Where did the Bible come from?

Elaine R. Follis

Do you have a Bible at your house? Maybe it's a paperback, or a study edition with tabs to help you find the different books in it. Or maybe you have a big, heavy Bible at home that is a family treasure. Maybe it has been passed along from one generation to another and has signatures and special family information written in it.

Although Bibles are different from one another in design, all of them contain books that were written centuries ago in a part of the world now known as the Middle East. Christians study a Bible that has two parts: the Old Testament and the New Testament. Jews study the Tanak. The Tanak is the same as what Christians call the Old Testament, except that some of the books come in a different order. And, like Christians, Jews love it because it tells about the one God. These early Scriptures tell the story of Jewish ancestors—the Hebrew people whom Moses brought to live in the land of Canaan, later called Israel. The Tanak has three sections: the Torah, or instruction in the law; the Nebbi'im, the Hebrew word for "prophets"; and the Kethubim, another Hebrew word that means "writings." Here's a chart showing the contents and order of books in the Tanak: