About The Bible II

14.   Written over the course of a thousand years, primarily in ancient Hebrew, the Jewish Bible is the equivalent of Christianity's Old Testament. For Jews there is no New Testament.

15.   At least half as much time elapsed between the Bible's first book and its last (with well over a thousand years between the first writing and the time of the last), as has elapsed between its last book and now. This means that writing styles vary not just between modern books and the Bible but among the Bible books themselves.

16.   The terms Old Testament and New Testament originated with the prophet Jeremiah. When he spoke about the glorious future for Israel of which the prophets often spoke, he said that God would "make a new covenant with the house of Israel." Testament means "covenant," and Jesus of Nazareth, the long-awaited Messiah, made a new covenant with God's people. The books of the New Testament provide the fulfillment of the promises made throughout the Old Testament books.

17.   The translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Koine Greek dialect was an outstanding literary accomplishment under the Ptolemies. This translation was called the Septuagint. The translation project is said to have been sponsored by Ptolemy II Philadelphus around the third century B.C. According to tradition, seventy-two Jewish scholars (six from each of the twelve tribes) were summoned for the project. The work was finished in seventy-two days; the Jewish scholars were then sent away with many gifts.

18.   The Septuagint provided a bridge between the thoughts and vocabulary of the Old and New Testaments. The language of the New Testament is not the koine of the everyday Greek, but the koine of the Jew living in Greek surroundings. By the New Testament era, it was the most widely used edition of the Old Testament.

19.   Most Jews of Jesus' day spoke Aramaic, a Syrian language similar to Hebrew that was commonly used at the time. Jesus surely studied the formal Hebrew of the Torah, Prophets, and Writings. Whether he could also speak Greek is unknown. Jesus left no personal writings.

20.   Both the Jewish Bible and Christian Old Testament contain the same thirty-nine books, although they are arranged and numbered in a slightly different order. In Jewish traditions the Bible is called the Tanakh, an acronym of the Hebrew words Torah (for "law" or "teaching"), Nevi'im ("the Prophets"), and Kethuvim ("the Writings").

21.   The Old Testament's first five books, the Pentateuch, were already considered authoritative Scriptures by the time of Ezra in the fifth century B.C. The other books were recognized as part of the Old Testament at later times.

22.   Jesus himself knew the "old covenant." As a Jewish boy, he diligently studied the Torah, Prophets, and Writings. He could recite them by heart when he was twelve. Because there was no Bible as we know it, he would have learned by rote from scrolls kept by local teachers or rabbis.

23.   The earliest references to the Old Testament were "the law of Moses," the law of the Lord," or simply "Moses." Since the additional writings were considered the work of prophets, the common term became "Moses and the Prophets" or something similar.
Note: Wherever the word "law" is seen, the Jewish reference would be "Torah." By New Testament times, "Scripture" or "the Scriptures" became common. The simplest generic term for the collection was "writings," often with "sacred" or "holy" added.

24.   The uniformity of Bible printing sometimes obscures the scope of variety within the Bible's writings. If Bible printers laid out the print with all the different styles and languages accounted for, including prose, poetry, and songs, a wheelbarrow would be needed to move a Bible from the den to the bedroom.

25.   No Bible writer that we know of ever drew a map to accompany his writing-at least not one that was preserved. Maps are generally drawn from facts discovered through historical and archaeological research.