Old Testament

What is the Old Testament?

The Old Testament is the first and longer of the two divisions of the Christian Bible — a collection of thirty-nine books written across more than a thousand years that records the creation of the world, the calling of Israel, the giving of the Law, the rise and fall of the kingdom, the long voice of the prophets, and the songs and proverbs of God's covenant people. Jewish tradition calls it the Tanakh; the church calls it the Old Testament because it bears witness to the older covenant that Jesus came to fulfil.

From Genesis 1:1 — 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth' — to the final words of Malachi promising the coming day of the LORD, the Old Testament is a single, sweeping story of how a holy God draws near to a fallen humanity through covenant, sacrifice, and promise. Every page leans forward toward the Messiah, and the New Testament authors quote it more than 250 times to show that Jesus is the One it has been pointing to all along.

The Old Testament is not a single book but a small library — law (Torah), history, wisdom and poetry, the songs of Israel's worship, and the words of prophets who spoke for God in the most turbulent centuries of the ancient Near East. Together these books form the foundation on which the entire Christian message rests: without the Old Testament's story of creation, fall, covenant, and promise, the New Testament's announcement of fulfilment makes no sense.

When was the Old Testament written?

The Old Testament was written primarily in Biblical Hebrew, with a small number of passages in Aramaic — most notably Daniel 2:4b–7:28, Ezra 4:8–6:18 and 7:12–26, Jeremiah 10:11, and two words in Genesis 31:47. Hebrew is the language of Israel; Aramaic was the lingua franca of the post-exilic Persian period and surfaces in books written or set during and after the exile.

The earliest portions reach back into the second millennium BC — the song of Moses in Exodus 15, the blessing of Jacob in Genesis 49, and the law-codes attributed to Moses himself. The latest books, including Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Chronicles, and Malachi, were composed in the fifth century BC. The text was transmitted with extraordinary care by Jewish scribes — culminating in the Masoretic Text preserved by the Masoretes of Tiberias between the 7th and 10th centuries AD, the basis for most modern Hebrew Bibles.

Three witnesses to the Old Testament text stand alongside the Masoretic Text: the Septuagint, a Greek translation made by Alexandrian Jewish scholars beginning in the 3rd century BC; the Samaritan Pentateuch, preserved by the Samaritan community; and the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered at Qumran beginning in 1947, which include manuscripts of every Old Testament book except Esther dating as early as the 3rd century BC. The remarkable agreement between the Qumran scrolls and the much later Masoretic manuscripts is one of the strongest testimonies to the careful preservation of the Hebrew Bible across more than a thousand years.

Canon: How the Old Testament Is Counted

The Old Testament canon recognised by the church today follows the contents of the Hebrew Bible — the same thirty-nine books Jewish tradition counts as twenty-four (combining the twelve Minor Prophets into one, treating 1 & 2 Samuel as one book, and so on). The Jewish tradition groups them as the Torah (Law), the Nevi'im (Prophets), and the Ketuvim (Writings) — the threefold structure Jesus refers to in Luke 24:44 as 'the law of Moses, and the prophets, and the psalms.'

Christian Bibles arrange the same books differently, grouping them by genre: the Pentateuch (the first five books), the historical books (Joshua through Esther), the wisdom and poetry books (Job through Song of Solomon), the Major Prophets (Isaiah through Daniel), and the Minor Prophets (Hosea through Malachi). Catholic and Orthodox Bibles also include the deuterocanonical books — what Protestants call the Apocrypha — between the testaments or interleaved with the protocanonical Hebrew books.

Why the Old Testament Still Matters

The Old Testament remains indispensable for Christian faith and practice. Its Psalms are the prayer-book of the church, sung and recited in worship for two thousand years. Its prophets supply the categories — Servant, Shepherd, Son of David, Suffering Righteous One, the Day of the LORD — that the New Testament uses to interpret Jesus. Its wisdom literature shapes Christian counsel on speech, work, money, and friendship in ways the New Testament rarely repeats because the Old Testament already said it so well.

Modern readers come to the Old Testament for its grand redemptive arc, for its honest portraits of human failure and faith, for the moral foundation of its Law, and for the literary power of its narrative — a power that has shaped Western literature, art, and music as deeply as any other body of texts.