The Law of Displaced People

Holy Watermelon

The Hebrew Bible is not the same thing as the Imperial Christian Old Testament (though it's very similar to the protestant version), but there are many different ways people draw value from these books.

The Torah is not the same thing as the Old Testament: it is the 5 books classically attributed to Moses. For some who adhere to an Abrahamic faith, the Torah is the only scripture; for others, the testimonies of prophets and historians are also invaluable.

The Hebrew Bible is often called the Tanakh, which isn't a word, but an acronym for Torah-Neviim-Ketuvim (Law, Prophets, and all the other writings). Calling it a bible is misleading; it's a library--a very small library of the greatest literature that defined a nation--a small Mediterranean nation that eventually influenced the entire world.

To say that "the Bible" is the infallible word of God is to deny the obvious inconsistencies and material contradictions. To say that it is the complete word of God is to deny the obvious appeals to external authoritative texts. To say that it is the literal word of God is to deny the obvious editorial history and the skill of the genuine authors.

We outline the various major textual traditions (the Greek Septuagint and the Hebrew Masoretic text), as well as the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Apocrypha (or Deuterocanon), and several pseudepigraphal writings. We look at rejected books that might hope to belong, and we cite books that were abridged into the biblical histories and have since been lost.

All this and more...

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