The books of
the Old Testament

or First Alliance

In the traditional Jewish order

A set of 24 collections comprising 39 books

In the order of the Protestant Bible

39 pounds: Protestant churches use the books of the Hebrew canon, but in a different classification.

In the order of the Catholic and Orthodox Bible

46 pounds: Catholics and Orthodox have preserved the Vulgate books and their layout. We find the apocryphal books of Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus (or Sirach), Baruch and the Greek complements to the books of Daniel and Esther (*) .

The languages used by the writers of the Old Testament are Hebrew and Aramaic. Biblical Hebrew is used for almost all of the Old Testament.
The Hebrew alphabet comprises 22 consonant letters. Vowels, transcribed by dots and dashes placed above, in the middle of or below consonants, were not used until the 4th century CE, when the aim was to fix reading (work of the Massorets).

Aramaic became established around the 6th century BC. It is written in cursive and the Hebrews adopted its script, except for religious texts.
In the 3rd century BC, they were written in «square» Hebrew (due to the general shape of the characters).
Aramaic is represented in the Old Testament in Jeremiah 10, Daniel 2 and Ezra 4.
The subdivision of the Bible into chapters is rooted in the Jewish practice of synagogue reading.

But the divisions used today are more recent.
In 1203, Étienne Langton, a scholastic at the University of Paris, divided the Bible into chapters. The division into verses came later. The verse is a unit of rhythm and syntax, making the text easier to read.
It was with the advent of printing in the 16th century that this division was established.
Printers Robert Estienne, his son Henri Estienne and Théodore de Bèze were the architects of the new system.