The Tanakh: Torah, Prophets and Writings, 24 Books

When people say “the Bible” in connection with Judaism, they are really referring to a collection that Jews call by another name: the Tanakh. The word is not a title but an acronym, formed from the initials of its three parts: Torah (the teaching, the Five Books of Moshe), Neviim (the Prophets) and Ketuvim (the Writings). Twenty-four books, written almost entirely in Hebrew, read continuously for more than two thousand years, and a question that curious readers and students tend to ask together: how does the Tanakh differ from what Christians call the “Old Testament,” who wrote it, how was it decided which books belong to it, and how is it read? This article starts from the texts themselves (the Mishna, the Talmud, Maimonides, the Shulchan Aruch), separates law (halakha) from moral and mystical readings, and then sets the tradition alongside history, archaeology and modern criticism, noting each time where tradition stops and scholarship begins.

In short: the Tanakh is the body of twenty-four books that Jewish tradition holds to be inspired. It is divided into Torah (five books, from the Creation to the death of Moshe), Neviim (eight books of prophets, from the conquests of Yehoshua to the twelve “minor” prophets) and Ketuvim (eleven books of poetry, wisdom, history and liturgical scrolls). The written Torah cannot be separated from the oral Torah, which transmits its interpretation. The text we read was fixed and vocalized by the Masoretes of Tiberias, and the oldest complete manuscripts date from the tenth and eleventh centuries CE, but the Dead Sea Scrolls attest to the essentials of the text more than a thousand years earlier.

An Acronym, Three Parts, Twenty-Four Books

The word Tanakh (תנ״ך) reads as an acronym: Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim. The sages of the Talmud speak instead of “Mikra” (what is read) or “Kitvei HaKodesh” (the holy writings). The name Tanakh, common in the Jewish world today, is a usage that postdates the Talmud; the threefold division, on the other hand, is much older, as we will see below in the discussion of the canon.

Tradition counts twenty-four books, because it groups together several texts that others count separately: Shmuel I and II form a single book, as do Melakhim I and II, Divrei HaYamim I and II, and Ezra-Nechemya; the twelve so-called “minor” prophets (Hoshea, Yoel, Amos, Ovadya, Yona, Mikha, Nachum, Chavakuk, Tzefanya, Chaggai, Zekharia, Malakhi) fit on a single scroll, called Trei Asar, “the Twelve” (Bava Batra 14b). Christians, who separate these books, arrive at thirty-nine for identical content.

The Talmud gives the order of the books within each part, and it is one of the rare places where it takes inventory itself. For the Prophets:

“Our rabbis taught: the order of the Prophets is as follows: Yehoshua and Shoftim, Shmuel and Melakhim, Yirmeyahu and Yechezkel, Yeshayahu and the Twelve.”

(Bava Batra 14b) — סִדְרָן שֶׁל נְבִיאִים: יְהוֹשֻׁעַ וְשׁוֹפְטִים, שְׁמוּאֵל וּמְלָכִים, יִרְמְיָה וִיחֶזְקֵאל, יְשַׁעְיָה וּשְׁנֵים עָשָׂר

And for the Writings:

“The order of the Writings is: Rut and the book of Tehilim, Iyov and Mishlei, Kohelet, Shir HaShirim and Eikha, Daniel and Megillat Esther, Ezra and Divrei HaYamim.”

(Bava Batra 14b) — סִידְרָן שֶׁל כְּתוּבִים: רוּת וְסֵפֶר תְּהִלִּים וְאִיּוֹב וּמִשְׁלֵי, קֹהֶלֶת, שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים וְקִינוֹת, דָּנִיאֵל וּמְגִילַת אֶסְתֵּר, עֶזְרָא וְדִבְרֵי הַיָּמִים

Two remarks right away. First, this order is not that of our printed editions: in most Hebrew Bibles today, the Writings open with Tehilim, Mishlei and Iyov, while some medieval Tiberian manuscripts, such as the Leningrad Codex, begin with Divrei HaYamim. The order therefore varies according to tradition and period, which shows that what matters is belonging to the corpus, not the place on the shelf. Second, the Talmud itself discusses, at this point, the reason for the order: according to the opinion that Iyov lived in the time of Moshe, the Talmud asks why it does not open the Writings, and the answer is that one does not begin with a calamity; Rut, which also tells of misfortunes, opens the Writings because that trial has a way out: from Rut came David (Bava Batra 14b).

The Torah: The Five Books

The Heart of the Tanakh

The Torah (literally “teaching,” and not “law”) is the foundation. It comprises Bereshit (Genesis), Shemot (Exodus), Vayikra (Leviticus), Bamidbar (Numbers) and Devarim (Deuteronomy): from the Creation of the world and the patriarchs to the death of Moshe at the threshold of the Promised Land. It contains the founding story of the people (the Exodus from Egypt, Sinai), all the commandments (613 according to the traditional count) and a large part of sacred history. Its public reading is divided into fifty-four weekly sections, the parashot. Its writing on parchment, by a specialized scribe, follows very strict rules: see the article How Is a Sefer Torah Written? The Craft of the Sofer.

Written and Oral

Jewish tradition affirms two inseparable things: a written Torah, which the Tanakh contains, and an oral Torah, which transmits its interpretation and the rules for applying it (the Mishna, the Talmud, the Midrashim). The Talmud finds a justification for this in the very text of Sinai:

“Rabbi Yehuda bar Nachmani, the interpreter of Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, taught: it is written ‘Write for yourself these words,’ and it is written ‘for according to these words…’: how can this be? What is written, you are not permitted to recite from memory; what was said orally, you are not permitted to write down.”

(Gittin 60b) — דָּרֵשׁ רַבִּי יְהוּדָה בַּר נַחְמָנִי, מְתוּרְגְּמָנֵיהּ דְּרַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן לָקִישׁ, כְּתִיב: ״כְּתוֹב לְךָ אֶת הַדְּבָרִים הָאֵלֶּה״, וּכְתִיב: ״כִּי עַל פִּי הַדְּבָרִים הָאֵלֶּה״ – הָא כֵּיצַד? דְּבָרִים שֶׁבִּכְתָב אִי אַתָּה רַשַּׁאי לְאוֹמְרָן עַל פֶּה, דְּבָרִים שֶׁבְּעַל פֶּה אִי אַתָּה רַשַּׁאי לְאוֹמְרָן בִּכְתָב

This rule was later relaxed: for fear that it would be forgotten, the oral Torah was eventually committed to writing in the Mishna and then in the Talmud (see the article What Is the Talmud?). The principle remains: the Tanakh alone is not Judaism; it is Judaism together with its reading. This is what the Talmud’s formula expresses, that “a verse does not leave its literal meaning” (Shabbat 63a), while still being, through the oral Torah, the bearer of many other meanings, a subject we will return to.

Who Wrote the Torah?

For tradition, it was Moshe, at G-d’s dictation. The prohibition against adding anything to it or removing anything from it follows from this:

“You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor shall you take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of the L-rd your G-d that I command you.”

(Devarim 4:2) — לֹא תֹסִפוּ עַל־הַדָּבָר אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוֶּה אֶתְכֶם וְלֹא תִגְרְעוּ מִמֶּנּוּ לִשְׁמֹר אֶת־מִצְוֺת ה׳ אֱלֹֽהֵיכֶם אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוֶּה אֶתְכֶֽם׃

The Mishna places belief in the heavenly origin of the Torah among the foundations: whoever says “the Torah does not come from heaven” is excluded from the World to Come (Mishna Sanhedrin 10:1). Maimonides makes it one of his thirteen principles of faith (see the article What Are Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith?).

One question nevertheless remains open in the Talmud itself: the last eight verses of Deuteronomy, which recount the death of Moshe. The Talmud reports two opinions. According to Rabbi Yehuda (or Rabbi Nechemya), Moshe stops before the account of his death:

“But up to here Moshe wrote; from here on, Yehoshua wrote: the words of Rabbi Yehuda.”

(Bava Batra 15a) — אֶלָּא עַד כָּאן כָּתַב מֹשֶׁה, מִכָּאן וְאֵילָךְ כָּתַב יְהוֹשֻׁעַ; דִּבְרֵי רַבִּי יְהוּדָה

Rabbi Shimon, for his part, refuses to accept that a Torah scroll could be “missing a single letter”: up to that point G-d dictated and Moshe repeated and wrote; for the account of his death, G-d dictated and Moshe wrote “with tears” (Bava Batra 15a). This disagreement shows that the rabbinic tradition is not monolithic on the details of transmission, while taking for granted that the whole is a divine gift. The same passage of the Talmud (Bava Batra 14b-15a) attributes to Moshe his own book, the section of Bilam and the book of Iyov.

The Neviim: The Prophets

Two Groups

The Neviim are divided into the Former Prophets (Yehoshua, Shoftim, Shmuel, Melakhim), which tell the history of Israel in its land, from the crossing of the Jordan to the destruction of the First Temple, and the Latter Prophets (Yeshayahu, Yirmeyahu, Yechezkel and the Twelve), collections of prophetic messages. This distinction is customary among students and publishers; the Talmud’s list, for its part, places the Prophets in a single group (Bava Batra 14b).

The prophets do not merely foretell the future. They recall the covenant, denounce injustice and idolatry, and console. The Talmud holds that Israel had many more prophets than there are books: forty-eight prophets and seven prophetesses “prophesied for Israel” (Megillah 14a). The same passage adds that there were far more prophets than books: “only the prophecy that the generations needed was written down, and that which they did not need was not written down” (Megillah 14a).

Moshe Remains Unique

On the scale of prophecy, no prophet equals Moshe. The final verse of the Torah says so:

“There has never again arisen in Israel a prophet like Moshe, whom the L-rd knew face to face.”

(Devarim 34:10) — וְלֹא־קָם נָבִיא עוֹד בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל כְּמֹשֶׁה אֲשֶׁר יְדָעוֹ ה׳ פָּנִים אֶל־פָּנִֽים׃

Maimonides draws two consequences from this. First, Israel’s faith in Moshe does not rest on his miracles but on the revelation at Sinai, experienced collectively (Mishneh Torah, Yesodei HaTorah 8:1). Second, a later prophet, whoever he may be, can neither add a commandment to the Torah nor remove one: he can only bring people back to it (Yesodei HaTorah 9:1, which relies on Devarim 30:12).

The End of Prophecy

The last book of the Prophets, Malakhi, closes the cycle with a reminder of the Torah of Moshe:

“Remember the Torah of Moshe My servant, which I commanded him at Horev for all Israel: statutes and judgments.”

(Malakhi 3:22) — זִכְרוּ תּוֹרַת מֹשֶׁה עַבְדִּי אֲשֶׁר צִוִּיתִי אוֹתוֹ בְחֹרֵב עַל־כׇּל־יִשְׂרָאֵל חֻקִּים וּמִשְׁפָּטִֽים׃

And the Talmud describes this moment as a turning point:

“Since the last prophets, Chaggai, Zekharia and Malakhi, died, the holy spirit has departed from Israel.”

(Sanhedrin 11a; Yoma 9b) — מִשֶּׁמֵּתוּ נְבִיאִים הָאַחֲרוֹנִים חַגַּי זְכַרְיָה וּמַלְאָכִי, נִסְתַּלְּקָה רוּחַ הַקּוֹדֶשׁ מִיִּשְׂרָאֵל

The Talmud adds that, from then on, people make use of the “bat kol,” a heavenly voice that is like an echo of prophecy (same passage). This idea has legal significance: the Torah is no longer “in heaven,” and no one can complete it any longer by means of a revelation. This idea is explored further below (see “Halakha, Aggada, Kabbalah”).

The Neviim in the Liturgy

The Prophets are read in the synagogue in the form of the haftarah, an excerpt from a prophetic book read after the Torah on Shabbat and on festivals. They are also translated: according to the Talmud, the Aramaic translation of the Torah is the work of Onkelos the convert, and that of the Prophets the work of Yonatan ben Uziel, based on the last prophets (Megillah 3a). Both translations (the Targumim) are printed alongside the Hebrew text in the classic editions.

The Ketuvim: The Writings

Poetry, Wisdom, History

The Ketuvim form the most varied part: the Psalms (Tehilim), attributed for the most part to King David; Proverbs (Mishlei), Ecclesiastes (Kohelet) and the Song of Songs (Shir HaShirim), which tradition connects to Shlomo (the Talmud says that Chizkiyahu and his group recorded them in writing); the book of Iyov (Job), a poem on the suffering of the righteous; Rut, Eikha (Lamentations), Esther; the book of Daniel; Ezra-Nechemya and Divrei HaYamim (Chronicles). In the Talmud’s list, then, it is a library, not a genre.

According to the Talmud, these books, together with those of the Prophets, were written by different hands and in different periods:

Moshe wrote his book (the Torah), the section of Bilam and Iyov;
Yehoshua, his book and eight verses of the Torah;
Shmuel, his book, as well as Shoftim and Rut;
David, the Tehilim, together with ten elders;
Yirmeyahu, his book, Melakhim and Eikha;
Chizkiyahu and his group, Yeshayahu, Mishlei, Shir HaShirim and Kohelet;
the men of the Great Assembly, Yechezkel, the Twelve, Daniel and Megillat Esther;
Ezra, his book and the genealogy of Divrei HaYamim up to his own time.

(Bava Batra 14b-15a.) This list is the rabbinic tradition’s answer to the question of authorship. It is not a dogma on every point: several attributions are themselves discussed in the same passage of the Talmud.

The Five Scrolls

Five books of the Ketuvim, the Megillot, are read in the synagogue over the course of the year: the Song of Songs at Pesach, Rut at Shavuot, Eikha at Tisha BeAv, Kohelet at Sukkot and Esther at Purim. The custom is ancient and varies somewhat among communities, notably for the Song of Songs and Kohelet. The reading of Esther is a rabbinic obligation, that of the other four scrolls a custom; see What Is Purim?.

Contested Books, Retained Books

Several books of the Ketuvim raised discussion among the sages. For Kohelet and Mishlei, the Talmud reports that the sages wanted to “hide” them (that is, withdraw them from circulation) because their words seem to contradict one another; they kept them after observing that the contradictions were only apparent: Kohelet begins and ends with words of Torah, and the verses of Mishlei that seem to conflict do not address the same case (Shabbat 30b). As for the Song of Songs, it too was discussed, like Kohelet, and the Mishna records the disagreement among the sages before laying down the rule:

“All the holy writings render the hands impure; the Song of Songs and Kohelet render the hands impure.”

(Mishna Yadayim 3:5) — כָּל כִּתְבֵי הַקֹּדֶשׁ מְטַמְּאִין אֶת הַיָּדַיִם. שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים וְקֹהֶלֶת מְטַמְּאִין אֶת הַיָּדַיִם

The expression “render the hands impure” is a rabbinic institution that serves as a criterion: a text that “renders the hands impure” is a text with the status of a holy book (the Talmud discusses the origin of this decree in connection with the Torah in Shabbat 14a). It thus preserves a precise trace of the debates at the end of the Second Temple period over what should or should not enter the corpus.

How the Canon Was Fixed

What Tradition Says

For tradition, the canon has been closed since the end of prophecy: Chaggai, Zekharia and Malakhi are the last prophets, and the Talmud concludes from this that the holy spirit then departed from Israel (Sanhedrin 11a). The book of Esther, according to Shmuel, was “spoken by the holy spirit” (Megillah 7a), even though the Talmud specifies at that point that it was so in order to be read and not to be written like a Torah scroll, a discussion that shows how carefully the status of each book was weighed. Tradition thus provides for neither a council nor a vote, but for the recognition, by the community and by the sages, of what had been prophetically spoken.

What History and Archaeology Say

The historian identifies several landmarks, which agree fairly well with tradition on the essentials:

The prologue to Ben Sira (Sirach), added around 117 BCE by the author’s grandson to his Greek translation, mentions the Law, the Prophets and the other writings: it is generally regarded as the oldest witness to a threefold division, which is not yet, however, a closed list.
Flavius Josephus, at the end of the first century CE, writes that the Jews do not have a multitude of books that contradict one another, as the Greeks do, but only twenty-two books held to be divine: five of Moshe, thirteen of prophets, and four containing hymns to G-d and precepts for life (Against Apion I, 8, Whiston’s division). These twenty-two books correspond, with a different division, to our twenty-four: he does not give a list by name.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered beginning in 1947 at Qumran, contain, in the current state of the work of analysis, fragments of every book of the Tanakh except Esther, as well as other texts that were not retained. They show that the canonical books were already in circulation, but also that the boundary of the corpus was less sharp at Qumran than it would later become.
The so-called “Council of Yavne”: in the 1870s, the historian Heinrich Graetz supposed that a council of sages gathered at Yavne toward the end of the first century had fixed the canon. This hypothesis, long repeated, is today largely abandoned (see in particular the critique by Jack P. Lewis, then Sid Leiman’s thesis published in 1976): the sages of Yavne did discuss Kohelet and the Song of Songs (Mishna Yadayim 3:5), but the idea of a single, formal decision is not supported.

The current consensus is therefore that the Torah and the Prophets were fixed well before the Common Era, and that the Writings stabilized gradually, with some residual discussions that continue into the second century CE. Tradition places this process under the sign of inspiration; the historian describes it as a gradual recognition. The two readings do not overlap, and this article does not claim to reconcile them.

Tanakh and “Old Testament”

Jews do not use the expression “Old Testament,” which presupposes a “New” one that would fulfill or replace it: for Judaism, the Tanakh is not a first installment, it is the text. Several concrete differences separate these corpora:

Content: Protestants take the same books as the Tanakh, thirty-nine when counted separately; Catholics and Orthodox add books preserved in Greek (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, among others), which were not retained in the Jewish canon.
Order: Christians arrange the books by genre (Pentateuch, historical books, poetic books, prophetic books), so that Daniel goes among the prophets, Ruth after Judges and Lamentations after Jeremiah; the Tanakh, for its part, ends with Divrei HaYamim.
Base text: Jews read the Masoretic Hebrew; part of the early Church relied on the Septuagint, a Greek translation produced in Alexandria beginning in the third century BCE, whose origin the Talmud recounts as a miracle of agreement among seventy-two sages working in isolation (Megillah 9a), and which sometimes presents variants.
Reading: for Judaism, the Tanakh is read together with the oral Torah (Mishna, Talmud, Midrash), and not on its own.

This last difference is the most important: see the article What Is the Torah?, which details the place of the oral Torah.

A scribe's hands holding a quill over a blank sheet of parchment, an inkwell beside it, side lighting

The Text: Transmission, Masorah and Manuscripts

Scribes and Masoretes

The Torah is copied by hand by scribes (sofrim) according to precise rules, so that a Torah scroll is, down to the last detail, the same everywhere. For the other books, the Jews of Tiberias, between the seventh and tenth centuries CE, wrote down what oral transmission had preserved: the masorah (“the tradition”), which records the vocalization (the nikud), the cantillation (the teamim) and the punctuation, and counts even the letters and the words. The Ben Asher family was the most famous of these Masoretes.

Maimonides, in the twelfth century, relies on Ben Asher’s work to settle the form of the open and closed sections of the Torah:

“The codex on which we have relied for these matters is the codex known in Egypt, which contains all twenty-four books, and which was in Jerusalem for several years so that other books could be corrected from it. Everyone relied on it, because Ben Asher had corrected it, had examined it meticulously for many years, and had corrected it many times.”

(Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Tefillin, Mezuzah ve-Sefer Torah 8:4) — וְסֵפֶר שֶׁסָּמַכְנוּ עָלָיו בִּדְבָרִים אֵלּוּ הוּא הַסֵּפֶר הַיָּדוּעַ בְּמִצְרַיִם שֶׁהוּא כּוֹלֵל אַרְבָּעָה וְעֶשְׂרִים סְפָרִים שֶׁהָיָה בִּירוּשָׁלַיִם מִכַּמָּה שָׁנִים לְהַגִּיהַּ מִמֶּנּוּ הַסְּפָרִים וְעָלָיו הָיוּ הַכּל סוֹמְכִין לְפִי שֶׁהִגִּיהוֹ בֶּן אָשֵׁר וְדִקְדֵּק בּוֹ שָׁנִים הַרְבֵּה וְהִגִּיהוֹ פְּעָמִים רַבּוֹת

This text is valuable for two reasons: Maimonides designates a complete codex of twenty-four books as the reference, which shows that the canon of twenty-four books is, in the twelfth century, an established fact; and it bears witness to a chain of textual correction going back to Ben Asher. It is not certain that the codex he describes is the one that has come down to us under the name of the Aleppo Codex, which Maimonides is said to have approved for its accuracy, but tradition identifies it with that codex.

The Great Codices

Two Tiberian manuscripts dominate:

The Aleppo Codex (around 920, Tiberias), preserved for centuries in the synagogue of Aleppo and then severely damaged after the riots of 1947: when it reappeared in Israel in 1958, about 40% of the manuscript, including most of the Torah, was missing. It is today in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem.
The Leningrad Codex (1008 or 1009, according to its colophon), the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew, which serves as the basis for most modern critical editions.

What the Dead Sea Scrolls Reveal

The Qumran manuscripts, copied between the third century BCE and the first century CE, pushed the text back by a thousand years. The great Isaiah scroll, discovered in the first cave at Qumran around 1947, is almost complete. Comparison with the Masoretic text shows great stability (the differences mainly concern spelling and details), but also the existence, at Qumran, of other forms of the text for certain books. Scholars see in this the proof that several “families of texts” coexisted before one of them prevailed. For tradition, this confirms that transmission, despite a few variants, preserved the essentials; for criticism, that the text was fixed gradually. Both readings agree that the Masoretic text is remarkably faithful to its oldest predecessors.

From Text to Translations

The Hebrew text was translated very early: into Greek (the Septuagint), into Aramaic (the Targumim, see above). The practice of translating is itself ancient: under Ezra, the Torah is read “distinctly” (“meforash,” Nechemya 8:8), which the Talmud understands as a translation (Megillah 3a). From then on, people comment and translate without end: the Torah is inexhaustible in its reading.

Reading the Tanakh: Liturgy, Study and Customs

A Public Reading

The Torah is read in the synagogue on Monday, Thursday and Shabbat, following a cycle of fifty-four parashot that concludes at Simchat Torah (see What Is Simchat Torah?). This annual cycle is the Babylonian one, universal today; in the Land of Israel, according to the Talmud, the Torah was completed over three years:

“… for the people of the West [Eretz Israel], who complete the Torah in three years.”

(Megillah 29b) — לִבְנֵי מַעְרְבָא דְּמַסְּקִי לִדְאוֹרָיְיתָא בִּתְלָת שְׁנִין

Each week, an excerpt from the Prophets (the haftarah) is read in addition. Each festival has its own. Someone studying privately is required, according to the Talmud, to “complete his parasha with the community” by reading the text twice and the translation once: this is the rule of shnayim mikra ve-echad targum (Berakhot 8a).

Tehilim, a Book of Prayer

The book of Tehilim is a book of daily life: in many communities it is read through in its entirety every week or every month, and chapters are recited in times of distress, mourning or illness. In prayer, Psalm 145 (“Tehilla le-David”), which forms the core of Ashrei, is recited three times a day, because the Talmud promises that whoever says it three times a day is assured of being a “child of the World to Come” (Berakhot 4b).

Customs That Vary

Customs differ among communities: the haftarot are not always the same from one rite to another, the cantillation (the melody of the teamim) differs among Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Yemenites and others, and the way of reading the scrolls, of standing and of positioning the scroll varies. These variations touch the dressing of the reading, not its content. In the Hasidic world, the master’s word on the parasha occupies a central place alongside the study of the text. None of these customs alters the text itself, which is the same everywhere.

Halakha, Aggada, Kabbalah: Four Ways of Reading

Tradition distinguishes several levels of reading, and it is important not to confuse them.

Halakha, or practical law. The Talmud establishes that the interpretation of the law belongs to the sages and not to a new revelation. The episode of the “oven of Achnai,” in which a heavenly voice sides with Rabbi Eliezer against the majority, gives the formula:

“Rabbi Yehoshua stood on his feet and said: ‘It is not in heaven!'”

(Bava Metzia 59b) — עָמַד רַבִּי יְהוֹשֻׁעַ עַל רַגְלָיו וְאָמַר: ״לֹא בַשָּׁמַיִם הִיא!״

Rabbi Yirmeya explains: the Torah has already been given at Mount Sinai, and we no longer pay attention to a heavenly voice, for it is written “to follow the majority” (Shemot 23:2). The Torah of Moshe is a text to be read and interpreted, not one to be completed; the expression comes from Devarim 30:12.

The plain meaning (pshat). The Talmud recalls a fundamental principle: even when a verse is read in a midrashic way, it remains that “a verse does not leave its literal meaning”:

“A verse does not leave its literal meaning.”

(Shabbat 63a) — אֵין מִקְרָא יוֹצֵא מִידֵי פְּשׁוּטוֹ

The literal meaning therefore always remains valid, alongside homiletic readings. Regarding a verse in which an expression is doubled, the Talmud also explains that “the Torah spoke in the language of human beings,” that is, that repetition does not always carry a particular teaching (Berakhot 31b).

Aggada and mussar. Midrash and moral reading draw life lessons from the text, often by playing on words. They are not laws: they illuminate. Rav Benizri gives examples throughout his lectures (see below).

Kabbalah and Hasidism. The mystical tradition completes these readings with a secret level (the sod). The acronym PaRDeS, formed from pshat (plain meaning), remez (allusion), drash (interpretation) and sod (secret), is the best-known way of arranging these levels. They are not in opposition: a teaching of Kabbalah or Hasidism does not replace halakha, it is added to it. See the article What Is Kabbalah?.

History, Archaeology and Modern Criticism

What Archaeology Has Recovered

Several discoveries have shed light on the world of the Tanakh. In 1979, archaeologists unearthed at Ketef Hinnom, near Jerusalem, two small silver scrolls bearing a text close to the blessing of the kohanim (Bamidbar 6:24-26), dated to the late seventh or early sixth century BCE: they are among the oldest known biblical passages on a written medium. The Dead Sea Scrolls, already mentioned, and the medieval codices complete the picture. For the blessing of the kohanim, see the article Who Are the Kohanim, Levites and Israelites?.

Source Criticism

Beginning in the nineteenth century, an academic tradition, whose most famous representative is Julius Wellhausen (Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, 1883, first published in 1878 under the title Geschichte Israels), maintained that the Pentateuch is the result of the fusion of several distinct written sources (the “documentary hypothesis”). This theory has since been heavily reworked, challenged and qualified, and there is today no consensus on its details.

We must be clear on this point: Orthodox Judaism rejects this theory, in the name of the heavenly origin of the Torah, which it holds to be an article of faith (Mishna Sanhedrin 10:1). The Talmud itself raises questions about the composition of the last verses (Bava Batra 15a), but it does so within faith in the divine origin of the Torah, which is not the approach of modern criticism. Other Jewish movements, such as Conservative and Reform Judaism, accept the contributions of criticism to a greater or lesser extent. This article does not aim to decide between these positions but to distinguish them: scholarship can describe the texts; tradition receives them as a gift.

One History, Two Readings

The Tanakh is not a history textbook in the modern sense: it tells the history of a people before G-d, with its choices and its failings, from a particular perspective. Archaeology and outside sources (inscriptions, Assyrian and Babylonian chronicles) make it possible to cross-check some accounts, but not all. The believing reader sees in it a story of covenant; the historian looks in it for facts. Neither prevents the other from reading attentively.

What Rav Raphaël Benizri Teaches

Rav Raphaël Benizri has not devoted a lecture to the Tanakh in general, but in several of his lectures he returns to the way the books respond to one another; we report what is found there.

The last word of the Tanakh. In his lecture on the book of Rut, the Rav notes that the Tanakh closes on a word of ascent: “The text closes on ‘let him go up’: when we have finished the Tanakh, we must still undertake an ascent of our being, and that is how we enter the world of the infinite.” This word is the last of Divrei HaYamim, in the proclamation of Cyrus authorizing the return from exile:

“Who among you is of all His people? May the L-rd his G-d be with him, and let him go up!”

(Divrei HaYamim II 36:23) — מִי־בָכֶם מִכׇּל־עַמּוֹ ה׳ אֱלֹהָיו עִמּוֹ וְיָֽעַל׃

The Rav draws a lesson from it: “A Torah without a messianic dimension, without a national dimension, without a social dimension, without a universal dimension has no reason to exist.” He also recalls that five scrolls are distributed across the year and that the only one that is poorly connected to its festival is Rut, which is read at Shavuot. See the lecture: Shavuot: The Book of Rut and Chesed.

The three “Eikha”s. In his lecture on the book of Eikha, the Rav notes that there are “three Eikhas in the Tanakh”: that of Moshe, on the divisions of the people, that of Yeshayahu, on the city that has become a harlot, and that of Yirmeyahu, on solitude. All three “go back to the ayeka addressed to man: where are you?” This is a reading that makes the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings speak to one another, and one that the Midrash knows (Eikha Rabbah 1:1). The Rav also notes that when Yechezkel draws the plans of the future sanctuary, he is drawing those of the Third Temple and not of the Second. See the lecture: Tisha BeAv: The Book of Eikha.

“Rosh Hashana” in the Tanakh. In his lecture on Yona, the Rav points out that nowhere in the Torah, the Neviim or the Ketuvim is the first of Tishrei called Rosh Hashana: we read Yom Teruah, the day of the shofar, or Yom HaZikaron, the day of remembrance. The expression appears in Yechezkel, applied to the day of Yom Kippur:

“In the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning of the year, on the tenth of the month…”

(Yechezkel 40:1) — בְּעֶשְׂרִים וְחָמֵשׁ שָׁנָה לְגָלוּתֵנוּ בְּרֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה בֶּעָשׂוֹר לַחֹדֶשׁ

The Talmud confirms that this “beginning of the year” falls on the tenth of the month: it is the year of the Yovel (Jubilee) (Arakhin 12a). See the lecture: Yom Kippur: The Book of Yona and Teshuva.

Common Misconceptions About the Tanakh

“The Tanakh Is the Bible, Full Stop”

Not exactly. The content is that of the Hebrew Bible, but the order, the reference language and above all the reading are different. The Tanakh is read with the oral Torah, in Hebrew, and within a chain of commentaries (Rashi, Ramban, Ibn Ezra and others) that are printed alongside the text in rabbinic editions. A “Bible” read without this tradition is a different object.

“Jews Only Read the Torah”

False. All the books of the Tanakh are read in the synagogue over the course of the year: Torah every week, Prophets as haftarah, Psalms in prayer, Megillot on the festivals. The Neviim and the Ketuvim have a lower status than the Torah, notably for the ritual use of a scroll, but they belong fully to the corpus.

“The Old Testament Announces Jesus”

This is a Christian reading that Judaism does not share. For Judaism, the passages that Christians read as prophecies of Jesus have a meaning in their own context and do not refer to him. See the article The Messiah in Judaism.

“The Torah Is Law, a Code of Rules”

Reductive. The word means “teaching.” The Torah contains law, but also narratives, genealogies, songs and ethics. The count of 613 commandments is that of the rabbinic tradition (Makkot 23b; see What Are the 613 Commandments?).

“The Rabbis Chose the Books at the Council of Yavne”

A hypothesis popularized in the nineteenth century, now largely abandoned by historians (see above). The discussions at Yavne about Kohelet and the Song of Songs are real, but no council ever fixed the canon.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Tanakh

What does “Tanakh” mean?

It is an acronym formed from the initials of Torah, Neviim and Ketuvim, the three parts of the collection. It refers to the whole of the Hebrew Bible.

How many books does the Tanakh contain?

Twenty-four in the Jewish count: five of Torah, eight of Neviim and eleven of Ketuvim (Bava Batra 14b). Christians, who separate Shmuel, Melakhim, Divrei HaYamim, Ezra-Nechemya and the Twelve, count thirty-nine.

Who wrote the Tanakh?

According to tradition, the Torah is by Moshe, at G-d’s dictation, and the other books are by inspired prophets, kings and sages, whom the Talmud lists (Bava Batra 14b-15a). Modern criticism proposes other schemes, which differ greatly from one school to another.

What is the difference between the Tanakh and the Torah?

The Torah is the first part of the Tanakh: the Five Books. But the word “Torah” also designates, more broadly, all of Jewish teaching, written and oral.

Why does the Tanakh end with Divrei HaYamim and not with Malakhi?

Because the order of the Tanakh follows that of the Talmudic tradition (Bava Batra 14b), not the chronological order of the books. Rav Benizri notes that the last word of the Tanakh is “let him go up” (Divrei HaYamim II 36:23).

Can the Tanakh be read in English?

Yes, but a translation is always an interpretation. The Talmud itself encourages reading the text together with its Aramaic translation (Berakhot 8a), and it is best studied with a classic commentary such as Rashi’s.

What does “the Writings” (Ketuvim) mean?

They are the books that are neither the Torah nor books of prophets in the strict sense: poetry, wisdom, history. They are held to be inspired: the Talmud says, for example, of Esther that it was “spoken by the holy spirit” (Megillah 7a).

Is the Tanakh read in its entirety?

Not within a single liturgical cycle: the Torah is read in full in one year, while the Prophets and the Writings are read in excerpts or by scroll. Daily study, such as the weekly Tehilim, complements the liturgy.

What Is the Tanakh? Torah, Prophets and Writings