A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The whole collection of authorized and privileged texts came to be known by a Hebrew word, Tanakh. This was actually a symbolic acronym formed from the three initial Hebrew letters of the three category names of books it contained: Law, Prophets and Writings. The last is a rather vague catch-all term for history, psalms and writings containing wise sayings, and the categories are not altogether helpful as concepts: books which are mainly historical are to be found among both Prophets and Writings, while Job and Qoheleth nestle among the Writings, despite their prophetic brutality towards the sort of common-sense advice for coping with everyday life which is represented by the Wisdom literature of the Writings – works like the Book of Proverbs, for example. The Tanakh is recognizable to Christians as their Old Testament, albeit arranged in a different order.