Bible: composition, history, and cultural significance

Bible

The word "Bible" (Middle High German bibel, older biblie) originated from ecclesiastical Latin biblia, a loanword from Koine Greek.

The neuter βιβλίον biblíon "book" is a diminutive of βίβλος bíblos "book", named after the Phoenician port city of Byblos. This port city was a major transshipment point for bast used to make papyrus scrolls in ancient times. The plural of βιβλίον biblíon is βιβλία biblía "scrolls, books". In the Septuagint, βιβλία biblía was primarily a reverential term for the Torah; John Chrysostom was the first to use this plural to designate the entirety of the Christian sacred writings (Old and New Testaments).

In ecclesiastical Latin the term biblia was first understood as neuter plural biblia, -orum, but since about 1000 AD as feminine singular biblia, -ae. The national languages adopted the word in the singular; in German it became Bibel. "The name implies: What is in our hands today as a single volume, and what we take for granted as a unity: the Bible, is in fact a multiplicity." The designation as "book of books" expresses on the one hand the religious significance of the Bible, and on the other hand its inner plurality.

Even after the codex replaced the scroll as the book form, only rarely were all biblical writings united in one book; the rule was that the Bible existed as a collection of multi-part books in a bookcase, such as in the scriptorium of a monastery, as shown in the illustration of the Codex Amiatinus (early 8th century, Northumbria). That a single book contained approximately the entire Jewish or Christian Bible did not become common until the invention of printing.

Holy Scripture

The New Testament frequently refers to the sacred writings of Judaism with the expression αἱ γραφαί hai graphaí "the [sacred] writings", thus following Jewish Hellenistic usage. At one point Paul of Tarsus also uses the form γραφαί ἅγιαι graphaí hágiai "sacred writings" (Rom 1:2 EU). In the New Testament, the singular γραφή graphḗ "the Scriptures" often refers to a single sentence (in modern terms, a biblical passage), but it also refers to the Jewish sacred writings as a unit - this also has parallels in Judaism, e.g. in Philon of Alexandria and in the books of Chronicles. In the early church this use of language continues; as "holy scripture(s)" then also the totality of books of the Old and the New Testament is called.

Old and New Testament

That the two parts of the Christian Bible are called Old and New Testament goes back to Paul of Tarsus who contrasted an old and a new "covenant". The old covenant is represented by the Torah of Moses (2 Cor 3:5-15 EU). Paul saw himself as a minister of the new covenant, mediated through Christ and made present in the celebration of the Lord's Supper (1 Cor 11:25 EU). In the Letter to the Hebrews, an anonymous Christian author explains how the new covenant replaces the old. The term "covenant" (ancient Greek διαθήκη diathḗkē, Latin: testamentum) always refers to an order and not to a book or a collection of scriptures.

Melito of Sardis coined the term "books of the old covenant" for the first part of the Christian Bible around 180 AD and at the same time also presented a list of the writings meant by it. He reported on this in a letter to his brother Onesimos, which has been preserved in the excerpt of Eusebius of Caesarea:

It is noticeable that Melito does not mention the Book of Esther, nor the deuterocanonical writings, Jewish writings found in the Septuagint but not in the Tanakh: Book of Judith, Book of Tobit, 1st Maccabees, 2nd Maccabees, Baruch, Wisdom of Solomon, and Jesus Sirach. The recognition of these books as Sacred Scriptures was quite hesitant in Christianity: in the Latin West around 400, in the East not until the 7th century. This was controversial - Jerome argued against it - and the motives are not entirely clear. A role could have been played by the fact that Tobit, Jesus Sirach and the Book of Wisdom were popular as religious edification literature and could also be used for teaching new Christians.

"Melito's formulation ... is ... to be taken to mean that God's 'old covenant' with Israel is represented by the writings referred to, but not that these writings themselves are called 'covenant' or 'testament'." Such usage did not become common until around 200 AD and is then found in Clement of Alexandria and Origen.

At the end of the 20th century Christian theologians proposed to abandon the term "Old Testament" because it sounded pejorative, and to speak instead of the "First Testament" (Erich Zenger, J. A. Sanders). This term did not become generally accepted, especially since the ancient world generally valued the old more highly than the new. However, the terms Hebrew or Jewish Bible or its Jewish designation Tanakh have become common.

The Bible is not quoted by page numbers, but by book, chapter and verse. This has the advantage that different Bible translations can be compared. Furthermore, with this method the reader can compare his translation and the Hebrew or Greek Bible text.

Special features:

• The Book of Psalms is a compilation of individual poems. The 150 chapters of this book are called Psalms: Ps 23:2 is therefore "Psalm 23, verse 2" rather than "Psalms, chapter 23, verse 2."
• The shortest books of the Bible (Book of Obadiah, Epistle of Philemon, 2nd Epistle of John, 3rd Epistle of John, Epistle of Jude) do not have chapter divisions and are quoted only with indication of the verse.
• The Book of Esther has a Greek-Hebrew mixed text as its basis in the Roman Catholic Unity Translation, while Protestant Bibles contain only the translation of the Hebrew text of the Book of Esther. The surpluses of the Greek text are not counted as verses in their own right in the Einheitsübersetzung, but are designated with small Latin letters. In the Luther Bible (2017), these surpluses are listed as pieces to the Book of Esther in the Apocrypha (appendix to the Old Testament); the individual sections of text are designated there from A to F and further subdivided according to verse numbers. These designation systems are therefore not compatible with each other.
• The apocryphal book of Jesus Sirach had a different counting in the Luther Bible compared to other Bible editions; however, since the 2017 revision, the Luther Bible has adopted the chapter and verse counting of the Einheitsübersetzung.

The copyists of the Hebrew Bible developed a system of sections and verses for the purpose of textual preservation: each section began with a new line. If further subdivision was necessary, a blank space was left within the line. Since the late Middle Ages, this subdivision has also been marked in the text by the Hebrew letters פ and ס. Parallel to this, a subdivision of the text into verses (marked by Sof pasuq) developed. The verse-counting itself derives from the Vulgate tradition. After the chapter division common today was made by Stephen Langton in the 13th century, the Parisian printer Robert Estienne numbered chapters and verses in his 16th century editions of the Bible.