Bibles

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Bible refers to respective collections of religious writings of Judaism and of Christianity. The exact composition of the Bible is dependent on the religious traditions of specific denominations. Modern Rabbinic Judaism generally recognizes a single set of canonical books that comprise the Tanakh, also known by the terms Hebrew or Jewish Bible. The Christian Bible includes the same books as the Tanakh (referred to in this context as the Old Testament), but usually in a different order, together with specifically Christian books collectively called the New Testament. Among some traditions, the Bible includes apocryphal books that were not accepted into the Tanakh.

The Hebrew Bible comprises three parts: the Torah ("Teaching", also known as the Pentateuch or "Five Books of Moses"), the Prophets, and the Writings. It was primarily written in Hebrew with some small portions in Aramaic.

The Christian Holy Bible includes the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, which were originally written in Greek, preceded by the protocanonical books of the Old Testament and sometimes a number of deuterocanonical books: Eastern Orthodox Churches use all of the books that were incorporated into the Septuagint, the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible; Roman Catholics include some of these books in their canon; and many Protestant Bibles follow the Jewish canon, excluding the additional books. Some editions of the Christian Bible have a separate Biblical apocrypha section for books not considered canonical.

Translations of the full Bible were available for 438 languages, translations of one of the two testaments in 1,168 additional languages, and portions of the text existed in 848 additional languages. This means that partial or full translations of the Bible exist in a total of 2,454 languages.

Etymology

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word bible[6] is from Latin biblia, traced from the same word through Medieval Latin and Late Latin, as used in the phrase biblia sacra ("holy book" - "In the Latin of the Middle Ages, the neuter plural for Biblia (gen. bibliorum) gradually came to be regarded as a feminine singular noun (biblia, gen. bibliae, in which singular form the word has passed into the languages of the Western world."). This stemmed from the Greek term τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια (ta biblia ta hagia), "the holy books", which derived from βιβλίον (biblion), "paper" or "scroll," the ordinary word for "book", which was originally a diminutive of βύβλος (byblos, "Egyptian papyrus"), possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician port Byblos from whence Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece.

Biblical scholar Mark Hamilton states that the Greek phrase Ta biblia ("the books") was "an expression Hellenistic Jews used to describe their sacred books several centuries before the time of Jesus,"and would have referred to the Septuagint. The Online Etymology Dictionary states, "The Christian scripture was referred to in Greek as Ta Biblia as early as c.223."

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