Chapter 2: The Library of Heaven: Structure, Languages, and Writing Materials

One book, sixty-six books

The word Bible comes from the Greek biblia, “books” (compare 2 Timothy 4:13, “the books, but especially the parchments”). That is the right name, for the Bible is a library of sixty-six books: thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New. Yet it reads as one book, with one story and one Author. The books were written over roughly fifteen hundred years, by around forty human writers (a traditional estimate) from many walks of life: a lawgiver, shepherds, kings, a cupbearer, a physician, fishermen, a tax collector, a tentmaker. They wrote in different places and countries and in different literary forms. Yet from Genesis to Revelation they tell one story, of creation, fall, redemption in Christ, and restoration.

The two Testaments

Testament means “covenant.” God promised through Jeremiah, “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah” (Jeremiah 31:31). At the Last Supper Jesus said, “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you” (Luke 22:20). Paul speaks of those who read “the old testament” (2 Corinthians 3:14) as a body of writings in his own day. The Old Testament records God’s covenant dealings with Israel and promises the Messiah. The New Testament records the coming of that Messiah and the new covenant in his blood.

The Old Testament’s three divisions

Jews have long arranged their Scriptures in three parts, and Jesus used this division when he spoke of “all things… which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me” (Luke 24:44). The Hebrew Bible is called the Tanakh, from the initials of its three parts:

The Hebrew order has twenty-four books, since Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra–Nehemiah, and the Twelve are each counted as single books. The English Old Testament has the same content in thirty-nine books, grouped by type: law, history, poetry and wisdom, and prophecy. The earliest church fathers and Josephus counted twenty-two books, reckoning Ruth with Judges and Lamentations with Jeremiah (Josephus, Ag. Ap. 1.38–41; Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.26; 6.25). The count differs; the content is the same.

The New Testament’s four kinds of writing

The New Testament has twenty-seven books of four kinds: the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John), the history of Acts, twenty-one Epistles (thirteen by Paul, and others by James, Peter, John, Jude, and the anonymous letter to the Hebrews), and the prophecy of Revelation.

Languages

The Bible was written in three languages.

Hebrew: nearly the whole Old Testament.

Aramaic: a sister language of Hebrew that became the common speech of the Near East after the Babylonian exile. It appears in parts of Daniel (2:4–7:28), Ezra (4:8–6:18; 7:12-26), and a single verse of Jeremiah (10:11).

Greek: the entire New Testament, written in koine (“common”) Greek, the everyday language of the Roman world from the conquests of Alexander onward. God chose a time when one language could carry the gospel across an empire (Galatians 4:4).

That the New Testament was written in common Greek, not literary Attic, was noticed by scholars in the nineteenth century when papyri of ordinary letters and receipts were found in Egypt. They showed that the New Testament’s Greek was the language of the marketplace. The Word was written in the speech of ordinary people.

Writing materials and the form of the book

The writers used the materials of their day. Moses’ commandments were first written on stone (Exodus 31:18; 34:1). Most of the Old Testament was written on scrolls, of papyrus or of prepared animal skin. When Jeremiah was told, “Take thee a roll of a book, and write therein all the words that I have spoken unto thee” (Jeremiah 36:2), the “roll” was a scroll, and his scribe Baruch wrote with ink (Jeremiah 36:18). The New Testament writers used papyrus, made from the Egyptian reed, and parchment, made from animal hides (2 Timothy 4:13; 2 John 12; 3 John 13).

Early Christians were quick to adopt the codex, a book of leaves bound at the spine like a modern book, in place of the scroll. A codex was easier to carry, could hold more text, and made it easier to find a passage. Almost all of the earliest Christian manuscripts that survive are codices (Metzger and Ehrman 2005). The church was not only a people of the Book; it was a people of the bound book.

Summary. The Bible is one book made of sixty-six: written over about fifteen centuries in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, on stone, scrolls, and codices, by many human writers and one divine Author. The next three chapters trace how the Old Testament came to be written, recognized, and preserved.

Part Two: The Old Testament