Name-dropping:
Tanakh (pronunciation: tah-NOCK).
Also known as the Hebrew Bible and often identified as the Old Testament, the Tanakh comprises the 24 books in the Hebrew canon read as scripture in Judaism.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Whenever anyone calls the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament, for starters. But your knowledge of the Tanakh is also sure to be a hit at bat and bar mitzvahs. Of course, you’ll probably need the conversation to pass the time, because even though they mark the entrance into adulthood, the “bar” in bar mitzvah rarely stands for open bar.

The Basics
Tanakh is an acronym from the initial letters of the Hebrew words Torah, meaning “The Law,” Nevi’im, meaning “Prophets,” and Ketuvim (meaning “Writings”). These three categories of writing compose the Hebrew Bible, which most Christians know as the Old Testament.

The Torah includes the five books of Moses—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—which introduce the beginnings of human history (with Adam and Eve) and Jewish history (with Abraham, who both Jews and Muslims view as their patriarch). It is also the basis for most Jewish law. (Traditionally, the law of Moses is said to contain exactly 613 commandments.)

The Nevi’im is the writings of the Prophets. From Joshua to Ezekiel, the Prophets exhorted the Jewish community to live up to their covenant with God as his chosen people. They promised, cajoled, and threatened. For much of Jewish history, there was disagreement about which prophets ought to be considered canonical, but a conference of rabbis around 100 CE set down the Nevi’im as we read it today.

The Ketuvim includes everything else. It includes the oddest, and arguably the most beautiful writing in the Christian and Jewish canon. Truly a miscellany, the Ketuvim includes history (Nehemiah), devotional poetry (the Psalms), prophecy that didn’t end up in the Nevi’im (Daniel), disconcertingly erotic poetry (the Song of Songs), and the saddest story ever told (Job). The books of the
Ketuvim were not canonized as a group, like the other two sections of the Tanakh, but instead were brought into the scriptures individually, usually because regular people liked them so much. This created the mishmash feel of the Ketuvim, but also ensured the enduring popularity of most of its books. Although Christians reading the Tanakh usually see it as a kind of forerunner to the New Testament, and find within it prophecies about Jesus, it is read quite differently in Judaism. It is a testament to the remarkable survival and flourishing of a small band of people who believed in one God long before it was popular, who suffered persecution again and again but always emerged intact, and whose greatness lies not in their numbers but in their commitment to, and faith in, the one true God.

Talmud
The Talmud, which began to be recorded around 200 BCE, holds a place in Jewish tradition second only to the Tanakh. The work of many Rabbinic scholars, the Talmud includes law passed down orally as well as critical and interpretive commentary on scripture. The Talmudic authors sought to fill out the Jewish law outlined in the Torah so as to help people live holy and spiritual lives. Today, however, most Reform Jews and many others reject the Talmud as an excessively legalistic and sort of crushingly nonspiritual text. But Orthodox Jews in particular continue to adhere to the law as set forth in the Talmud.

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? THE HEBREW BIBLE EDITION
So what’s the difference between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament? The Catholic Old Testament includes “the Apocrypha,” several books that both Protestants and Jews decided weren’t canonical. The Protestant Old Testament is identical, but the order of the books is different. Still, though, it’s offensive to many Jewish people to call the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament, because it implies the existence of a New Testament, and Judaism does not believe in any such thing.

Conversation Starters
◆ Like many a Yugoslavian town name, the Hebrew text of the Tanakh originally contained only consonants. Pronunciation of words was passed down orally until the early Middle Ages, when diacritical marks were added to codify the pronunciation.

◆ In the Christian Old Testament, Kings, Samuel, and Chronicles are each divided into two books. This wasn’t originally the case with the Tanakh, but the three books proved too long for the scrolls that early Christians used, so they divided them.

◆ Almost all of the Tanakh was composed in Hebrew. The exceptions consist of two words in Genesis, a sentence in Jeremiah, two in Ezra, and almost half the Book of David. These sections were all written in Aramaic, which was spoken by many Jews for millennia, and by the cast of The Passion of the Christ for a few months. By contrast, the New Testament was probably written entirely in ancient Greek, except for one sentence of Aramaic. In the Gospel According to Mark, Jesus’ last words are recorded as the Aramaic “elo’i elo’i lama sabachthani,” or “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”