The Hebrew Bible in English

The Hebrew Bible is the scripture of the Jewish people. Jews call it the Tanakh, a name formed from the initials of its three parts, and count 24 books in it. Most of it is in Hebrew, with parts of Daniel and Ezra, and one verse of Jeremiah, in Aramaic.

Jewish tradition holds that the Torah was given to Moses at Sinai and that the other books were written by prophets and sages; many modern scholars see the Torah, too, as the work of several writers and editors over centuries. Scholars debate when the list of books was closed, but by the early centuries of the common era it was settled in the form Jews use today.

The Hebrew on this page is the Masoretic text, the form of the Bible that Jews have read for more than a thousand years. Its consonants are far older. The Masoretes, scribes and scholars who worked mainly in Tiberias between about the seventh and tenth centuries, added the signs for vowels and for chanting, and wrote notes in the margins to guard every spelling.

The oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex, was copied in the early eleventh century, and the somewhat older Aleppo Codex, now incomplete, was long regarded as the most authoritative copy. The Dead Sea Scrolls, copied about a thousand years earlier, include many texts very close to the Masoretic one, alongside others that differ.

The English beneath each verse is the translation published by the Jewish Publication Society of America in 1917, The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text. A committee of Jewish scholars, with Max Margolis as editor-in-chief, prepared it to follow the traditional Hebrew text and Jewish interpretation, in the familiar style of the King James Version.

Small differences show its approach. Where the King James has the earth "without form, and void," the 1917 version has "unformed and void." Where the King James has the Spirit of God moving upon the waters, this version has it hovering, closer to the Hebrew verb. And it ends the first day with "one day," as the Hebrew does, rather than "the first day."

Genesis, from a Greek word for origin, is called Bereshit in Hebrew, after its first word. It tells of the creation of the world, of Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, and then of the ancestors of Israel: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah, and Joseph in Egypt.

It begins with creation in six days and the seventh day of rest. Readers have discussed these verses for millennia, starting with the first word: the medieval commentator Rashi held that the opening verse is better read as a clause setting the scene than as a statement that heaven and earth were made first.

In the synagogue the Torah is read through in a yearly cycle of 54 weekly portions, each called a parashah, or sidra, and named after a word in its opening verse. In some weeks two portions are combined so that the cycle fits the calendar, and some congregations follow a three-year cycle instead.

The cycle ends and begins again on Simchat Torah, the festival of rejoicing in the Torah, when the last chapters of Deuteronomy are read and then, straight away, the account of creation at the start of Genesis. On the following Shabbat, Shabbat Bereshit, the first portion is read in full. Called Bereshit, it runs from Genesis 1:1 to 6:8 and includes the verses on this page.

This page is the starting point for the Hebrew Bible in the collection. Other parts of the Bible have pages of their own, beginning with Psalm 23. The Shema, from Deuteronomy, has a page too, because it is both a passage of the Torah and the central declaration of Jewish prayer.

Each follows the pattern of this page: the Hebrew, the 1917 translation, and our explanation verse by verse.