Unit 2 · The Biblical Lens I: The Hebrew Bible

In a synagogue, the Torah is kept in a cabinet called the ark, wrapped in cloth, as a handwritten scroll. In a Jewish home, the same text sits on a shelf as a printed book with the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Jews call that whole Bible the Tanakh. The word is not ancient. It is an acronym, a word made from first letters: T for Torah, N for Nevi’im and K for Ketuvim. The three parts were gathered at different times and are read in different ways.

The Torah is the first five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Torah means teaching or instruction. It holds stories of the world’s beginning, the ancestors of Israel and the escape from Egypt, along with hundreds of laws. In Jewish tradition it is the most sacred part, the part read aloud in full every year. Christians call these five books the Pentateuch, from a Greek word meaning five scrolls.

Nevi'im means Prophets. It includes history books such as Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which Jewish tradition calls the Former Prophets. It also includes the Latter Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and twelve shorter books counted as one. Ketuvim means Writings. This is the most varied shelf: the poetry of Psalms, the sayings of Proverbs, the questions of Job, and short books like Ruth and Esther. By the traditional Jewish count, the whole Tanakh has twenty-four books.

Knowing the three parts helps you read. A law in Leviticus, a sermon by Amos and a love poem in the Song of Songs are all in the same Bible, but they are different kinds of writing with different purposes. This chapter stays inside the Torah. The next chapter walks through the Prophets and the Writings.

On a Saturday morning in a synagogue, the ark is opened and a scroll is lifted out. It is carried through the room, and people touch it with a prayer book or the fringe of a prayer shawl. Then it is unrolled on a table and chanted aloud. The scroll has no vowels and no punctuation, so the reader has practiced for weeks. Every Torah scroll is written by hand, by a trained scribe, with a quill on parchment. A scroll with a single error is not used until it is fixed.

The Torah is divided into weekly portions. Each portion is called a parashah. The cycle begins in the fall with Genesis and ends a year later with the last verses of Deuteronomy. On the holiday of Simchat Torah, the final portion and the first portion are read back to back, and the scrolls are carried around the room with singing. The idea is that the reading never stops. When you finish, you begin again.

This practice is old. The book of Nehemiah describes a scene from about the fifth century BCE. The scribe Ezra stood on a wooden platform in Jerusalem and read the Torah aloud from morning until midday. Assistants explained the meaning so the people could understand. Scholars often point to this scene as a picture of how the Torah became the center of Jewish life: a text read in public, explained and discussed.

For Jews, then, Torah is something you do with other people. Study partners argue over a verse. A thirteen-year-old chants a portion at a bar or bat mitzvah. A rabbi gives a d'var Torah, a short teaching on the week’s reading. In this course you will read the Torah as a student, not as a member of the community. But it helps to know that for its readers, the book has always had a voice and an audience.

The first words of the Torah, in the King James translation, are: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Genesis 1 then moves through six days. Light is separated from dark. Sky is separated from sea, and land from water. Plants, then sun and moon, then fish and birds, then land animals appear. Again and again the text repeats a refrain: God saw that it was good. On the sixth day humans are made. On the seventh day God rests, and that day is set apart. Jewish tradition sees here the root of the Sabbath, the weekly day of rest.

A careful reader notices that Genesis 2 tells the story again, differently. Here the ground is dry and empty. God forms a man from the dust and breathes life into him, plants a garden in Eden, and forms the animals and then a woman. The order is different, the style is different, and God is called by a different name. Many scholars conclude that the Torah preserves two older accounts side by side. Many traditional readers, Jewish and Christian, read the second story as a close-up of the sixth day. Both readings take the differences seriously.

The most quoted line in the first chapter is about people. Genesis 1:27 says humans were created in the image of God, male and female. In Jewish tradition this verse grounds the worth of every person, since every person carries that image. In Christian tradition it does the same work, and it also shapes teaching about Jesus as the full image of God. The text does not define the phrase. Interpreters have filled it in for more than two thousand years, with ideas like reason, freedom, relationship and responsibility.

Notice what the Genesis account does not do. It does not describe a battle between gods, as some other ancient creation stories from the region do. One God speaks, and the world answers. The sun and moon are not gods but lights. Historians of religion call this monotheism, belief in one God, and Genesis 1 is one of its clearest ancient expressions. For Jews and Christians, the chapter is less a science report than a statement about who made the world and what it is for.

In the garden of Eden, Genesis 2 says, God places the man and gives him one command: do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In Genesis 3 a serpent speaks to the woman and tells her the fruit will make them like God. She eats and gives some to the man. Their eyes are opened, they hide, and God questions them. The chapter ends with consequences: pain, hard labor, death, and exile from the garden. The names Adam and Eve come from Hebrew words connected to earth and to life.

Many Christians, especially in the Western churches, read this chapter as the Fall. In this reading, going back to the church father Augustine in the fifth century, the first disobedience damaged human nature itself. Every person is born inclined to sin and needs to be rescued. Christian teaching then presents Jesus as the one who undoes what Adam did. Paul’s letter to the Romans, in the New Testament, draws exactly that contrast between Adam and Christ.

Jewish tradition reads the same chapter without the doctrine of original sin. In rabbinic teaching, every person is born with two inclinations, one toward good and one toward selfishness, and each person chooses between them. The story of Eden is about the first exercise of that choice and its cost. It is read every fall, in the first Torah portion of the year, as a story about responsibility, not as a permanent verdict on human nature. Eastern Orthodox Christians also reject the idea of inherited guilt, though they teach that all people inherit the effects of the first sin, such as death.

Same text, two readings. Neither community is misreading. Each brings its own later texts and teachers to the chapter and asks it a different question. Christians ask: what went wrong, and how is it fixed? Jews ask: what is a person, and how should a person choose? The chapter can bear both questions. When you compare traditions, part of your job is to notice which question a reader brings to the page.

Genesis 6 says the earth was filled with violence, and God decided to flood it. One man, Noah, was told to build an ark and bring his family and pairs of every animal aboard. Rain fell for forty days. When the waters went down, Noah sent out a raven and then a dove. The dove came back with an olive leaf, a sign of dry land. Noah left the ark and built an altar. Then God made a promise never again to destroy the earth by flood, and set a rainbow in the clouds as its sign.

This promise is the first covenant in the Torah. A covenant is a binding agreement between two parties, with promises and signs. Ancient kings made covenants with the peoples they ruled. The Torah uses that familiar form for the bond between God and humans. What is striking about Noah’s covenant is who is included. God makes it, the text says, with every living creature, not with one people. The rainbow is the sign of the covenant, the visible reminder that the promise stands.

Jewish tradition drew from this story the idea of the Noahide laws. These are a few basic rules, such as not murdering and setting up courts of justice. The rabbis taught that they apply to all humanity, not only to Jews. Christian readers have often seen the ark as a picture of rescue, and the New Testament letter of 1 Peter compares it to baptism. In both traditions, the story is less about the size of the boat than about a God who judges, saves and promises.

Flood stories appear in other ancient texts from the same region, including the Babylonian Atrahasis story and the Epic of Gilgamesh, both older than the written Torah. Scholars compare the versions closely. The details overlap, but the meaning differs. In Atrahasis the gods send the flood because humans are too noisy, and in Gilgamesh the gods later regret it. In Genesis, the flood answers violence, and it ends with a promise. Reading the two side by side is a good example of how context helps you see what a text is doing.

Genesis 12 begins with a command to one man. Abram is told to leave his country and his father’s house and go to a land he will be shown. With the command comes a promise: a great nation, a great name, and blessing for all the families of the earth through him. Abram goes. Tradition places him around 1800 BCE, though the text gives no date. He travels from Mesopotamia to the land of Canaan, the region that later became Israel.

The promise is repeated and sealed as a covenant. In Genesis 15 God promises descendants as many as the stars. In Genesis 17 the covenant gets a sign: circumcision of every male on the eighth day of life. Abram receives a new name, Abraham, and his wife Sarai becomes Sarah. Their son Isaac is born when they are old. Jewish families still circumcise sons on the eighth day in a ceremony called brit milah, covenant of circumcision, in direct memory of this chapter.

The hardest story in this cycle is Genesis 22, which Jewish tradition calls the Akedah, the binding. God tells Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. Abraham walks three days with his son, builds an altar, binds Isaac and raises a knife. A messenger stops him, and a ram is offered instead. Jews read this chapter on Rosh Hashanah, the new year. Christians have read Isaac carrying the wood as a foreshadowing of Jesus carrying the cross. Muslims tell a version of this story too, and Eid al-Adha recalls it, though Islamic tradition usually names Ishmael as the son.

The covenant passes to Isaac, then to his son Jacob, who wrestles with a stranger through a night and is renamed Israel. Jacob’s twelve sons become the twelve tribes. Genesis ends with the family in Egypt, brought there by Jacob’s son Joseph, who rose from slave to high official. Jews call Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the patriarchs and Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah the matriarchs. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all trace themselves to Abraham, which is why they are often grouped as the Abrahamic traditions.

The book of Exodus opens generations after Joseph. A new pharaoh, the text says, did not know Joseph and feared the growing Israelite population. He forced them into labor, building store cities, and ordered that newborn Hebrew boys be killed. One mother hid her baby in a basket in the Nile. Pharaoh’s daughter found him and raised him in the palace. She named him Moses. Two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, who refused the king’s order, are among the first people in the Bible named for an act of civil disobedience.

As a grown man Moses killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew and fled to the land of Midian. There, while keeping sheep, he saw a bush on fire that did not burn up. From the bush a voice called his name and said, in the King James wording, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Moses was told to go back and bring the people out. He objected five times. He was slow of speech. He was nobody. Who should he say had sent him?

The answer to that last question is one of the most discussed lines in the Bible. God answers with a Hebrew phrase, ehyeh asher ehyeh, which the King James Version renders I AM THAT I AM. It is linked to the four-letter divine name, written YHWH, which Jews traditionally do not pronounce. In Jewish practice the name is read aloud as Adonai, my Lord, and often written as Hashem, the Name. English Bibles usually print it as LORD in small capitals. When you see LORD in capitals, you are looking at that name.

The Exodus, the going out of Egypt, is the founding event of Israel as a people in the Torah’s telling. The date is uncertain; many who place it historically suggest around the thirteenth century BCE, and scholars debate how the story relates to the archaeological record. For this course, what matters is how the story functions. In Jewish tradition it is the reason for Passover, the ground of the law, and the memory that shapes commands about the stranger. In Christian and Muslim scripture, Moses is also honored as a prophet.

Moses and his brother Aaron went to Pharaoh with a demand: let my people go. Pharaoh refused, and Exodus 7 through 12 describe ten plagues that struck Egypt. The Nile turned to blood. Frogs, lice and flies swarmed. Livestock died, boils broke out, hail fell, locusts came, and darkness covered the land for three days. Before the last plague, each Israelite family was told to kill a lamb, mark the doorposts with its blood, and eat it in haste with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. That night, the text says, the firstborn of Egypt died, but death passed over the marked houses.

That is the origin of the name Passover, in Hebrew Pesach. Exodus 12 commands that the night be kept as a memorial in every generation. The Israelites left so quickly that their bread had no time to rise, which is why matzah, flat unleavened bread, is eaten for the seven or eight days of the holiday and why observant Jews remove leavened food from their homes first. Pharaoh’s army pursued the people to the sea. Exodus 14 says the waters parted, Israel crossed on dry ground, and the sea closed over the Egyptians. Exodus 15 preserves a victory song led by Moses and then by his sister Miriam with a drum.

The Seder meal, like the one in this chapter’s opening story, is how most Jewish families keep the command to remember. Every item on the Seder plate points to the text. Bitter herbs recall the bitterness of slavery. Salt water recalls tears. A sweet paste called charoset recalls the mortar of the bricks. The book that guides the evening, the Haggadah, means the telling, and its central line is that each person should see themselves as if they had personally left Egypt. Passover is among the most widely observed Jewish holidays in the United States.

Christians also read Exodus 12 closely. The Gospels place the last meal of Jesus at Passover time, and the New Testament calls Jesus the Passover lamb. For this reason Easter usually falls in the same season as Passover. The Exodus story has also traveled far beyond both communities. Enslaved African Americans sang Go Down, Moses, and the civil rights movement drew on the language of Pharaoh and the promised land. A text about one people’s freedom became a shared language for freedom.

Three months after leaving Egypt, Exodus 19 says, the people camped at the foot of Mount Sinai. God offered them a covenant: if they kept it, they would be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. The people answered that they would do all that was spoken. On the third day there was thunder, lightning, thick cloud and the sound of a horn. Moses went up the mountain. What came down, Exodus 20 says, were the words that Jewish tradition calls the Ten Words and English speakers call the Ten Commandments.

The list begins not with a command but with a reminder: I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt. Only then come the rules: no other gods, no carved images, no misuse of the name, keep the Sabbath, honor father and mother, no murder, no adultery, no theft, no false witness, no coveting. The first group concerns God. The second concerns other people. Jewish and Christian teachers have long noted that the covenant joins the two: how you treat God and how you treat your neighbor are one law.

Traditions count the ten differently, which surprises many students. Jewish tradition counts the opening line, I am the LORD, as the first word. Catholics and Lutherans, following Augustine, combine the commands about other gods and images into one and split coveting into two. Most other Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox keep the image command separate. The text is the same. The numbering is an interpretation. When two posters of the Ten Commandments disagree, you are seeing two traditions, not a mistake.

The covenant at Sinai includes far more than ten lines. Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy contain laws about worship, courts, property, food, festivals and the treatment of the poor. Rabbinic tradition counts 613 commandments, or mitzvot, in the Torah. Jewish tradition holds that the covenant made at Sinai binds every generation, including those not yet born. The holiday of Shavuot, seven weeks after Passover, marks the giving of the Torah, and many Jews stay up all night studying to honor it.

Leviticus is the book most students skip, and it is the book Jewish children traditionally began with. Its name means about the Levites, the priestly tribe, and much of it describes sacrifices and purity rules for the sanctuary. But at its center is chapter 19, which opens with a command to the whole people: be holy. Holy here means set apart for God. The chapter then lists what that looks like. Leave the corners of your field for the poor. Pay workers on time. Do not put a stumbling block before the blind. Use honest weights. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Leviticus 19 also commands love for the stranger, the foreigner living among you, and gives a reason: you were strangers in Egypt. The Exodus is not only a story to remember but a reason to act. Scholars count the command to care for the stranger dozens of times across the Torah, more often than almost any other command. Leviticus 11 lists which animals may be eaten. From these rules, and from later rabbinic teaching, come the laws of kosher food, which many Jews keep today in different degrees.

Deuteronomy means second law. It is written as a set of speeches by Moses on the plains of Moab, just before the people enter the land and just before he dies. It repeats the Ten Commandments, restates many laws, and adds sermons about loving God and remembering the past. Its most famous line is Deuteronomy 6:4, the Shema: Hear, O Israel. Jews recite it every morning and evening, and many hope to say it as their last words. Its following verses command teaching these words to children and writing them on the doorposts, which is the origin of the small case called a mezuzah on Jewish doors.

Deuteronomy ends with a choice. Moses sets before the people life and death, blessing and curse, and urges them to choose life. Then he climbs a mountain, sees the land he will not enter, and dies. The Torah closes there. Christians read these two books with respect but in a different way: most Christians hold that the food and sacrifice laws were fulfilled or set aside through Jesus, while the moral commands remain. In Jewish tradition the commandments remain binding, though Jewish movements differ on how they apply today. How a community handles Leviticus is one of the clearest markers of the difference between the two traditions.

Step back from the individual stories and a pattern appears. Genesis 1 and 2 show a world made and called good. Genesis 3 through 11 show that world damaged: a broken command, a brother killed, a flood, a tower built in pride. Genesis 12 through Deuteronomy show a response: one family called, one people freed, one law given. Many teachers, Jewish and Christian, describe this shape in three words. The world is made. The world is broken, or fallen. The world is called, or redeemed. The words differ, but the arc is the same.

The pattern shows up in the Torah’s own repetitions. Creation ends with the Sabbath; the commandments include the Sabbath; the Sabbath command in Exodus points back to creation, and the version in Deuteronomy points back to the Exodus. The rainbow, circumcision and the tablets of the law are all signs of covenant. Adam is placed in a garden; Israel is promised a land. Read closely, the later stories echo the earlier ones on purpose. Scholars call this echoing typology when one event is read as the pattern for another.

Jews and Christians both use this arc, but they finish it differently. In Jewish tradition, the calling is ongoing. The people keep the covenant through the commandments, and the story continues in the Prophets, the Writings and the life of the community. Repair of the world, tikkun olam in Hebrew, is a shared task. In Christian tradition, the arc bends toward Jesus: the New Testament presents him as the one who completes what the Torah began. Both readings take the Torah seriously. Each hears in it the first movement of a different symphony.

For a student, the arc is a tool, not a verdict. Ask of any passage: is this about the world as made, as broken, or as called? A law about honest scales belongs to the calling. A story about jealousy belongs to the brokenness. A psalm about the stars belongs to the making. Historians of religion also caution that the Torah does not use the word fallen, and that this three-part shape is a later summary. Use it as a map, and keep checking it against the text.

Open a Jewish Bible and a Christian Bible to the last page of the Hebrew scriptures. The Tanakh ends with Chronicles and the decree of the Persian king Cyrus allowing the exiles to return to Jerusalem. The Christian Old Testament ends with the prophet Malachi and a promise that Elijah will come before the great day of the Lord. Same books, different order, different ending. The Christian order sets up the New Testament, which opens with John the Baptist, whom the Gospels connect to Elijah. Arrangement is already interpretation.

The count of books differs too. Jews count twenty-four. Protestants count the same material as thirty-nine. Catholic Bibles include seven more books, such as Tobit and 1 and 2 Maccabees, which were in the ancient Greek translation called the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew canon. Catholics call them deuterocanonical; Protestants call them the Apocrypha. Eastern Orthodox Bibles include a few more still. Which books count as scripture is a decision each community made, and the decisions were not identical.

Translation choices show the difference clearly. Isaiah 7:14 speaks of a young woman who will bear a son named Immanuel. The 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation reads young woman, following the Hebrew word almah. The King James Version reads virgin, following the Septuagint and the Gospel of Matthew, which quotes this verse about Mary. Neither translation is careless. Each follows the community’s reading of the verse. A student’s job is to notice the choice and explain why it was made.

Finally, the two communities read with different companions. Jews read the Torah with the Talmud and centuries of commentary, and the Torah remains the center. Christians read the Old Testament through the New, so that the Old Testament becomes the first act of a two-act story. The name itself is a Christian name; many scholars now say Hebrew Bible to describe the shared text without choosing a side. In this course, Tanakh is used when speaking of Jewish reading, Old Testament when speaking of Christian reading, and Hebrew Bible for the text itself.

The Former Prophets, the history books from Joshua through Kings, tell how Israel lived in its land. After Joshua, the book of Judges describes leaders called judges who rose up in times of crisis. The last of them was Samuel. The book of 1 Samuel begins with his mother, Hannah, praying at the sanctuary at Shiloh for a child. The rabbis later held up her quiet, heartfelt prayer as a model for how to pray, and Jews read her story on Rosh Hashanah.

When Samuel grew old, 1 Samuel 8 says, the elders came to him with a demand: give us a king to judge us like all the nations. Samuel was displeased. He warned them what a king would do. He would take their sons for his chariots, their daughters for his kitchens, and a tenth of their harvests and flocks. The people insisted. Samuel poured oil on the head of a young man named Saul. To anoint someone is to pour oil on them to set them apart for a task. The Hebrew word for an anointed one is mashiach, the root of the English word messiah.

The texts are divided about kingship, and careful readers notice it. Some passages treat the request for a king as a rejection of God as Israel’s true ruler. Others present the king as God’s gift. Saul’s reign goes badly. He disobeys the prophet’s instructions, and Samuel secretly anoints a shepherd boy from Bethlehem, David, the youngest of his brothers. From here on, a pattern runs through these books. A king holds power, and a prophet stands beside him or against him, speaking for God.

That pattern is one of the Hebrew Bible’s lasting contributions to political thought. In these books the king is not a god, as rulers were in some neighboring lands, and he is not above the law. Deuteronomy 17 even commands the king to write out a copy of the law and read it all the days of his life. Historians point out how unusual it is for a nation’s sacred history to record its own rulers’ failures so plainly. These books do exactly that, again and again.

David is the most fully drawn person in the Hebrew Bible. The books of Samuel show him as a shepherd who defeats the giant Goliath with a sling, a musician who plays for King Saul, a hunted outlaw, and finally a king. Tradition dates his reign to around 1000 BCE. He captured Jerusalem, made it his capital, and brought the ark of the covenant there, dancing before it with all his might. An inscription found at Tel Dan in northern Israel, from the ninth century BCE, mentions the house of David, one of the few outside references to him.

The text does not hide David’s crimes. In 2 Samuel 11 he takes Bathsheba, the wife of his soldier Uriah, and arranges for Uriah to die in battle. The prophet Nathan tells David a story about a rich man who steals a poor man’s only lamb. David is furious at the rich man. Nathan answers, in the King James wording, Thou art the man. David confesses, and tradition links Psalm 51, a prayer for mercy, to this moment. Earlier, in 2 Samuel 7, Nathan had brought David a promise that his house and kingdom would last forever. That promise became the root of later hopes for a messiah, an anointed king from David’s line.

David’s son Solomon is remembered for wisdom. First Kings tells how he asked God for an understanding heart rather than riches, and how he judged between two women who both claimed the same baby. Solomon built the First Temple in Jerusalem, around the tenth century BCE, as a house for the ark and the center of sacrifice and pilgrimage. Archaeologists and historians debate how large and wealthy David’s and Solomon’s kingdom really was. The texts, written or edited later, present it as a golden age.

After Solomon died, around 930 BCE, the kingdom split. The ten northern tribes formed the kingdom of Israel, later with its capital at Samaria. The south, with Jerusalem and the Temple, became the kingdom of Judah, and the word Jew comes from Judah. In 722 BCE the Assyrian empire conquered the north and scattered much of its population. Judah survived for more than a century longer. Traditional Jewish teaching expects a future messiah from David’s line. Christians call Jesus the son of David and hold that he is that messiah.

In the ninth century BCE the northern kingdom was ruled by King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, a princess from Phoenicia. First Kings says they promoted the worship of Baal, a storm god of the region, and persecuted the prophets of Israel’s God. Against them stands Elijah, a prophet from Gilead who enters the story without introduction. He announces a drought, hides by a brook where ravens feed him, and stays with a poor widow whose flour and oil do not run out.

The most dramatic scene is on Mount Carmel, in 1 Kings 18. Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to a contest. Each side prepares a sacrifice and calls on its god to send fire. The prophets of Baal call all morning with no answer, and Elijah mocks them. Then he soaks his own altar with water, prays, and fire falls. The people fall on their faces and cry that the LORD is God. The story ends violently, with the prophets of Baal killed. Readers today often discuss how to understand stories of religious violence in sacred texts.

The next chapter turns quiet. Jezebel vows to kill Elijah, and he flees into the wilderness, exhausted, and asks to die. At Mount Horeb, another name for Sinai, God passes by. There is a great wind, then an earthquake, then fire, but God is not in any of them. After the fire comes what the King James Version calls a still small voice. Many readers take this as a lesson that the divine is not always found in force and spectacle. This theophany, an appearance of God, happens in near silence.

Elijah does not die in the story. Second Kings 2 says he was carried up to heaven in a whirlwind, with a chariot of fire. The prophet Malachi later promised that Elijah would return before the great day of the LORD. That is why Jews set a cup of wine for Elijah at the Seder and sing about him as the Sabbath ends. The Gospels show Elijah appearing with Moses beside Jesus at the Transfiguration. The Qur’an names Elias, or Ilyas, as a prophet who called his people away from Baal. One figure lives on in three traditions.

Around 760 BCE the northern kingdom of Israel was prosperous. Its wealthy built houses decorated with ivory and held lavish feasts. Into that world came Amos, who described himself as a herdsman and a gatherer of sycamore fruit from Tekoa, a village in Judah. He insisted he was not a professional prophet. His book is among the earliest in the Latter Prophets, and much of it reads like speeches delivered in public.

Amos opens by condemning Israel’s neighbors, one by one, for their cruelty in war. His listeners might have cheered. Then he turns on Israel itself. They sold the righteous for silver, he says, and the poor for a pair of shoes. Amos names specific practices: dishonest scales, bribed judges, and the poor denied a hearing at the city gate, where courts met. For Amos, justice, fair treatment in courts and markets, was part of the covenant itself, not an extra.

His sharpest words are about worship. In Amos 5 God says, in the prophet’s voice, that he hates and despises Israel’s festivals and will not accept their offerings or listen to their songs. What God wants instead is justice and righteousness. In the Hebrew Bible, righteousness means right relationship: fairness, faithfulness and doing what is owed to others. Amos does not say worship is wrong. He says worship by people who crush the poor is hollow.

The word prophet can suggest someone who predicts the future. In the Hebrew Bible a prophet is first a person who speaks for God to the present, often with a warning. Amos warned of exile, and in 722 BCE Assyria did conquer the north. Centuries later, his words found new listeners. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted Amos 5:24 in his 1963 I Have a Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Jewish and Christian movements for social justice still cite Amos as a model of speaking truth to power.

Isaiah prophesied in Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE, during the reigns of several kings of Judah. His call comes in chapter 6. He sees God enthroned in the Temple, surrounded by winged beings called seraphim, who call to each other: Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts. Isaiah cries out that he is a man of unclean lips, and a seraph touches his mouth with a burning coal. The seraphim’s words became part of daily Jewish prayer in the Kedushah and part of Christian worship in the Sanctus.

Like Amos, Isaiah demands justice. Chapter 1 tells the people to learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless and plead for the widow. But Isaiah also offers some of the Bible’s best-known pictures of peace. In chapter 2, nations stream to Jerusalem to learn God’s ways. In chapter 11, the wolf lives with the lamb. A sculpture called Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares, based on Isaiah 2:4, stands in the garden of the United Nations in New York.

Many scholars read Isaiah as the work of more than one prophet. Chapters 1 to 39 fit eighth-century Jerusalem. Chapters 40 to 55 address exiles in Babylon about two centuries later and name the Persian king Cyrus. Scholars often call this later voice Second Isaiah. Chapter 40 opens, in the King James wording, Comfort ye, comfort ye my people. Traditional Jewish and Christian readers have generally held the book to be one prophet’s work. In synagogues, Isaiah 40 is read on the Sabbath after Tisha B’Av, the fast that mourns the Temple’s destruction.

Isaiah is also a key place where Jewish and Christian readings part. Chapter 53 describes a suffering servant, despised and wounded for others. Christians have read this servant as Jesus, and the New Testament applies the passage to him. Many Jewish commentators, including the medieval scholar Rashi, read the servant as the people of Israel, suffering in exile. Christians also read Isaiah 7:14 and 9:6 as announcing the birth of Jesus. Handel’s oratorio Messiah, first performed in 1742, sets many of these verses to music.

Jeremiah began to prophesy around 627 BCE, when Judah was caught between the great powers of Egypt and Babylon. For forty years he warned that Jerusalem would fall if the people did not change. His message was unpopular. The book records that he was beaten, put in stocks, thrown into a muddy cistern and accused of treason. He even wore a wooden yoke through the streets as a sign that the nation would serve Babylon. Acts like this, performed to carry a message, are sometimes called sign-acts.

Jeremiah is also the most personal of the prophets. In passages scholars call his confessions, he complains that God deceived him into his calling, curses the day he was born, and says God’s word burns like fire in his bones so that he cannot stay silent. For this reason he is often called the weeping prophet. Jewish tradition credits him with the book of Lamentations, five poems of mourning over ruined Jerusalem. Lamentations is chanted in synagogues on Tisha B’Av, often in dim light, with worshipers seated on the floor or on low benches.

In 597 BCE the Babylonians carried the king and many leaders of Judah into exile. Jeremiah sent them a letter, preserved in Jeremiah 29. Its advice surprised them. Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens. Marry and have children. Seek the peace of the city where you have been taken, and pray for it, because in its peace you will have peace. For centuries, Jewish communities in many lands have pointed to this letter as guidance for life in the diaspora, the scattering of a people outside its homeland.

Jeremiah 31 contains a promise of a new covenant, written not on tablets of stone but on the heart. Jewish readers understand it as a renewal of God’s covenant with Israel. The New Testament letter to the Hebrews quotes it at length and applies it to Jesus. In fact, the name New Testament comes from this idea, since testament is an older English word for covenant. One passage in Jeremiah gave its name to one of the two parts of the Christian Bible.

In 586 BCE, after a long siege, the army of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar broke through the walls of Jerusalem. Second Kings 25 describes the burning of the Temple, the palace and the houses. The king of Judah was captured, and many people were led away to Babylon, in present-day Iraq. Some scholars date the fall to 587 BCE. Either way, the loss was enormous: the Temple Solomon had built, the line of kings from David, and the land itself.

The exile produced some of the Hebrew Bible’s most painful poetry. Psalm 137 begins with captives sitting by the rivers of Babylon, weeping as they remember Zion, another name for Jerusalem. Their captors ask them for a song, and they ask how they could sing the LORD’s song in a strange land. The psalm swears never to forget Jerusalem. It ends with an angry curse against Babylon that shocks many readers. Some teachers leave that ending out. Others argue that it shows honestly what grief and rage feel like.

The exile also changed how the people practiced their faith. Without a Temple, they could not offer sacrifices. Many scholars think this is when practices that later defined Jewish life gained new weight: the Sabbath, circumcision, food laws, prayer, and above all the study of written texts. Much of the Torah and the history books may have been collected and edited in this period. A people who could not gather at one altar could gather around one book.

Jews still mourn the destruction. Tisha B'Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, is a fast day that remembers the fall of the First Temple and, centuries later, of the Second. At many Jewish weddings a glass is broken, often explained as a reminder of Jerusalem’s loss even in a moment of joy. Psalm 137 also traveled. The Rastafari movement in Jamaica, and reggae songs such as Rivers of Babylon from 1970, use Babylon as a symbol of exile and oppression.

In 539 BCE the Persian king Cyrus captured Babylon. According to the book of Ezra, he then issued a decree, around 538 BCE, allowing the exiles of Judah to go home and rebuild the Temple. A clay cylinder from Cyrus’s reign, found in 1879, describes his policy of returning conquered peoples and their gods to their homes, though it does not mention Judah. Isaiah 45 calls Cyrus the LORD’s anointed, a remarkable title for a foreign king.

The return was slow and hard. Ezra says the first groups laid the foundation of a new Temple. When the old people who remembered Solomon’s Temple saw it, they wept, while others shouted for joy. After years of delay, the Second Temple was completed around 515 BCE. The prophets Haggai and Zechariah urged the builders on. Rebuilt and later greatly expanded, the Second Temple stood until the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE.

In the next century two leaders shaped the community. Nehemiah, a Jewish official at the Persian court, came to rebuild Jerusalem’s broken walls. Ezra, a priest and scribe, brought the book of the law and read it aloud to the people, a scene you met in the last chapter. Ezra also required men who had married foreign wives to send them away, and Nehemiah opposed such marriages, a policy that troubles many readers today. Some scholars suggest that the book of Ruth, with its loyal Moabite heroine, offers a different view.

Not everyone went back. Many families had followed Jeremiah’s advice and built lives in Babylon. The Jewish community there lasted for more than two thousand years, and centuries later its academies produced the Babylonian Talmud. From this period on, Jewish life had two centers: the land of Israel and the diaspora. The Tanakh itself ends with Cyrus’s decree in 2 Chronicles, calling the people to go up to Jerusalem. The last word of the Jewish Bible is an invitation to return.

The book of Psalms, in Hebrew Tehillim, meaning praises, holds 150 poems. Seventy-three carry a heading that links them to David, whom 2 Samuel calls the sweet psalmist of Israel. Others are linked to Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon and Moses. Many psalms seem to have been sung in the Temple, some with instructions for musicians. The book is divided into five smaller books, and many readers see that as an echo of the five books of the Torah.

Hebrew poetry does not rhyme. It works through parallelism, where a second line echoes, sharpens or answers the first. Psalm 19 opens, in the King James wording: The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. The second half says the same thing in new words. Once you notice parallelism, you can read more carefully, asking what the second line adds. It also survives translation well, which may be one reason the psalms feel natural in so many languages.

The psalms cover the whole range of feeling. There are hymns of praise, songs of thanks, royal psalms about the king, and wisdom psalms. The largest single group, scholars say, is the lament, a cry to God in trouble. Laments often complain openly. Psalm 22 begins, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Most laments then turn, near the end, toward trust. The Gospels of Matthew and Mark report that Jesus cried out the opening words of Psalm 22 from the cross, and Christians have read the psalm in light of that moment.

In worship, the psalms are everywhere. Jewish morning prayers include Psalms 145 through 150 every day. On Friday evening, many synagogues welcome the Sabbath with Psalms 95 to 99 and 29, and later Psalms 92 and 93. On festivals, Psalms 113 to 118, called Hallel, are sung. Monks following the Rule of Saint Benedict pray all 150 psalms every week. Catholic Masses include a sung psalm after the first reading. The first book printed in England’s American colonies, the Bay Psalm Book of 1640, was a book of psalms.

The wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible speaks less about Israel’s history and more about ordinary life: work, money, speech, family and death. Similar collections of wise sayings existed in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and scholars see Israel’s sages as part of that wider conversation. The book of Proverbs is linked to Solomon, whom First Kings credits with three thousand proverbs. Its central claim comes early: the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge. Fear here means awe and respect, not terror.

Most of Proverbs is short, two-line sayings. A soft answer turneth away wrath. Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. The book imagines wisdom as a woman calling in the streets, inviting the simple to learn. Its general teaching is that the hard-working, honest and humble tend to do well, and the lazy and proud tend to fall. The last chapter praises a capable woman, the eshet chayil or woman of valor, and many Jewish families sing that passage at the Friday night table.

Ecclesiastes sounds very different. Its speaker calls himself Qohelet, often translated the Preacher or the Teacher. He opens with vanity of vanities; all is vanity. The Hebrew word hevel means vapor or breath, something that vanishes. Qohelet has tried wealth, pleasure, building and learning, and finds that the wise and the foolish die alike. His advice is to enjoy your bread, your work and the people you love while you can. The book ends by telling the reader to fear God and keep his commandments.

The two books do not cancel each other. Many readers see them as a conversation, with Proverbs describing how life usually works and Ecclesiastes naming the times it does not. Many Jewish communities read Ecclesiastes on Sukkot, the autumn harvest festival, pairing a joyful time with a sober book. Its third chapter, a time to be born and a time to die, reached a new audience in 1965 when the Byrds recorded Pete Seeger’s song Turn! Turn! Turn!, built almost entirely from its words.

The book of Job opens like a folktale. Job, from the land of Uz, is blameless and upright, with a large family and great wealth. In a scene in heaven, a figure called the satan, meaning the adversary or accuser, suggests that Job is good only because he is rewarded. In Job this figure is a member of the heavenly court, not yet the devil of later tradition. God allows Job to be tested. In one day Job loses his livestock, his servants and his ten children. Then his body is covered with sores.

Three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, come to comfort him. At first they sit with him in silence for seven days, which Jewish mourning customs still echo. Then they talk. Most of the book is a long poetic argument. The friends defend a clear idea of retribution: God rewards the good and punishes the wicked, so Job must have sinned. Job insists he has not. He demands a hearing, accuses God of injustice, and wishes he had never been born.

Finally God answers Job out of the whirlwind. The answer is not an explanation. Over four chapters God asks Job question after question about the making of the world: where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who gives the horse its strength? Job is shown a universe far larger than any human argument, and he withdraws his words. Then, surprisingly, God tells the friends that they have not spoken rightly, as Job has. The book ends with Job’s fortunes restored and new children born.

Readers have argued about Job for centuries. Some see its point in God’s greatness. Others stress that God approves Job’s honest protest over the friends’ tidy explanations. Jewish law permits mourners and those fasting on Tisha B’Av to study Job, one of the few texts allowed on those days. Many Christian funerals include Job’s words, I know that my redeemer liveth. Philosophers use the word theodicy for any attempt to explain how a good and powerful God can allow suffering. Job may be the most famous text that refuses to settle that question.

The book of Ruth is set in the time of the judges. During a famine, an Israelite woman named Naomi moves to Moab with her family. Her husband and both sons die there. One daughter-in-law, a Moabite woman named Ruth, refuses to leave her. Ruth’s vow, whither thou goest, I will go, is one of the Bible’s most quoted lines. In Bethlehem, Ruth gathers leftover grain in the field of Boaz, a relative of Naomi, under the law in Leviticus that leaves the edges of the harvest for the poor.

Boaz treats Ruth with generosity, and the two marry. Their son Obed becomes the grandfather of King David. So an outsider from Moab, a nation the Torah often treats with suspicion, becomes an ancestor of Israel’s greatest king. The Hebrew word that runs through the book is chesed, loyal kindness that goes beyond what is required. Christians note that the Gospel of Matthew names Ruth in the family line of Jesus. Jews read Ruth on Shavuot, the harvest festival that also marks the giving of the Torah.

The book of Esther is set in the Persian court. Esther, a young Jewish woman, becomes queen to King Ahasuerus without revealing her background. The king’s official Haman plots to destroy all the Jews of the empire. Her cousin Mordecai urges her to act, saying perhaps she came to royal position for such a time as this. She risks her life to approach the king, exposes Haman and saves her people. The holiday of Purim celebrates the story with a public reading, costumes, noise at Haman’s name, gifts of food and gifts to the poor.

Esther is unusual: the Hebrew text never mentions God, though many readers see a hidden hand behind every coincidence. Ruth and Esther belong to a group of five short books called the Five Scrolls, in Hebrew Megillot. Each is read on its own occasion: the Song of Songs at Passover, Ruth at Shavuot, Lamentations on Tisha B’Av, Ecclesiastes at Sukkot and Esther at Purim. In this way the Writings move through the Jewish year alongside the weekly Torah portion and the reading from the Prophets that follows it, the haftarah.