Category:Hebrew Bible

Hebrew Bible is a term that refers to the common portions of the Jewish canon and the Christian canons. In its Latin form, Biblia Hebraica, it traditionally serves as a title for printed editions of the masoretic text.

Many scholars advocate use of the term Hebrew Bible when discussing these books in academic writing, as a neutral substitute to terms with religious connotations.^[1] Additional difficulties include:

• Usage of Old Testament does not refer to a universally agreed canon, but rather to different sets of books depending on denomination. Christian use of Old Testament is occasionally misunderstood to allude anachronistically to covenant theology or dispensationalism (these terms post-date Old Testament by more than a millennium). It can also be misunderstood to allude to a lesser known, and even more recently coined term, supersessionism. Any such allusions are naturally inimical to confessional Jewish writers.
• Tanakh is a Hebrew acronym unlikely to be appreciated by readers unfamiliar with that language. It also refers to the particular arrangement of the biblical books as found in Judaism, and even to the exact features of the masoretic text. None of this is central to the Bible in the Christian textual tradition.

Hebrew in the term Hebrew Bible refers to the original language of the books, but it may also be taken as referring to the Hebrew people, who originally wrote the books, and the Jews of the Diaspora, who preserved the transmission of the text up to the age of printing.