Bible
A collection of sacred texts constituting the canonical scripture of Judaism and Christianity, composed over a period of more than a thousand years by a multitude of different authors, oral traditions and redactor communities, and traditionally divided into two major parts. The first, the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh — called the Old Testament by Christian tradition — includes the Torah, or the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), containing the accounts of creation, the patriarchs, the exodus from Egypt and the foundational legal code of the people of Israel; the Nevi'im, or prophetic books, which combine historical narrative (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) with the oratory of the great literary prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the twelve minor prophets); and the Ketuvim, or Writings, a heterogeneous collection including poetry (Psalms), wisdom literature (Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes), narrative (Ruth, Esther, Daniel) and other material. The second part, exclusive to Christianity, is the New Testament, written in Greek during the first century AD, which includes the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) recounting the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth; the Acts of the Apostles, narrating the expansion of early Christianity; the epistles, mostly attributed to Paul of Tarsus, which constitute its oldest doctrinal core; and Revelation, an apocalyptic text full of visionary symbolism. Beyond its central religious function for billions of believers, the Bible is, from a purely historical and literary standpoint, the single most influential text on Western civilisation, both for its direct imprint on law, morality and institutions and for having been, for centuries, the principal source of references, metaphors and narrative structures for Western literature, art and music. Translated into more languages than any other book in history, its textual transmission — from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the great modern critical editions — also constitutes one of the largest and most technically complex fields of academic philology.