Finding your way around: what the Bible is and how it is laid out

Then he said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled." (Luke 24:44, NET)¹

Most people read that sentence and hear one thing: Jesus says the whole Bible is about him. That is in it. But look at how he names the whole Bible. He doesn't say "the Scriptures" and leave it there. He gives three parts: the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms. Describing the collection in three parts was one Jewish way of doing it, and it is older than Jesus: the prologue to Sirach, written about 132 BC, speaks three times of "the Law, the Prophets, and the rest of the books", with that third shelf not yet carrying a fixed name.¹³ Scholars argue about how standard the three-part description was, since the New Testament more often says just "the Law and the Prophets", and about whether "the Psalms" here means the Psalter itself or stands in for the whole third shelf. Either way, the person Christians read this whole book as being about is describing a collection with a shape.

Before you can read a book well, you have to be able to find it, and you have to know what kind of thing you have found. A Bible is not one book. It is a library of sixty-six (or seventy-three, or more, and we'll get to that) bound as one, arranged by shelf rather than by date, with numbers in the margins that nobody who wrote it ever saw. Once you can see the shelves, you can predict what kind of book you are holding before you read a word, and that prediction is the first thing that goes wrong for new readers.

First, where this course stands

This is a School of Christian Studies course, and the label on it tells you so. We believe the Bible is God's Word: that in these books God speaks, and speaks truly, about himself and about us. That is a faith claim, and we hold it by faith. We won't dress it up as a neutral fact, and we won't pretend it's the only view a thoughtful person can hold.

It isn't a bare assertion either, and you should know the shape of the argument even here at the start. The classic Christian case doesn't begin with a theory about books; it begins with Jesus. He treated Israel's Scriptures as God's own speech, argued from them, and staked his claims on them, and a Christian who trusts him inherits his estimate of them. That is John Wenham's argument in Christ and the Bible, and lesson 10 makes it properly and puts the strongest objections to it. A critical scholar reads the same texts as ancient documents, asks what each meant in its own setting, and holds that the question of God's speech is not one the historical method can settle. That is a serious position held by serious people, and this course will say so every time it matters.

So the course will keep three kinds of claim apart, in its own words, every time they come up. History establishes something when the documents and the digs settle it and scholars of every conviction agree. Scholars argue about something when serious, informed people disagree and the evidence does not yet settle it; there you will get each side in its own terms. We hold by faith something when it is ours as Christians and evidence bears on it without deciding it. You will see those three phrases so often that you'll start sorting claims yourself, which is the point.

One more thing about words. This course says "Old Testament", because that is the Christian name for the first and larger part of the Bible. Jews call the same books the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible, and for them it is not an "old" anything; it is Scripture, read on its own terms, in its own order, in synagogues this week. When I talk about how Jews read these books, I'll use their words. When the subject is scholarship done by the historical-critical method, which asks what a text meant in its own setting and treats it as it would any other ancient document, I'll say "critical scholar", because that is the field's own term. It names a method, not a belief: critical scholars include believing Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and people of no faith.

How many books?

Sixty-six is the count this course uses, and it says so now so that nothing is hidden. The Catholic count is forty-six Old Testament books plus twenty-seven, defined at the Council of Trent in 1546,¹⁰ which Catholics understand not as a new decision but as the Church stating under challenge what it had long received and read. Orthodox Bibles carry those books and a few more, such as 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, and Psalm 151.¹¹ The books at issue are called deuterocanonical by Catholics, and the "second" there refers to when their place was settled, not to a lower rank; Catholics hold them as fully Scripture. Orthodox Christians more often say anagignoskomena, "the things read". Protestants traditionally call them the Apocrypha. Each name belongs to the tradition that uses it.

Why the difference exists, and what each tradition says for itself, is lesson 8. It deserves a whole sitting, because it is a real disagreement with serious people on each side. For now, three things. History establishes what each of these Bibles contains. Which list is Scripture is a question the traditions answer by faith and by the authority of their churches. And one doctrine does turn on the difference: Catholic teaching on purgatory and prayer for the dead appeals to 2 Maccabees 12, which is not in a Protestant Bible. Beyond that, the creeds do not depend on it. The argument has run for five centuries, and it was harder at the start than it is now, since Trent's decree attached an anathema to anyone who refused the books "entire with all their parts".¹⁰ Today neither side treats the difference as putting the other outside the faith.

The shelves of the Old Testament

The Old Testament in a Christian Bible has four groups. Say them out loud once; you'll use them every time you open the book.

1. Law, five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. The founding story from creation to the edge of the promised land, and the covenant made at Sinai.
2. History, twelve books: Joshua to Esther. Israel in the land, the kings, the fall of both kingdoms, exile, and return.
3. Poetry and Wisdom, five books: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs. Prayers, songs, and reflection on how to live.
4. Prophets, seventeen books: Isaiah to Malachi. Five long ones (the "Major" Prophets, so called for length, not rank, though Lamentations is short and sits there because it was attributed to Jeremiah), then twelve short ones.

Five, twelve, five, seventeen: thirty-nine.

Christine Hayes, who taught Yale's introductory Old Testament course, points out that this order has a logic, and it isn't the order of the Hebrew Bible. It comes from the Septuagint, the Greek translation made for Greek-speaking Jews from about the third century BC, which became the Old Testament of the early Greek-speaking church. In her words, "The Septuagint's rationale for ordering the books is temporal. They've clustered books Genesis through Esther, which tell of things past; the books of Job through the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon contain wisdom that applies to the present; and then the prophetic books, Isaiah to Malachi, contain or tell of things future."² Past, present, future. That's a reader's arrangement.

The same books, another way

Now the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, which is what Jesus was describing in Luke 24. Tanakh is an acronym: Torah, Nevi'im, Ketuvim. Law, Prophets, Writings.

• Torah, five books. The same five.
• Nevi'im, the Prophets, eight books: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings (the "Former Prophets", which a Christian Bible calls History), then Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve counted as one book (the "Latter Prophets").
• Ketuvim, the Writings, eleven books: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the five short scrolls read at festivals (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther), Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles.

Five, eight, eleven: twenty-four. Same books. Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles are each one book instead of two; the twelve short prophets are one; Ezra and Nehemiah are one. Count them the Christian way and you get thirty-nine. Josephus, writing around AD 95, counted twenty-two: "only twenty two books: which contain the records of all the past times: which are justly believed to be divine."³ He does not say how he got to twenty-two; the usual reconstruction is that Ruth was folded into Judges and Lamentations into Jeremiah. Twenty-two, twenty-four, thirty-nine: one library, three ways of counting the shelves.

That Talmud passage gives away two things about what was still being settled in those early centuries. First, its list of the Prophets runs "Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and Isaiah and the Twelve",⁴ which is not the order in any Bible you can buy. Printed Hebrew Bibles put Isaiah first. So in this passage the rabbis are settling an order, and they are working from a list they already treat as normal. How much that tells us is argued: some scholars read it as evidence that membership was long settled, while others point to rabbinic debates over whether Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Esther "defile the hands" and read the boundary as still moving into the second century.¹⁵ Second, Daniel sits in the Writings, not among the Prophets.⁴ A Christian Bible, following the Septuagint, puts Daniel right after Ezekiel. Scholars argue about why the Tanakh shelves him with the Writings. The usual suggestions are its Aramaic chapters, its court-tale style, and the date of the book's final form, which is itself one of the sharpest disputes in Old Testament study: most critical scholars date that final form to the second century BC, and conservative scholars argue for a date centuries earlier. Lesson 10 gives both cases. Either way, the two placements read him differently. A Christian reader meets Daniel as a prophet of things to come. A Jewish reader meets a wise man in exile, and reaches the visions later. The book doesn't change. What you expect walking in does.

The picture below puts all three arrangements side by side, drawn to one scale so you can compare them by eye. Watch the same twenty-four books get regrouped into thirty-nine, and see where the New Testament sits.

Every row is drawn to the same ruler, eleven units per book, so you can compare them by eye. Notice that the Old Testament row is longer than the Tanakh row. That is not because it holds more material. It is the same material cut into more books: Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah each split in two, and the Twelve counted one by one. Catholic Bibles add seven books to that middle row, and Orthodox Bibles more again. Sources: Bava Batra 14b; Hayes, RLST 145 lecture 1; any printed Bible's contents page.

The New Testament's four shelves

The New Testament is shorter and simpler to map.

1. Gospels, four: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Four accounts of one life.
2. Acts, one: the church's first thirty years or so, by the author of Luke.
3. Letters, twenty-one: thirteen with Paul's name on them, arranged roughly by length (Romans is first because it is longest, not because it came first), then Hebrews, then seven from James, Peter, John, and Jude.
4. Revelation, one: a vision, in a kind of writing the first readers knew and we mostly don't.

Four, one, twenty-one, one: twenty-seven. That count is the same in Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox Bibles. The one exception is the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo church, whose canon is the largest of any, and whose broader New Testament runs past twenty-seven.

Notice again that nothing here is in date order. On any dating, conservative or critical, Paul's letters are the earliest Christian writings we have, and they sit after the Gospels and Acts. The Gospels come first because they tell the story the letters assume. The letters are arranged by author and length. Revelation is last because it ends the story. It is a reading order, and a good one.

A library, not a timeline

The order of the books is a reading order. The books are grouped by the kind of writing they are, the way a library puts fiction on one wall, history on another, and poetry in a corner. So the shelf a book sits on tells you what kind of thing it is before you open it. A book among the History books is going to be narrative: people, events, a narrator reporting. A book among the Prophets is going to be oracles: speeches from God, delivered to a particular audience in a particular crisis, collected later. A Letter is one side of a conversation. A Gospel is a portrait of a life.

That prediction matters because reading is mostly done by expectation. You read a recipe differently from a novel, and you knew which one you were holding before the first sentence. The Bible's first readers had the same reflexes for their own kinds of writing. We have mostly lost them, and the shelves are the quickest way back. Lesson 3 will make this the first rule of reading; for now, it is enough to see that the shelf is a clue you can use from a closed book.

It cuts the other way too. Because the order is by kind, it is not by date. Paul wrote before Mark, and Mark is printed first. If you assume the pages run in time order, you will misplace nearly everything, and lesson 2 will fix that by giving you the timeline the shelves don't.

Three books from a closed Bible

Start with the simple case, the one you'll do a hundred times. Find Habakkuk, Philemon, and Daniel without the contents page, and say what kind of book each is from its shelf.

Habakkuk. It's a prophet, and a short one, so it is among the twelve at the end of the Old Testament. The Twelve run Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. Habakkuk is eighth, so open near the end of the Old Testament and go back a few pages from Malachi. Kind of book: oracles, though Habakkuk is unusual because most of it is the prophet arguing with God rather than God speaking to the people. Still a prophet's book: expect speech, poetry, and a crisis (here, the coming Babylonians).

Philemon. It's a letter with Paul's name on it, so it is in the Letters, and since Paul's letters are arranged roughly by length and Philemon is one page, it is the last of them, just before Hebrews. Kind of book: one side of a conversation, about one situation, to one man and his house church. You'll be reconstructing the situation from the letter itself, which is lesson 7's skill.

Daniel. Now the wrinkle inside the simple case. In your Christian Bible, Daniel is a prophet, sitting right after Ezekiel and before the Twelve. Kind of book: half court stories (the lions' den, the furnace) and half visions. In the Tanakh, Daniel is among the Writings, near the end, alongside Esther and Ezra.⁴ Nothing about the book changes. What changes is what a reader expects walking in. Christian readers have usually met Daniel as prophecy first; Jewish readers meet him as a wise exile first and reach the visions later. Knowing that both shelves exist keeps you from thinking your own is the only one.

Chapters and verses: the numbers nobody wrote

Open any Bible and the page is full of numbers. It's easy to assume they're as old as the words. They aren't.

Start with what the documents settle: both layers of numbers are late. The chapter divisions used in nearly every Bible today are usually credited to Stephen Langton, later Archbishop of Canterbury, working in Paris in the early thirteenth century, though who exactly made them is less certain than when.⁷ Verse numbers came about three and a half centuries later, and those we can date precisely: Robert Estienne, a Paris printer also known as Stephanus, numbered the verses of his Greek New Testament of 1551 and of a French Bible in 1553.⁷ The Geneva Bible of 1560 was the first complete English Bible to carry them.⁷ So the writers of the Bible never saw a chapter number, and the first Christians to read Romans read it as a letter without a single numeral in it.

Why does that matter? Because chapter and verse numbers are a finding aid, like page numbers, and they're very good at it. Two people in different countries can go to the same line in seconds. But they aren't units of meaning. A verse isn't a sentence the author marked off; often it's half a sentence. A chapter isn't a section the author planned; often it cuts across one. Treat the numbers as the address of a line, not as a claim about where the thought begins and ends.

Where the chapter number sends you wrong

Isaiah 53 is the most famous chapter in the Prophets, the one about the suffering servant. Ask most people where to start and they say "verse 1", because the big number in the margin says so. Read it that way and this is what you get:

"Who would have believed what we just heard? When was the Lord's power revealed through him? He sprouted up like a twig before God, like a root out of parched soil; he had no stately form or majesty that might catch our attention..." (Isaiah 53:1–2, NET)¹

Who is "he"? You have read two verses and the poem still has not told you. That is because the poem did not start here. It started three verses earlier, at what the chapter numbers call 52:13:

"Look, my servant will succeed! He will be elevated, lifted high, and greatly exalted." (Isaiah 52:13, NET)¹

There he is. The servant is announced, his exaltation is announced, and then his disfigurement, and then the nations' astonishment, all before the chapter break. The poem runs from 52:13 to 53:12, five stanzas of three verses each, and Langton's chapter line falls after the first stanza. A reader who starts at 53:1 walks in during the second verse of a song and spends three lines asking who the singer means.

Who the servant is has been argued between Jews and Christians for two thousand years, and lesson 4 takes it up: Jewish tradition has long read the servant as Israel, and Christians have read the passage of Jesus since the New Testament. Neither reading is the point here. The point here is that a number in the margin cut a poem in half.

Here's the mirror case, where the numbers split what belongs together. Psalms 9 and 10 in your Bible are two psalms. Read them together and the stanzas step through the Hebrew alphabet, with gaps, as one alphabetic poem; and the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, prints them as a single psalm of thirty-nine verses, with our Psalm 10 beginning at its verse 22.⁸ Two numberings, one poem, and no fault in either; but a reader who only knows one numbering will think Psalm 10 has a strange abrupt opening, when it is simply the second half.

What people get wrong

"The books are in the order they were written." They are grouped by kind, and within each group by other rules (length, author, tradition). Paul's letters are earlier than the Gospels and printed later. Lesson 2 gives you the timeline; the contents page never will.

"Chapter and verse are part of the text." You've seen the dates. They are the address of a line. When you meet a break that seems to fall in an odd place, it probably does, and you are free to read across it.

"The Old Testament is Judaism's Bible with a Christian sequel." Half true in a way that misleads. The books are the same, and Christians did receive them from Israel. But the Tanakh is a living Scripture, read today by Jews on its own terms, in its own order, with its own last word, and not as a prelude to anything. Whenever this course speaks of how Jews read it, it will say so in their terms, and lesson 2 will show you how the same books tell two stories, each with its own integrity.

"Forty authors over fifteen hundred years." You will hear this often, and it is a fine sentence on one set of dates: Moses around 1400 BC, John around AD 95. On the dates most critical scholars hold, the earliest books are much later and the span is under a thousand years. Scholars argue about the dates of the earliest books, and lesson 10 gives both cases. The honest form of the sentence is "roughly a thousand to fifteen hundred years, depending on when you date the earliest books". Either way, it is a library written across many centuries, by many hands, in three languages (Hebrew, a little Aramaic, and Greek), and that is remarkable enough without rounding.

"The Bible I own is the Bible." If yours has sixty-six books, a Catholic friend's has seventy-three, and an Orthodox friend's has more. History establishes what each contains. Which list is Scripture is answered by each tradition's faith and its church. This course uses sixty-six and will give you every side's case in lesson 8.

Practice

Then close the page and, from memory, write out the four shelves of the Old Testament with their counts, the three parts of the Tanakh with theirs, and the four shelves of the New Testament with theirs. Check. The site will ask you to write everything you remember before the quiz; that is the moment this lesson either stuck or didn't.

Connections

Everything in this course depends on being able to find things and knowing what shelf they came from.

• Lesson 2 puts the shelves on a timeline, so that you can place any book in the one story from creation to new creation, and so that "which came first, Ezra or Isaiah?" has an answer the contents page can't give.
• Lesson 3 turns "what shelf is this on?" into the first rule of reading: identify the kind of writing before you decide what a sentence means. You have already started doing that with Habakkuk, Philemon, and Daniel.
• Lesson 8 comes back to the counts: sixty-six, seventy-three, and more, with each tradition's case in its own words.
• Lesson 9 comes back to the numbers in the margins, when you see manuscripts like the Isaiah scroll above and learn how the words reached your page.

Go deeper

• Christine Hayes, RLST 145 lecture 1, "The Parts of the Whole" (Open Yale Courses, free video and transcript): fifty minutes on the layout of the Hebrew Bible from a critical scholar who never asks you to believe or disbelieve. Hear the Jewish arrangement described by someone who works in it, rather than from me.
• The Jewish Study Bible (JPS Tanakh, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2014): the introductory essays describe the canon and the order from inside the tradition. The book Hayes sets for her own students.
• Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, chapter 1, "The Need to Interpret": the argument that the Bible is a library of kinds of writing and that reading each kind by its own rules is every reader's first job.
• Longman and Dillard, An Introduction to the Old Testament, introduction: the standard evangelical survey, book by book, with a clear account of how the Christian and Jewish arrangements relate.
• Josephus, Against Apion 1.8 (Whiston translation, free online): two paragraphs from a Jewish historian around AD 95 counting his people's sacred books, worth reading in full to see how early the collection was fixed.

Sources

1. NET Bible, netbible.org. Luke 24:44; Isaiah 52:13 and 53:1–2; Malachi 4:5. The practice readings are 2 Chronicles 36:22–23 and Malachi 4:4–6. Scripture quoted by permission. Quotations designated (NET) are from the NET Bible® copyright ©1996, 2019 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. All rights reserved. The NET is used throughout the course because its terms allow free quotation in a work like this one and because its translators' notes are themselves worth reading; see Editorial Standards 4.7.
2. Hayes, C., Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), RLST 145, Lecture 1, "The Parts of the Whole" (Open Yale Courses, Fall 2006), transcript. The three parts of the Tanakh (Torah, Nevi'im, Ketuvim) and the 24-book count; the quotation on the Septuagint's temporal rationale for ordering the books (Genesis to Esther as past, Job to Song of Songs as present, Isaiah to Malachi as future).
3. Josephus, Against Apion 1.8 (1.37–43), c. AD 95, trans. W. Whiston, online at the University of Chicago. "Only twenty two books: which contain the records of all the past times: which are justly believed to be divine." Verified against the page at draft time.
4. Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 14b, baraita on the order of the books, William Davidson Talmud translation, Sefaria. The Prophets "Joshua and Judges, Samuel and Kings, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and Isaiah and the Twelve Prophets"; the Writings "Ruth and the book of Psalms, and Job and Proverbs; Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Lamentations; Daniel and the Scroll of Esther; and Ezra and Chronicles." Verified at draft time. Supports: Chronicles last, Daniel among the Writings, and the Talmud's Jeremiah-before-Isaiah order.
5. Fee, G. D. & Stuart, D., How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2014), ch. 1. The Bible as a collection of different kinds of writing, each read by its own rules; the basis of lesson 3 and of the "shelf predicts kind" idea here.
6. Longman, T. & Dillard, R., An Introduction to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Zondervan, 2006), introduction. The Christian Old Testament's four-part arrangement and its relation to the Hebrew canon.
7. Metzger, B. M. & Ehrman, B. D., The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2005). Chapter divisions usually credited to Stephen Langton in the early thirteenth century (the course's research file gives c. 1205–1227); verse numbers introduced by Robert Estienne (Stephanus) in his 1551 Greek New Testament and 1553 French Bible; the Geneva Bible of 1560 the first English Bible to carry them.
8. Septuagint, Psalm 9, Greek text with Brenton's English, Elpenor edition. LXX Psalm 9 runs to 39 verses; the Hebrew Psalm 10 ("Why standest thou afar off, O Lord?") begins at its verse 22. Verified at draft time. The shared alphabetic (acrostic) pattern across Psalms 9 and 10 is the standard observation of the commentaries and of the NET Bible's note on Psalm 9, which I could not open at draft time; the fact-check should confirm the wording.
9. Great Isaiah Scroll, column containing Isaiah 53, photograph by Ardon Bar Hama for the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; public domain, Wikimedia Commons. The scroll itself is treated in lesson 9.
10. Council of Trent, Session IV, 8 April 1546, Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures. The Catholic canon of 46 Old Testament and 27 New Testament books. Discussed in full in lesson 8.
11. Synod of Jerusalem (1672) and the Orthodox anagignoskomena (1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, with 4 Maccabees in an appendix), as recorded in the course research file; the Orthodox canon is given in each tradition's own terms in lesson 8.
12. BibleProject, "What is the Bible?" (YouTube, ak06MSETeo4); the BibleProject site lists the running time as 5:48. Existence and channel verified at draft time.
13. Prologue to the Wisdom of Ben Sira (Sirach), c. 132 BC. The translator, writing in Egypt, refers three times to "the Law, the Prophets, and the rest of the books", the earliest witness to a three-part Jewish collection, with the third part not yet carrying a fixed name.
14. The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text (Jewish Publication Society, 1917), public domain. 2 Chronicles 36:23. Used for the Tanakh's ending because it is the Jewish translation of the Jewish arrangement; see Editorial Standards 4.7.
15. On whether the boundaries of the Jewish canon were closed by the first century, the standard treatments arguing that they were still moving are J. Barton, Oracles of God (1986), T. Lim, The Formation of the Jewish Canon (2013), and L. M. McDonald, The Formation of the Biblical Canon (2017). The rabbinic disputes over whether Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs and Esther "defile the hands" are at Mishnah Yadayim 3:5. Lesson 8 gives the argument properly.