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The Hebrew Bible, unfortunately, is not entirely in Hebrew. It does have some Aramaic. Nor is it the entirety of what most people mean when they say "Bible". The term "Hebrew Bible" refers to the books found in the biblical canon of traditional Judaism.
These books, for Judaism, make up the entire biblical canon, while for Protestants they make up the Old Testament. For Catholics and Orthodox Christians, the entire Hebrew Bible is in the Old Testament, but additional books are also included.
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, The Twelve, Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Qoheleth, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles.
The Hebrew Bible is not a book in the ordinary sense, but an anthology -- a collection of books. How many books? The traditional Jewish count is 24, while the traditional Protestant count is 39.[1]
So how many books are there, really? There's no single right answer. There is no unconstested "original" count. Likewise, there is no unconstested "original" order of the books. Canonization was likely a gradual process. (For more on the concept of biblical "books," see here.)
Nor is there any uncontested "original" text of the Hebrew Bible. We have a variety of manuscripts, which vary in many ways -- sometimes large, sometimes small. Within those manuscripts, even if we choose a particular Hebrew text, there are many places where more than one understanding of the Hebrew text is possible.
Some things about the Hebrew Bible are fairly clear. Some are more obscure. The only way to really get a feel for the extent and nature of biblical ambiguities is to just jump right in.
We might call the first nine books (by Jewish count) of the Hebrew Bible the "Primary History", as some do.[2] In its present form, this "Primary History" constitutes a generally continuous record from the creation of the universe to the Babylonian captivity -- John Hobbins has called this collection the "centerpiece of the Hebrew Bible".[3] It makes up about half the Hebrew Bible by volume.
Alternately, in Judaism these nine books constitute first the Pentateuch (the Torah, in Hebrew), of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The next four, for traditional reasons, are called in Judaism the "Former Prophets": Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and The Twelve.
In a way, Deuteronomy could be seen as the pivot around which the Primary History turns. The first four books culminate in Deuteronomy, which is a sort of comprehensive religious/civil/moral code grounded in and justified by the stories of the previous four books. The next four books, the "Former Prophets", and sometimes called the Deuteronomistic History, on account of the way they borrow ideology and even wording from Deuteronomy and use its moral outlook as the basis for interpreting the history of the Israelite peoples.
The Pentateuch begins with Genesis, the prologue to the Pentateuch, the Primary History, and the Bible itself, which relates a story of humankind and proto-Israel from the creation of the world to the entry of 70 people into Egypt. Exodus follows, describing how the descendants of those 70, now a massive army, escape from Egypt to set off to Canaan. The next three books, through narrative and legal passages, tell the story of the 40 years in which Israel wanders through the desert and acquires laws from God. Finally, the capstone of the Pentateuch is Deuteronomy, which provides a single unified law code, using the fictional device of a single speech by Moses given immediately prior to the Israelite invasion of Canaan.
Deuteronomy-Joshua-Judges-Samuel-Kings consists of a story which begins when God through Moses gives a lawcode to the Israelites, complete with positive sanctions for obedience and negative sanctions for disobedience. This theological understanding of the human relationship to God’s law is the basis for the next four books, which detail what goes right and what goes wrong within that framework, with the history of Israel viewed as an illustration of the biblical legal theology. Joshua picks up where Deuteronomy leaves off. Moses dies, and his successor, Joshua, leads Israel on an exciting genocidal campaign giving them control of the land of Israel. Judges tells of the men (“Judges” or warlords) who follow the death of Joshua, providing ad-hoc leadership during the better parts of a yo-yo relationship between Israel and God, in which Israel disobeys, is punished by foreign domination, turns back to God, and is given victory and peace, over and over. The period of the Judges comes to an end in the books of Samuel, in which the prophet Samuel serves as the final Judge during Israel’s rocky transition to monarchy, under the figures of Saul and David. Kings picks up with Saul’s son Solomon, followed by the division of Israel into two kingdoms (Israel and Judah). The story of the two kingdoms is followed until both are destroyed--one by Assyria and one by Babylon--as divine punishment.
Another recognizable grouping contains the works referred to in Judaism as the "Latter Prophets": Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and The Twelve.
Together, the Former Prophets and the Latter Prophets make up the section known in Hebrew as Neviʾim ("Prophets"). The Torah and the Prophets make two out of three of the traditional Jewish divisions of the Tanakh. Tanakh, in Hebrew, is an acronym: T for Torah, N for Neviʾim, and K for Ketuvim.
It may seem odd to group the Former Prophets with the Latter Prophets, given how the two sets are so different in genre, but perhaps there something valuable to this way of categorizing the Hebrew Bible. Despite the difference between the prose historiographical writing of the Former Prophets and the poetic oracles of the Latter Prophets, they are both concerned with the outworking in history of the promises and threats contained in the Pentateuch.
The Latter prophets are mostly poetry, in contrast to the Primary History, which is almost entirely prose. Stretching from the monarchic period to the Persian period, the prophets consist of three major books (Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel) along with twelve minor prophets (Hosea to Malachi). Though there are important differences within the prophetic books, the overall theological frame is similar to that of the Primary and Secondary Histories. Obedience is rewarded with prosperity, peace, and political independence, while disobedience brings the opposites of these things.
The Ketuvim ("Writings") might as well be called "everything else." It is a grab-bag of various sorts of works.
The term Sifrei ʾEmet means literally 'books of truth', but the word ʾEmet here functions as a Hebrew acronym (ʾ-m-t) for three large poetic books, which in the Masoretic Text are given are marked differently for cantillation than the other books of the Bible. The are Job (ʾIyob), Proverbs (Mishlei) and Psalms (Tehillim).
Psalms is a collection of 150 poems or songs. Proverbs is wisdom literature -- advice, much of it in short pithy sayings. Job is a poetic story of a righteous man suffering, and it is particularly interesting because of the way it challenges the Bible's usual themes about how God punishes evil and rewards good.
The Five Megillot are five relatively short books. The Song of Songs is love poetry, and while it is devoid of theological material, later Jewish and Christian interpreters have justified its inclusion in Scripture by reinterpreting it as an allegory for the relationship between God and his beloved people. Ruth is a short story set in the time of the Judges, in which a foreign widow marries into Israel and becomes an ancestor of David. Lamentations is a tragic collection of poetry about the destruction of Jerusalem. Qoheleth, like Proverbs, might likewise be called wisdom literature, though its outlook is darker than Proverbs. It's challenge to typical pieties reminds one of Job. Esther is the story of a Jewish queen who saves her people during the Persian Empire.
The remaining three books of the Ketuvim are oriented, in a manner somewhat like the Deuteronomistic History, toward interpreting the history of the Israel and the Jewish people in theological terms.
The books of Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah, although much shorter than the Primary History, serve as a sort of second version of the history of Israel. Chronicles is often thought of as running parallel to Samuel and Kings (from which it borrows much, often verbatim). But is more than that. By means of its first nine chapters — genealogies which many readers are tempted to skip over — it briefly retraces the time of the Penteteuch, Joshua, and Judges from Adam to David. Then its narrative sections retell the stories of Saul and David, followed by the kings of both kingdoms until the end of the Babylonian captivity. Ezra and Nehemiah discuss the partial reconstitution of Israel in the form of a province within the Persian Empire. And that, basically, is where the narrative of the Hebrew Bible ends, with the exception of veiled references in Daniel to the situation during the Maccabean revivial (circa 164 BCE).
Daniel initiates the genre of apocalyptic literature, telling stories of the exile speaking in symbols which cast the run-up to the Maccabean revolt in terms of an epic battle between good and evil.
You will need, first of all, a basic introduction to Hebrew. One textbook that would likely work for that purpose is the one by John Cook and Robert Holmstedt. You'll need to get enough grammar under your belt, and enough vocabulary, that you can start to read the Hebrew Bible. Once over this hurdle, the primary task is to read large portions of the Hebrew Bible, and you'll pick up the rarer words and finer points of grammar as you, perhaps with the aid of commentaries and lexicons.
When making the transition from a beginning textbook to full reading of the Hebrew Bible, something like the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia: A Readers Edition might be very helpful. It contains footnotes to help with verb parsing and all words which appear less than 70 times in the Hebrew Bible. Another neat thing for learning Hebrew words and grammatical stuff is Bible Online Learner, where you can pull up selections of the Bible and look up individual words.
For books on particular books of the Bible, see the specific articles on the respective books.
For the Hebrew Bible in the original Hebrew, see Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (5th ed.).
Avalos, Hector (2007). The End of Biblical Studies.
Freedman, David Noel (1992), editor. Anchor Bible Dictionary.
Freedman, David Noel (1991). The Unity of the Hebrew Bible.
Friedman, Richard Elliot (1987). Who Wrote the Bible?
Fishbane, Michael (1995, 1998). Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel.
As with other pages migrated from biblicalambiguities.net, this page may contain material paraphrased or even outright copied without direct attribution from the KJV, RV, ASV, JPS (1917), WEB, NHEB, Kittel's BH, the pre-1923 volumes of the ICC series, or the commentaries on Genesis of Dillmann, Skinner, and Driver. More details on this policy can be found here: biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and biblicalambiguities-translation-disclaimer.
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