Preliminary information

Holy Scripture, or the Bible, is a collection of books written by prophets and apostles, as we believe, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The word "Bible" is Greek, meaning "books." The main theme of the Holy Scriptures is the salvation of mankind by the Messiah, the incarnate Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Old Testament speaks of salvation in the form of types and prophecies about the Messiah and the Kingdom of God. The New Testament sets forth the very realization of our salvation through the incarnation, life and teaching of the God-Man, sealed by His death on the Cross and Resurrection. According to the time of their writing, the holy books are divided into the Old Testament and the New Testament. Of these, the first contain what the Lord revealed to people through the divinely inspired prophets before the Savior's coming to earth, and the second contains what the Lord the Savior Himself and His apostles revealed and taught on earth.

The Original Form and Language of the Holy Scriptures

The Old Testament books were originally written in Hebrew. Later books from the time of the Babylonian captivity already have many Assyrian and Babylonian words and figures of speech. And the books written during the Greek rule (non-canonical books) are written in Greek, the Third Book of Ezra in Latin. The books of Holy Scripture did not come out of the hands of the holy writers in appearance as we see them now. Initially, they were written on parchment or papyrus (which was made from the stems of plants growing in Egypt and Palestine) with a cane (a sharpened reed stick) and ink. As a matter of fact, not books, but charters were written on a long parchment or papyrus scroll, which looked like a long ribbon and was wound on a shaft. Usually the scrolls were written on one side. Subsequently, parchment or papyrus ribbons, instead of gluing them into ribbons-scrolls, began to be sewn into books for ease of use. The text in the ancient scrolls was written in the same large capital letters. Each letter was written separately, but the words were not separated from one another. A whole line was like one word. The reader himself had to divide the line into words and, of course, sometimes did it incorrectly. There were also no punctuation marks and accents in ancient manuscripts. And in the ancient Hebrew language, vowels were also not written, only consonants.

The division of words in books was introduced in the fifth century by the deacon of the Church of Alexandria, Eulalius. Thus, gradually the Bible acquired its modern form. With the modern division of the Bible into chapters and verses, reading the holy books and searching for the right places in them has become a simple matter.

The history of the Old Testament books

The holy books in their modern fullness did not appear immediately. Time from Moses (1550 B.C.) to Samuel (1050 B.C.) can be called the first period of the formation of the Holy Scriptures. The divinely inspired Moses, who wrote down his revelations, laws, and narratives, gave the following command to the Levites who bore the ark of the covenant of the Lord: "Take this book of the law, and put it at the right hand of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God" (Deuteronomy 31:26).

Subsequent sacred writers continued to attribute their works to the Pentateuch of Moses, with the command to keep them in the same place where it was kept, as if in one book. Thus, we read about Joshua that he wrote his words in the book of the law of God (Joshua 24:26), i.e. in the Book of Moses. In the same way, Samuel, the prophet and judge, who lived at the beginning of the royal age, is said to have set forth ... the people the rights of the kingdom, and wrote it in a book (apparently already known to everyone and existing before it), and laid it before the Lord (1 Samuel 10:25), i.e. on the side of the ark of the covenant of the Lord, where the Pentateuch was kept. From Samuel to the Babylonian captivity (589 B.C.), the elders of the people of Israel and the prophets were the collectors and custodians of the sacred books of the Old Testament. The latter, as the main authors of Hebrew writing, are very often spoken of in the Books of Chronicles. It is also necessary to bear in mind the remarkable testimony of the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius about the custom of the ancient Jews to revise the existing texts of the Holy Scriptures after all sorts of vague circumstances (for example, prolonged wars). Sometimes it was like a new edition of the ancient Divine Scriptures, which, however, were allowed to be published only by God-inspired people, the prophets, who remembered the most ancient events and wrote the history of their people with the greatest accuracy. Worthy of note is the ancient Jewish tradition that the pious king Hezekiah (710 B.C.), with the chosen elders, published the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, Proverbs of Solomon, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes.

The period from the Babylonian captivity to the time of the Great Synagogue under Ezra and Nehemiah (400 B.C.) is the period of the final completion of the Old Testament list of sacred books (canon). The chief work in this great work belongs to the priest Ezra, that holy teacher of the law of the God of heaven (see 1 Ezra 1:10). 1:12). With the assistance of the scholar Nehemiah, the creator of an extensive library, who collected the stories of kings and prophets and of David, and the letters of kings about sacred offerings (2 Mac. 2:13), Ezra carefully revised and published in one composition all the divinely inspired writings that had come before him, and included in this composition both the Book of Nehemiah and the Book with his own name. The then living prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi were undoubtedly Ezra's co-workers, and their works were also included in the list of books collected by Ezra.

From the time of Ezra, divinely inspired prophets ceased to appear among the Jewish people, and the books published after this time are no longer included in the list of sacred books. Thus, for example, the Book of Jesus, the son of Sirach, also written in the Hebrew language, for all its ecclesiastical dignity, was no longer included in the sacred canon.

The antiquity of the sacred books of the Old Testament is evident from their very content. The books of Moses tell so vividly about the life of a person of those distant times, so vividly depict the patriarchal way of life, so correspond to the ancient legends of those peoples, that the reader naturally comes to the idea of the author's own closeness to the times about which he narrates. According to experts in the Hebrew language, the very syllable of the Mosaic books bears the stamp of the deepest antiquity. The months of the year do not yet have their own names, but are simply called the first, second, third, etc., and the books themselves are simply called initial words without special names. For example, bereshit ("in the beginning" the Book of Genesis), veelle shemot ("and these are the names" of the Book of Exodus), etc., as if to prove that there were no other books to distinguish them from which special names would be required. The same correspondence with the spirit and character of ancient times and peoples is observed in other sacred writers who lived after Moses.

The Old Testament Holy Scripture contains the following books:

1. The books of the prophet Moses, or the Torah (containing the basics of the Old Testament faith): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.