There is no single Old Testament: Protestants count 39 books, Catholics 46
Ask how many books the Old Testament holds and the answer depends on which church you ask: 39 for most Protestants, 46 for Catholics, up to 49 in Orthodox traditions. The extra books came through an ancient Greek translation, and even the 1611 King James Version once printed them.
The Old Testament is the first half of the Christian Bible, built mainly on the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, written chiefly in Hebrew with some Aramaic. Christians arrange it differently from Jewish tradition, usually in four blocks: the five books of the Pentateuch, matching the Torah; histories running from the conquest of Canaan to exile in Babylon; poetic and wisdom writings; and the prophets. Only the Torah's internal order is identical in every Jewish and Christian tradition.
The disputed books mostly entered through the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Hebrew scripture. Catholics, following the Council of Trent in 1546, call them deuterocanonical; Greek Orthodox Christians, after the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, call them anagignoskomena, things to be read. Most Protestant Bibles leave them out, though Luther's German Bible included them, and some Anglican and Lutheran editions group them as Apocrypha. The name Old Testament is itself Christian: Jewish readers do not see these writings as an earlier covenant replaced by a new one.
Scholars date the texts across many centuries. The Pentateuch is thought to have reached its current shape in the Persian period, 538 to 332 BC, shaped by returned exiles who ran the Temple. Joshua through Kings probably began as one work, the Deuteronomistic History, during the 6th-century BC exile. Most prophetic books date from the 8th to 6th centuries BC, but Jonah and Daniel came later, and Ecclesiastes was finished by the 3rd century BC. Some stories echo older ones, such as the Genesis flood alongside the Gilgamesh flood myth.
Historical reliability is debated. In 2007 Lester Grabbe noted that American scholars broadly took the patriarchs and a unified conquest as historical until roughly the 1970s, but that specialists are now minimalists about that early period. Avraham Faust wrote in 2022 that, after the sweeping scepticism of the 1990s, mainstream work has become more balanced, with some traditions from the 9th century BC onward matching archaeology. Running through the books are covenant, justice for the vulnerable, and the struggle to explain why a good God allowed disasters like the Babylonian exile.
Source: Old Testament
