. Copies made a thousand years apart, like the great Isaiah scroll from the Dead Sea caves and the Leningrad Codex, say almost exactly the same thing. That is not luck. That is care.
THIS BIBLE'S BASE TEXT: The Old Testament in The Owner's Manual is translated from the Masoretic Text, mainly as it is kept in the Leningrad Codex. Once in a while, like most modern Bibles, it follows the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Greek Septuagint or another old copy where the Hebrew seems to have a copying slip. When it does, a TEXT note tells you.

HOW THIS BIBLE WORKS · DATING THE BOOKS · CONFIDENCE: HONEST

Why Do Some Books Have Two Dates?

The Merneptah Stele, carved in Egypt about 1208 BC, now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. It is the oldest mention of Israel outside the Bible that most scholars accept, already a people living in Canaan. Clues like this help pin down the dates.

TWO DATES, ONE BOOK: In the introduction to almost every Old Testament book, you will see two dates. The first is the traditional date. The second is the date many critical scholars give, and it is usually later. This page explains where each one comes from, so nothing surprises you.
WHAT CRITICAL MEANS: Just like textual criticism, critical does not mean mean. It means judging carefully. Critical scholars study the Bible the way they would study any old book. Some are believers and some are not.
HOW THIS BIBLE DATES A BOOK: First, what the book says about itself. Isaiah 1:1 names the four kings Isaiah served under. Second, what the rest of the Bible says. Jesus called the first five books the Law of Moses, Luke 24:44, and called Daniel a prophet, Matthew 24:15. Third, old Jewish tradition, which tells who wrote or gathered each book. Fourth, history and archaeology, to check all of it.
THE ANCHORS: Some dates are nailed down by records from other nations. An Assyrian monument called the Black Obelisk shows King Jehu of Israel paying tribute around 841 BC. The Assyrian king Sennacherib attacked Judah in 701 BC. Babylonian records say Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem in 597 BC. Counting back from anchors like these, 1 Kings 6:1 puts the Exodus around 1446 BC. Many scholars prefer the 1200s BC, and some doubt it happened the way it is told, so the book intros give both.
WHY CRITICS DATE LATER: 1, NO PREDICTIONS: This is the biggest reason. Some scholars start with a rule that nobody can really predict the future. But there are other reasons too. Isaiah 40 to 66 talks to people who are already in Babylon, as if Jerusalem has already fallen. Isaiah names King Cyrus about 150 years early, Isaiah 44:28 to 45:1, so many date those chapters to Cyrus's time, around 540 BC. Daniel 11 tells the story of the Greek king Antiochus in great detail, right up to about 165 BC. Then, critics say, the details about his death in verses 40 to 45 no longer match what happened. So they date Daniel to the 160s BC.
2, THE FOUR SOURCES IDEA: In 1878, a German scholar named Julius Wellhausen made famous the idea that Genesis to Deuteronomy was stitched together from four later writings, nicknamed J, E, D and P, and finished around 500 BC, about 900 years after Moses. Today many scholars have dropped the neat four part version, but most still date the final form late.
3, DETAILS THAT SOUND LATER: Genesis 14:14 mentions the city of Dan, but that city got its name later, Judges 18:29. Genesis 36:31 talks about kings before Israel had a king. Deuteronomy 34 tells about Moses' own death and burial.
4, THE LANGUAGE: Hebrew changed over time, the way English did. Ecclesiastes uses later Hebrew and at least one Persian word. Daniel uses Greek words for three musical instruments, Daniel 3:5.
5, THE DIGGING SO FAR: Many archaeologists say they have not found clear signs of Israel's time in the wilderness or of some cities in Joshua being destroyed when the Bible says.

HOW THIS BIBLE WORKS · DATING THE BOOKS · CONFIDENCE: HONEST

The Traditional Answers

The smaller Ketef Hinnom silver scroll, about 600 BC, unrolled. It holds a short form of the priestly blessing from Numbers 6:24 to 26 and the name YHWH. Public domain.

FAIR IS FAIR: Each of those five reasons has an answer, and Christian scholars have given them for a long time. Here they are, in the same order.
THE ANSWER TO 1: If God knows the future, prediction is not a problem. It is the point. God says He declares the end from the beginning, Isaiah 46:9 to 10. For many critics, the no predictions rule is a starting belief, not something anyone discovered. And Jesus Himself called Daniel a prophet.
THE ANSWER TO 2: Moses could have used older family records. Genesis is divided by the words This is the account of, which may mark older sources. Even the scholars who hold the four sources idea cannot agree on how to divide it. And the silver scrolls from Ketef Hinnom, about 600 BC, already have a short form of the priestly blessing from Numbers 6:24 to 26. Many critics put that passage in their latest source. They answer that the blessing was older than the book it ended up in. Still, it shows this part of the Law was in use before the exile.
THE ANSWER TO 3: Later scribes updated old place names so readers would know where things were, the same way we might say the Pilgrims landed in the United States, though there was no United States yet. Old Jewish tradition says Joshua wrote the last verses of Deuteronomy, about Moses' death.
THE ANSWER TO 4: Scribes updated spelling and words over the centuries, like the King James Bible was updated in 1769. Greek words for instruments could travel with traders long before Greece ruled the world. Greek soldiers and traders were already in the Near East in Daniel's day. Critics answer that one of those words shows up in Greek only much later.
THE ANSWER TO 5: Not finding something yet is not proof it never happened. People living in tents in the desert leave very little behind. And some finds point the other way. The Merneptah Stele on the first page of this section shows Israel already living in Canaan by about 1208 BC.
SO WHO IS RIGHT: On the small things, like an updated place name, both sides can be partly right. On the big thing, it comes down to one question: can God tell the future? If He can, there is no reason to push the dates later. This Bible believes He can, and the hundreds of fulfilled prophecies highlighted on these pages are the evidence.

HOW THIS BIBLE WORKS · DATING THE BOOKS · CONFIDENCE: HONEST

The Big Dates Side by Side

The Cyrus Cylinder, about 539 BC, now in the British Museum. Isaiah names Cyrus in Isaiah 44:28 and 45:1. That name is one of the main reasons many scholars date the end of Isaiah later.

GENESIS TO DEUTERONOMY: Traditional: Moses, about 1440 to 1400 BC, or the 1200s BC with the later Exodus date. Critical: finished around 500 BC. Why: the four sources idea and later sounding details.
JOSHUA TO KINGS: Traditional: written over time by prophets, with Kings finished during the exile in Babylon. Critical: mostly put together around 620 to 560 BC. Both sides agree Kings was finished after 562 BC, because its last verses happen that year, 2 Kings 25:27.
JOB: Traditional: the story is set in Abraham's time, and some say Moses wrote it down. Critical: about 600 to 400 BC. Why: the language and the big questions it asks.
PSALMS: Both sides agree it was collected over hundreds of years. Traditional: many by David, around 1000 BC, with some much later, like Psalm 137 from the exile. Critical: many of David's psalms were written later in his name.
ECCLESIASTES: Traditional: Solomon, about 950 to 930 BC. Critical: about 450 to 250 BC. Why: later Hebrew and a Persian word.
ISAIAH: Traditional: Isaiah, about 740 to 680 BC. Critical: chapters 40 to 66 around 540 BC or later, by followers sometimes called Second Isaiah. Why: Cyrus is named. The New Testament quotes both halves as Isaiah, John 12:38 to 41.
DANIEL: Traditional: Daniel, in the 500s BC. Critical: around 167 to 164 BC. Why: the detailed prophecies about Antiochus in chapter 11. See When Was Daniel Written? in Daniel.
JONAH: Traditional: Jonah lived around 793 to 753 BC, and many Christians believe he wrote it. Critical: written later, maybe 500 to 300 BC. Why: the language and the style of the story.
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS SETTLE THE EDGE: No matter which date you pick, every Old Testament book except Esther was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and many of those copies were made before Jesus was born. So the prophecies about Jesus were written down before He came. Even the latest date for Daniel is still more than 150 years before Jesus.
THIS BIBLE'S RULE: Every book intro gives the traditional date first, then the critical view in one honest line. When the date really matters, like Daniel, there is a Big Question page that lays out both sides.
WHAT EVERYONE AGREES ON: These books are ancient. They were copied with great care. And the Old Testament we read today is the same one Jesus read and quoted.

HOW THE BOOKS ARE ARRANGED

Why the Books Are Not in Time Order

SORTED LIKE A LIBRARY: A library puts books on shelves by type, not by the year they were written. The Old Testament does the same. It has five shelves: the Law, History, Poetry and Wisdom, the Major Prophets and the Minor Prophets. The books on each shelf are mostly in time order, but the shelves overlap each other.
MAJOR AND MINOR: The only difference is length. Isaiah has 66 chapters, and Obadiah has one. Around AD 420 Augustine wrote that the short ones are called minor because their books are short, not because they matter less. A minor prophet still spoke for God.
THE TWELVE: In Jewish Bibles the twelve minor prophets are one book, called The Twelve, because all of them fit on one scroll.
WHY A PERFECT ORDER IS IMPOSSIBLE: Many books happen at the same time. Kings and Chronicles tell the same years twice. Isaiah, Hosea, Amos and Micah all preached during the years of 2 Kings 14 to 20. Jeremiah watched Jerusalem fall in 2 Kings 25. Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi all belong to the return from Babylon. The Psalms were written over hundreds of years. And some books never tell us when they happened, like Job and Joel. So no list can put every book in one perfect line. The next two pages show where they overlap.
THE TANAKH: The Jewish Bible is called the Tanakh. The name is built from the first letters of its three parts: T for Torah (teaching or instruction, usually called the Law); N for Nevi'im (prophets); and K for Ketuvim (writings). The vowels are added so you can say it.
SAME BOOKS, DIFFERENT COUNT: The Tanakh has the same books as our Old Testament, but it counts 24, not 39. Samuel, Kings and Chronicles are one book each, Ezra and Nehemiah are one book, and The Twelve is one book. Daniel sits with the Writings, not the Prophets. And most Jewish Bibles end with Chronicles, where King Cyrus tells the Jews they can go home and rebuild the temple.
TORAH (THE LAW), 5 BOOKS: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.
NEVI'IM (THE PROPHETS), 8 BOOKS: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, The Twelve. The first four are called the Former Prophets, because Jews believed prophets wrote Israel's history.
KETUVIM (THE WRITINGS), 11 BOOKS: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah, Chronicles.
JESUS KNEW THE THREE PARTS: Jesus named the three parts in Luke 24:44: the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms, usually the first book of the Writings. In Matthew 23:35 He spoke of the blood of the prophets from Abel to Zechariah. Abel is killed in Genesis, and a Zechariah is stoned in 2 Chronicles 24:20 to 21. Many scholars think Jesus meant from the first page to the last page of His Bible.
WHY OURS ENDS WITH MALACHI: Our order comes from the old Latin Bible, which put the prophets last and ended them with Malachi. Catholic Bibles add 1 and 2 Maccabees after it. So our Old Testament closes with Malachi's promise that God will send Elijah before the great day of the Lord, Malachi 4:5. Turn the page, and Matthew opens with John the Baptist, who came in the spirit of Elijah, Luke 1:17.

Start reading Genesis 1

NextNew Testament Introduction

The Old Testament

What Does Testament Mean

One Big Story

Not in Time Order

The Books

Why We Say Yahweh

How This Bible Marks the Old Testament

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