The Bible is not one book but a library in two parts. The Old Testament gathers the writings received from ancient Israel, composed over centuries and almost all of them in Hebrew, with a few stretches in Aramaic: Daniel 2:4 to 7:28 (the Aramaic starts halfway through the verse), Ezra 4:8-6:18 and 7:12-26, one stray verse at Jeremiah 10:11, and two words at Genesis 31:47. The New Testament is a later and much shorter collection, written entirely in Greek across a far narrower span — the exact dates are argued over — and every book in it turns on Jesus of Nazareth and the earliest Christian communities. “Testament” here renders the Greek diathēkē, “covenant”, not a last will and testament. Both names are Christian usage: Judaism calls nothing “old”, because it recognises no “new”, and knows those same books as the Tanakh. The other thing worth knowing up front is that the table of contents of the first, longer part is not the same in every Bible.
How the Old Testament is arranged
- books
- 39
- chapters
- 929
- verses
- 23,145
- words
- 581,462
Christian Bibles split the Old Testament into four blocks, and the split is an editorial convention: nothing inside the text labels it. First the Pentateuch — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy — five books running from the origins to the death of Moses, with nearly all the legal material embedded in them. Then the historical books, Joshua through Esther, following the people from the entry into Canaan to the return from exile. Then the poetic and wisdom books — Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs — which tell no continuous story: they collect poems, sayings and arguments. And last the prophets, sorted into major (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel and Daniel) and minor (Hosea through Malachi). Watch that label: major and minor refer to length, not to importance — Obadiah fits on a page, and Jeremiah is one of the longest books in the Bible. The order above is the usual Protestant one; a Catholic or Orthodox Bible slots further books in among these same blocks.
How the New Testament is arranged
- books
- 27
- chapters
- 260
- verses
- 7,958
- words
- 174,747
The New Testament comes in blocks too, four of them. The Gospels open it — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — narrating the public life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Then a single narrative book, the Acts of the Apostles, which continues Luke's Gospel: both open with a dedication to the same recipient, Theophilus (Luke 1:3 and Acts 1:1). Next comes the bulk of the volume, the letters. Thirteen carry Paul's name, Romans through Philemon, and they are arranged not by date but roughly from longest to shortest — first those addressed to communities, then those addressed to individuals. Hebrews follows in the usual editions, though the book never says who wrote it and its attribution has been disputed since antiquity; some early manuscripts place it in the middle of the Pauline block. The catholic, or general, epistles close the section — James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John and Jude — where “catholic” means “general”, because they address a broad readership: the word has nothing to do here with the Roman Catholic Church. The last book is Revelation, titled Apocalipsis or Apocalipse in Spanish and Portuguese Bibles; one book under two names, since the Greek apokalypsis means “unveiling”. And this order is not universal either: in the Greek manuscript tradition the catholic epistles usually come before Paul's.
The Old Testament index is not the same in every Bible
Here is the part almost no site bothers to spell out. Catholic Bibles carry, inside the Old Testament, a set of books Protestant Bibles do not print: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch and 1-2 Maccabees, plus extra passages in Esther and Daniel. They are not tucked into an appendix either — they are interleaved (Tobit and Judith after Nehemiah, Maccabees after Esther, Wisdom and Sirach after the Song of Songs, Baruch beside Jeremiah), so the whole index shifts. The Orthodox churches include those and several more (1 Esdras, which other traditions number differently, the Prayer of Manasseh, 3 Maccabees, Psalm 151), and even among them there is no single list: the Ethiopian Orthodox canon is broader still. Even the name is contested: Catholics and Orthodox call them deuterocanonical, “of the second canon”, because their status was settled in a second round of debate rather than because they rank second; the Protestant tradition calls them the Apocrypha. Picking one of those two words is already taking a side, which is why this page uses both. Nor are they a late addition: they circulated in the Greek manuscripts of Scripture in antiquity, and Reformation Bibles — Luther's, the King James of 1611 — printed them as a separate section between the two testaments; only over the course of the nineteenth century did editions that leave them out altogether become the Protestant norm. The New Testament, by contrast, is not in dispute: Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox share its books, the historic exception being the Syriac tradition, whose classic version left five of them out.
The Hebrew Bible holds the same books as the Protestant Old Testament, but it neither orders nor counts them the same way. It is called the Tanakh, an acronym of its three parts: Torah (the Law, the five books of Moses), Nevi'im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings). The Prophets take in the Former Prophets — Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which Christian Bibles file among the historical books — and the Latter Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and “the Twelve”, the twelve minor prophets counted as a single book. The Writings hold Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the five scrolls (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther), Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles — so Ruth, Lamentations and Daniel, which a Christian index places among the histories or among the prophets, sit somewhere else entirely. That is why the traditional Jewish count is twenty-four books, well short of what a Christian table of contents lists even though the content is the same: Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah each count as one, and so do the twelve minor prophets. The ending differs too: the Christian Old Testament closes with Malachi, a prophet, while the printed Tanakh closes with Chronicles — though some early codices put Chronicles at the head of the Writings rather than at the end.
A warning, so nobody hunts here for something that is not here: this site publishes the 66-book canon, the one Protestant Bibles carry. The deuterocanonical books named on this page — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, Maccabees and the additions to Esther and Daniel — are not part of our text: you can read about them here, but you cannot read them here. If you use a Catholic or Orthodox Bible, your index has entries ours does not, and in Esther and Daniel even the numbering will not line up, because those passages are interleaved and push the chapter and verse count along. This is not a verdict on those books; it is simply what the corpus we serve contains, and we would rather say so up front than let you find out by searching.