Page "Books of the Bible" Paragraph 4

The Old Testament is called by the Jews the Tanakh, an acronym formed by combining the initials of the three sections by which the Jews divide the text: the Torah, or Law ( the Pentateuch ), the Nevi ' im, or Prophets, and the Ketuvim, or Writings or Hagiographa ( with vowels added, as Hebrew is written with a consonantal script, TaNaKh ).

It is called the Hebrew Bible in some scholarly editions, even though it is not written entirely in Hebrew, but in Hebrew and Aramaic.

This comes from the use of the word " Hebrew " to designate a people instead of a language: the Hebrew Bible is the Bible of the Hebrew people.

The Protestant canon is the same as the Tanakh in content, as decided by the Council of Jamnia.

The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox receive several additional books in to their canons based upon their presence in manuscripts of the ancient translation of the Old Testament in to Greek, the Septuagint ( although some of these books, such as Sirach and Tobit, are now known to be extant in Hebrew or Aramaic originals, being found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls ).

Jews, Protestants, and Catholics all use the Masoretic text as the textual basis for their translations of the protocanonical books ( those which are received by both Jews and all Christians ), with various emendations derived from a multiplicity of other ancient witnesses ( such as the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc.

), while generally using the Septuagint and Vulgate, now supplemented by the ancient Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts, as the textual basis for the deuterocanonical books.

The Eastern Orthodox receive the Septuagint as the textual basis for the entire Old Testament, in books both protocanonical and deuteroncanonical, to be used both in the Greek for liturgical purposes, and as the basis for translations in to the vernacular.

Most of the quotations ( 300 of 400 ) of the Old Testament in the New Testament, while differing more or less from the version presented by the Masoretic text, align with that of the Septuagint.