This unity of the messianic idea is no less clear in the general plan of the Bible. In terms of their nature and content, all the books of the Old Testament can be divided into three main groups: books of law-positive history, books of prophets, and books of poetic and edifying. The first class presents the history of theocracy, i.e., the rights of Hashem's rule over Israel. But for what purpose does the Lord use such different methods of educating His people? The covenant at Sinai, the Mosaic law, the calamities of the wilderness, the conquest of the promised land, victories and defeats, alienation from other nations, and finally, the burden of the Babylonian captivity and the joy of returning from it, all had as their obvious aim the formation of the Jewish nation in a certain spirit, in the spirit of preserving and spreading the messianic idea. This motive is even more evident in the prophetic books, where, now through threats, now through promises of rewards, the Jewish people were constantly maintained on a certain moral height and prepared in the spirit of pure faith and right life, in view of the coming Messiah. As for the books of the last group, poetic and edifying, some of them, such as the Psalms, were directly messianic prayers of the Jewish nation; others, like the Song of Songs, depicted the union of Israel with Christ under the form of allegory; still others, like the books of Wisdom, Ecclesiastes, etc., revealed various features of Divine Wisdom, the rays of that Divine Word (Λόγος) that shone in the darkness of paganism and in the pre-Christian world.

Thus, it can be said with full conviction that the main and fundamental subject of the Bible, from the first chapters of the Book of Genesis (III:15) to the last chapters of the Apocalypse (XXI:6-21 [81] and XXII:20 [82]), is the God-Man, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Old Testament.

The earliest division of the Bible, coming from the time of the early Christian Church, was its division into two, far from equal parts, which were called the Old and New Testaments.

Such a division of the entire composition of the biblical books was due to their relationship to the main subject of the Bible, i.e. to the person of the Messiah: those books that were written before the coming of Christ and only prophetically foreshadowed Him became part of the "Old Testament", and those that appeared after the coming of the Savior into the world and are devoted to the history of His redemptive ministry and the exposition of the foundations of the Church established by Jesus Christ and His holy apostles. formed the "New Testament".

All these terms, i.e. both the word "covenant" itself and its combination with the adjectives "old" and "new", are taken from the Bible itself, in which, in addition to their general meaning, they also have a special one, in which we also use them when speaking of well-known biblical books.

The word covenant (Hebrew berit, Greek: διαθήκη, Latin: testamentum), in the language of Holy Scripture and Biblical usage, first of all, means a certain decree, condition, law, on which the two contracting parties agree, and hence this very contract or union, as well as those external signs that served as its confirmation, seal, as it were a seal (testamentum). And since the sacred books in which this covenant or union of God with man was described were, of course, one of the best means of confirming it and fixing it in the people's memory, the name "covenant" was also transferred to them very early. It already existed in the time of Moses, as can be seen from the 7th verse of the 24th chapter of the Book of Moses. Exodus, where the record of the Sinai legislation read by Moses to the Jewish people is called the book of the covenant (sefer habberit). Similar expressions, which denote not only the Sinai legislation, but the entire Mosaic Pentateuch, are found in the subsequent Old Testament books (2 Kings XXIII:2 [83]; Sir XXV:25 [84]; 1 Macc I:57 [85]). To the Old Testament belongs the first, still prophesied reference to the New Testament, namely, in the well-known prophecy of Jeremiah: "Behold, the days are coming, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah" (Jeremiah XXXI:31).

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).