Skip to content
- The Tanakh, which came together mostly between the 600s and 100s BCE, was a compendium of Jewish sacred writings ages before Christianity existed – a collection gradually supplemented in the history of Judaism by the Oral Torah, which was in turn codified and developed during Late Antiquity into Midrash, and separately, into Halacha and Aggadah by the Mishna and Gemara of the Talmud to form the foundational texts of modern-day Rabbinical Judaism.
- The Tanakh was first, and has been ever since, a Jewish book, and so our focus as we learn about it will be on ancient Jewish history – the First Temple period, the Exilic Period, the Second Temple period and Hasmonean monarchy, the Herodian dynasty, and then on into the Christian period.
- The Tanakh is a book with astounding theological diversity, with bluntly proscriptive early texts like Leviticus and Deuteronomy eventually giving way to books written during the Persian and Hellenistic periods – books like the world-weary Ecclesiastes, the sultry Song of Songs, the kindly book of Ruth, and the almost novelistic sagas of Esther and Daniel.
- The Old Testament’s outlook, ultimately, becomes more cosmopolitan and pluralistic in books written during later periods of history, with the xenophobia and harsh laws of earlier texts like Numbers and Joshua ultimately giving way to the gentler worldview of later books like Jonah, and in the expanded Roman Catholic canon, Tobit, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Greek additions to Esther.
