BIBLE AS A LIBRARY
The Bible is the proclaimed word of God, written by the human authors, whom are considered as a secondary author.
There is a common thread which runs throughout the Bible into unity with the help of the Holy Spirit, who is the primary author.
The Bible is the “sacred scriptures” of the Christians.
The Bible is a library that is collection of many books in one book.
The title “the Bible” is coming from Greek word ta biblia meaning “the books.”
The Bible contains books written in different languages and contains different genres (types) such as rituals, stories, history, legislative, poems, proverbs, letters, gospels, and etc.
The authors of these books are holy people, evangelists, prophets, and disciples of Jesus.
The formation of the Bible is a long process that took over 1200 years.
The Bible was originally written in three languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.
The Old Testament was generally written in Hebrew, but some parts are found in Aramaic.
The whole of the New Testament is written in Greek.
1. OLD TESTAMENT AS A LIBRARY
The Christian Bible consists of two great branches that are Old Testament and New
Testament. The English word “testament” comes from the Latin word testamnetum which is the translation of Greek word diatheke which means “covenant”. The Hebrew expression for covenant is “berith” The Old Testament itself is a library. It contains many books belonging to diverse literary genres written by many authors who lived in different periods of the history. The Jews called it by an acronym Ta-Na-K.
1.1. THE TANAK- FIRST BLOCK: TORAH
The Torah literally means “teaching” or “Law” or “the Law of Moses”, contains the
first five books of the Bible.
Torah is the important section of the Hebrew Bible.
This is called “Pentateuch” in the Greek Bible, which means “five containers”
In the Hebrew Bible each book is known by its first word or words.
The first Book is called Genesis
The second book is called Exodus
The third book is called Leviticus
The fourth book is called Numbers
The fifth book is called Deuteronomy
1.2 THE TANAK- SECOND BLOCK: THE NEBI’IM
Nebi’im means “prophets” and they are classified into Former prophets and latter prophets.
Joshua, Judges, Samuel and kings are catalogued as Former prophets or “non-writing prophets”
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the twelve prophets are labelled as latter prophets or “writing prophets”
Thus the prophets are eight in number.
1.3. THE TANAK- THIRD BLOCK: THE KETUBIM
# The ketubim is also called as the writings, in Greek it is called as Hagiographa which means “holy writings”
# Holy writings contained five Megilloth which literally means “scrolls” and six other books.
# The five Megilloth are: Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther.
# Megilloth is called as the five scrolls of feast because it constituted special lectionary for some feasts.
Song of Solomon is a song of victory was a Passover reading.
Ruth is the Pentecost scroll.
The book of Lamentations was read over the destruction of the Jerusalem temple.
Ecclesiastes was the scroll of the feast of the New Year.
Esther was read on the Purim festival.
However, Hebrew Bible originally had 24 books: five books of Torah, four non
writing prophets, four writing prophets and eleven books of the writings.
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