Each Abrahamic tradition is anchored in scripture, and each surrounds its scripture with a tradition of interpretation. This page outlines the principal texts and how they took shape.
The Hebrew Bible
The Tanakh takes its name from its three divisions: Torah, Nevi’im and Ketuvim. Jewish tradition counts twenty-four books. The Torah, the five books from Genesis to Deuteronomy, holds the highest place and is read in full in the synagogue over the course of each year. The oldest surviving Hebrew manuscripts of biblical books are among the Dead Sea Scrolls, found near Qumran from 1947 onwards and dating from roughly the third century BCE to the first century CE.
Rabbinic literature
The Mishnah, edited around 200 CE, organises Jewish law by subject. The Talmud joins the Mishnah to the Gemara, a wide-ranging commentary; its Jerusalem and Babylonian versions were completed between the fifth and seventh centuries. Midrash collects rabbinic interpretation of scripture.
Aramaic in the scriptures
Aramaic, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew, served as a common language across much of the Near East from the Persian period onwards. Papyri from the Jewish community at Elephantine in Egypt, written in the Imperial Aramaic script, survive from the fifth century BCE. Parts of the books of Daniel and Ezra are written in Aramaic, in the same square script as the Hebrew around them. The Targums (תרגום, “translation”), Aramaic renderings of the Hebrew scriptures, were read in synagogues, and the Gemara of the Babylonian Talmud is written largely in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic.
Most historians hold that Jesus taught in Aramaic, and the Gospels preserve a few of his Aramaic words, such as abba (אבא, father). Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic with its own alphabet, carries the Peshitta (ܦܫܝܛܬܐ, “the simple version”), the standard Bible of the Syriac churches, and a large body of Christian literature.
The Christian Bible
The Christian Old Testament contains the books of the Hebrew Bible, arranged differently. The Catholic and Orthodox churches also accept further books preserved in the Greek translation known as the Septuagint, called deuterocanonical books. The New Testament has twenty-seven books: the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, twenty-one letters and the book of Revelation. Protestant Bibles contain sixty-six books, Catholic Bibles seventy-three, and Orthodox Bibles a few more.
The Qur’an and ḥadīth
The Qur’an has 114 sūrahs (سورة, chapters), arranged broadly from longest to shortest. Muslim tradition holds that it was revealed over some twenty-three years, memorised and written down in the Prophet’s lifetime, and gathered into a standard written text under the third caliph, ʿUthmān, around 650 CE. Alongside the written text, the Qur’an has been carried by memory: a Muslim who has memorised all of it is called a ḥāfiẓ (حافظ, “one who preserves”), and such reciters are found in Muslim communities worldwide. The ḥadīth literature records the words and deeds of the Prophet; Sunni Muslims give special weight to the collections compiled by al-Bukhārī and Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj.
Reading scripture
All three traditions read scripture through commentary. Jewish readers turn to the Talmud and the medieval commentators; Christian readers to the church fathers and later theologians; Muslim readers to tafsīr (تفسير, exegesis). Modern historical scholarship adds its own questions about authorship, dating and context. See the article Understanding the Bible and the Qur’an in Historical Context.