The Jewish Bible?

[rianredd1088]

Does anyone know anything about the Jewish Bible (Do they even call it a bible?). I think from what i remember from catholic school, is that the 1st 5 books of their bible is called the Torah. What are the books of the Jewish “Bible”, are they the same as the Catholic books?

 

[Fidelis]

The Jewish Bible is known as the Tanakh. The Tanakh (also spelt Tanach) is the Hebrew acronym for the Jewish Bible, based upon the initial letters of its three parts:

Torah (Teaching, Law)
Nevi’im (Prophets)
Ketuvim (Writings, Hagiographa)

Because the books included in Tanakh were mainly written in Hebrew it may also be called the Hebrew Bible.

For more information, see this short article from wikipedia:

fact-index.com/t/ta/tanakh.html

 

[JGC]

For a good overview of The Old Testament,

How to Read the Old Testament by Etienne Charpentier is excellent. 120 pages, very readable!

 

[rianredd1088]

Ok, so on the website it says the following:

The Hebrew Bible includes the same books as the Protestant Old Testament, but not the deuterocanonical portions of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Old Testament

Ok, so why is it that we have these books when the Jews didn’t have them as sacred scripture? I don’t understand how we could just “Add” books. We get some of our believees from the following books (ieurgatory), and I have heard people say that Purgatory is is a Jewish Belief, so I just don’t understand?

 

[Ghosty]

The other part of Jewish teaching which is extremely important, though not Scripture, is the Talmud, which can be compared to the Church’s belief in Sacred Tradition. Interestingly, the Talmud brings up the existance of Jesus, the miracles performed by his followers, and the fact that the miracles associated with the Temple Sacrifice ceased around time of Christ’s death.

The Jewish religion has its own answers to these things, but all of them are recorded in Jewish tradition long before Christianity became any kind of powerful faith.

 

[rfk]

rianredd1088:

Ok, so why is it that we have these books when the Jews didn’t have them as sacred scripture? I don’t understand how we could just “Add” books.

We didn’t just “Add” books. The deuterocanonical books were written in Greek, since Greek was the primary literate language in the 1st century BC. They were part of the Greek-translated Bible called the Septuagint. In Jesus’ time, those 5 books were commonly accepted throughout most of the Jewish world, and in fact, many of the times that Jesus quotes or references scripture in the Gospels refer to those books.

There was a small group of Jewish scholars that met late in the first century. They decided to drop the books for two main reasons. First and foremost, they were reacting to the widespread growth of this new movement called Christianity, and explicitly removed the books because they support Catholic teaching. Second, they also used the reason, some say excuse, that they limited the books to only those books written in Hebrew.

Thus, the Church has pretty consistently maintained (with some internal debate) that Jesus and the Apostles treated those books as scripture and they should be included in the Old Testament Canon. Obviously, why would we let post-Jesus Jews try to define scripture when the Church itself has that authority.

Before anyone starts rolling grenades under the tent, I have tried to give a very brief, high-level overview. So don’t start taking me to task about names, dates, quotes from documents. This isn’t meant as a “scholarly treatise”.