BIBLICAL
STUDIES
Being my greatest love, the Tanakh |תנ"ך| (the Hebrew Bible) is subject to scrutiny in this section. I try to bring information from many disciplines in order to better understand the context of the words we read and, therefore, to grasp a little bit of what it was to be in the skin of the biblical authors, seeing what they saw, thinking what they thought,
תנ"ך
The Tanakh
THE BOOK_
What we call Tanakh |תנ"ך| is a library consisting of 24 books divided in three collections. This library was canonized by Jewish sages in the 1st century CE. It became sacred to Judaism and Christianity (although the latter has included in its canon some other Hebrew texts); they have also deeply influenced Islam.
The word "Tanakh" is an acrostic formed by the first Hebrew letters of each of the parts of this collection: T for Torah |תורה| (also know as the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses), N for Neviyim |נביאים| (Prophets) and K, Kh ou Ch for Ketuvim |כתובים| (Writings).
Today, thanks to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we know that the Israelites had many more books that might have been considered inspired by God. The sages of the 1st century, though, might have not been aware of all those different books, once they were hidden from the Romans in the aves of Qumran and vicinities; or else, they might have simply believed that those 24 were fundamental to organize the Jewish faith wherever the Jews lived in the diaspora.
The idea behind this is that The Book became The Temple, The Book became The Land.
The Tanakh is also called Miqra |מקרא|, which means "reading" or "that which is read".