THE Protestant Bible in common use is a collection of sixty-six books, subdivided into the Old Testament (thirty-nine books) and the New Testament (twenty-seven books). The thirty-nine Old Testament books originally constituted the Hebrew Scriptures recognized and used by Palestinian Judaism in New Testament times. The remaining twenty-seven originated in Christian circles in the Apostolic Age. . . . The material in the Bible was composed at different times during a period of more than a thousand years—from the foundation of the Hebrew nation by Moses (c.1200 B.C.) to about the end of the first century A. D. The number of writers whose work is preserved in the Bible is unknown. . . . The poet, the historian, and the philosopher ("wise man"), the priest and the apostle, the king and the statesman, the popular storyteller, the serious legislator, the antiquarian delighting in genealogy and statistics, the zealous reformer, the faithful teacher, the seer, all these and others, . . . find their words or work represented in the Bible.
It is also a world of varied thought and culture that is reflected in the Biblical material. In one part we are face to face with the primitive simplicity of the Semitic nomad; in another we are in touch with the rich culture of the ancient Babylonian civilization; again we share the experiences incident to the predominantly agricultural type of life of the ancient Hebrew commonwealth; at first we witness the . . . warfare between clans or tribes, then the larger struggles of Israel with her near neighbors; next we hear the measured tread of Assyria's victorious armies, creators of the first world monarchy; then, in succession, it is the Babylonian, the Persian, the Greek, and finally the Roman empires that form the background of the Biblical history. . . . The Old Testament was already complete before a word of the New Testament was written. But neither collection was the work of a single age.—A New Standard Bible Dictionary.
