This is probably a good place to remind you, dear reader, that I’m no expert on any of this. It would be a good idea to read an introduction to the Hebrew Bible by a bona fide scholar, like perhaps John J. Collins Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Depending how much time you have available for this, perhaps you might enjoy something more like the same author’s A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible.
Nevertheless, I figure I should have some sort of brief sketch of the Hebrew Bible’s contents to accompany the upcoming Boring Bible project.
In terms of the canon as viewed from the lens of Judaism, the core of the Hebrew Bible is the Pentateuch, or Torah, consisting of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These tell a narrative beginning with the creation of the earth and leading to the ethnogenesis of the Israelite people, leading to their rescue from slavery in Egypt by Moses, who leads the people through a period of wandering for forty years in a wilderness, during which time he gives them laws. The Pentateuch ends with Moses’ giving a final speech, almost a sort of constitution for the Israelite people, which makes up the bulk of Deuteronomy.
Generally speaking, modern scholarship treats the events of Genesis through Deuteronomy as mythical, even if some details may trace back to distantly remembered historical realities.
Next, there is a section that Jewish tradition identifies as the books of the “Prophets”, though there is a very important subdivision between the books known as the “Former Prophets” and the “Latter Prophets”.
The Former Prophets are the books known to modern scholarship as the Deuteronomistic History, because their storyline, outlook, and vocabulary effectively make them a series of sequels to the book of Deuteronomy. These are the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.
As these books tell it, after the death of Moses leadership of the Israelite people fell into the hands of his deputy Joshua, who then lead the Israelites on a campaign to conquer the land of Canaan and to kill off and expell its inhabitants. For the next several hundred years, the book of Judges tells the tale of the Israelites living without a king or centralized state, alternating between oppression by foreigners and rule by ad hoc warlords traditionally known as “Judges”. The last of these judges is Samuel, and it is he who reluctantly appoints the first and second kings of Israel. Under the kings Saul and then David, followed by David’s son Solomon, Israel exists as a single national entity including all twelve of its tribal groupings.
Then, in the late tenth century, the kingdom was split in two in a tax revolt, in which the majority of the kingdom, the northern portion, seceded from the rule of the Davidic monarchy. From then on, the larger Northern Kingdom was known as Israel, and the Southern Kingdom as Judah. In 722, the Northern Kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrian Empire, after which it ceased to have a national existence. This left only the Southern Kingdom existing under its Davidic kings for approximately another century and a half, until its destruction by the Babylonian Empire in 587. The book of Kings ends during the Babylonian Exile of the Judahite elite.
The whole sequence from Genesis to Kings, which are in traditional Jewish terms the Torah and the Former Prophets, have sometimes been called the Primary History by biblical scholars. Together, these nine works make up about half the bulk of the Hebrew Bible, and present a more or less continuous narrative from the creation of the world to the end of the Judahite monarchy. Exactly how much of this is “History” in the sense of relating events that actually happened is much-debated, although generally speaking we might say that there is not much actual history before David, while we can say with pretty good certainty that the kings referred to from then on actually did exist.
The next section is what Judaism calls the “Latter Prophets”, a collection consisting of three large and twelve small works. Generally speaking, the prophecies of the Bible are delivered in poetry, and the prophets foretell a variety of better and worse futures to come as a result of the variously better or worse behavior of the people in their relationships to God and to each other. The three large works are Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Isaiah writes in the second half of the eighth century, although a large amount of material written later is also found in the book in its present form. Isaiah’s speaks to the period immediately before and after the fall of the Northern Kingdom. Jeremiah prophesies in the first part of the sixth century — that is, before and after the fall of the Southern Kingdom. Ezekiel’s ministry is a little bit later, though partially overlapping with Jeremiah’s. Finally, there are twelve smaller works, traditionally counted as a single “book” in Judaism: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
The final section is given a very general name in Hebrew, “The Writings”, and true to its title it contains a wide range of works. Some of its works, like Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah, rewrite and extend the narrative of Genesis – Kings. Daniel does this sort of thing in its own way as well — extending the biblical narrative from the Babylonian exile through to the time of the Maccabees. Like Daniel, Esther and Ruth are relatively short prose works, each telling — in very different ways — the story of a marriage which would prove important to the history of Judah.
The Song of Songs is a collection of ancient Israelite love poetry — it is not entirely clear how it found its place in the biblical canon. Another relatively short prose work that may puzzle readers is Qoheleth, or Ecclesiastes, a set of often bleak reflections on the nature of life on earth. Similarly bleak is Lamentations, a short set of poems bewailing the fall of Jerusalem.
Like Lamentations and Ecclesiastes, Job is a tough read, a meditation on why some very bad things have happened to a very good man. Job is often considered “Wisdom Literature”, as is the Proverbs, a rather larger work which dispenses various forms of advice. Like Proverbs, the Psalms are often added into printed New Testaments — the Psalms are a hymn-book of ancient Israelite religion.
I have heard it said, though I can’t say about the quality of the evidence, that the books of the Hebrew Bible entered the canon in three tranches — first the Pentateuch, then the Former and Latter Prophets, and finally the Writings last of all.