Subsequently, the term New Testament was repeatedly used by Jesus Christ Himself and His holy apostles to designate the beginning of the history of redeemed and grace-filled mankind (Matthew XXVI:28 [86]; Mark XIV:24 [87]; Luke XXII:20 [88]; 1 Corinthians XI:25 [89]; 2 Corinthians III:6 [90] and others), from where it passed on to the sacred books written during this period.

The name Old Testament as applied to certain books originates from the particularly clear testimony of the Apostle Paul: but their (the Jews') minds are blinded: for the same veil remains unremoved to this day in the reading of the Old Testament, because it is removed by Christ (2 Corinthians III:14).

As part of the "Old Testament", the Orthodox Church, as we have already said above, has 38 canonical and 9 non-canonical books, differing in this from the Roman Catholic Church, which has 46 canonical books in its Vulgate (they consider the canonical Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon and 2 books of Maccabees).

As regards, finally, the very order of the books of the Old Testament, there is a rather sharp difference between the Hebrew Bible, on the one hand, and the Greek translation of the LXX translators, and hence our Slavonic-Russian Bible, on the other hand. In order to understand this difference, it is necessary to know that the ancient Jews divided their books not so much according to the homogeneity of their content (as in the LXX and Slavonic-Russian), but according to the degree of their significance and importance. In this sense, they divided all the Old Testament books into three groups: the "law" ("Torah"), the "prophets" ("nebiim") and the "hagiographers" ("ketubim"), emphasizing especially the importance of the first two groups, i.e., the "law" and the "prophets" (Matthew V:17 [91]; VII:12 [92]; XXII:40 [93]).

In our country, following the LXX translators and the Vulgate, another division is accepted, according to the nature of the very content of the Old Testament books, into the following four groups: 1) the books of the law; 2) historical; 3) didactic and 4) prophetic. Such an arrangement and division of books in the Hebrew and Slavonic-Russian Bibles will be most clearly seen from the following table: (omitted)

Pentateuch

The first five books of the Old Testament, having one and the same author, Moses, apparently represented at first one book, as can be judged from the testimony of Book II. Deuteronomy, where it says: "Take this book of the law and put it at the right hand of the ark of the covenant" (XXXI:26 [94]). The same name "book of the law" or simply "the law" was used to designate the first five law-positive books elsewhere in the Old and New Testaments (1 Kings II:3 [95]; 2 Kings XXIII:25 [96]; Psalm XVIII:8 [97]; Isaiah V:24 [98]; Matthew VII:12 [92]; XI:13 [93]; Luke II:22 [99] and others).

But the rabbis already from ancient times had another, somewhat peculiar designation of this "Torah" (law), as the "five fifths of the law", which simultaneously proves both the unity of the Pentateuch and its composition of five different parts. This five-place division seems to have been finally defined by the time of the translation of the LXX translators, where it was already gaining full recognition.

Our modern word "Pentateuch" is a literal translation of the Greek πεντάτευχος from πέντε – "five" and τεύχος – "volume of the book". This division is quite accurate, since, indeed, each of the five volumes of the Pentateuch has its own differences and corresponds to different periods of theocratic legislation. Thus, for example, the first volume is a kind of historical introduction to it, and the last serves as an obvious repetition of the law; and the three intermediate volumes contain the gradual development of theocracy confined to certain historical facts, the middle of these three books (Leviticus), differing sharply from the previous and the following (almost complete absence of the historical part), is an excellent dividing line between them.

All five parts of the Pentateuch have now acquired the meaning of special books and have their own names, which in the Hebrew Bible depend on their initial words, and in the Greek, Latin and Slavonic-Russian - on the main subject of their content.

Hebrew name Greek name Slavic-Russian name

Bereshit ("in the beginning") Γένεσις Genesis

Ve elle shemot ("and these are the names") Έξοδος Exodus