Page 14 - Yahwehs Book

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Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in the 2 century B.C.. These Jewish scholars, working in Alexandria,
Egypt where there was a large community of Jewish believers, chose names for the five books of
Moses that reflected the theme of each book. In the Greek Septuagint, the first five books were titled
as follows:

Genesis: "origin"
Exodos: "going out"
Leuitikos: "relating to the Levites"
Arithmoi: contains a record of the numbering of the Israelites in the wilderness of Sinai and later
on the plain of Moab.
Deuteronomion: "second law," refers to the fifth book's repetition of the commandments reviewed
by Moses before his death.

It is easy to see in these Greek names how the English titles of the five books of Moses were arrived
at in our Christian Bibles today.

The Tanakh follows the five books of Moses (the Torah) with the Neviim, or the Prophets. Included
in these books are Ruth-Judges, Samuel (which includes I Samuel and II Samuel as a single book),
and Kings (I and II Kings as one book). We may not think of these books as belonging to the
prophets, though Samuel was certainly a prophet. Yet, the ancient Hebrews categorized them this
way.

In modern versions of the Tanakh, the Neviim contains 8 books, often informally divided into two
subdivisions; the Earlier Prophets, and the Later Prophets. The first four prophetic books lean more
toward historical accounts, and the latter prophetic books are characterized by the declaration of
numerous prophecies. Joshua, Judges-Ruth, Samuel, and Kings comprise the four early Prophetic
books, while Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and The Twelve (the twelve minor prophets) comprise the
latter group of four.

One may wonder why Kings is in the group known as Neviim, but Chronicles is not, for both of
these books are very similar in content and cover the same time period. One of the widely accepted
theories on this peculiarity is that Chronicles was adopted into the canon of Hebrew Scripture much
later than the other books of the Prophets. Therefore, it was placed as the very last book of the
Tanakh. This was evidently the arrangement of the books in Christ’s day. F.F. Bruce provides the
following argument in support of this view.

There is evidence that Chronicles was the last book in the Hebrew Bible as Jesus knew it. When he
said that the generation he addressed would be answerable for ‘the blood of all the prophets, shed
from the foundation of the world,’ he added, ‘from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who
perished between the altar and the sanctuary’ (Luke 11:50f.). Abel is the first martyr in the Bible
(Gen. 4:8); Zechariah is most probably the son of Jehoiada, who was stoned to death ‘in the court
of Yahweh’s house’ because, speaking by the Spirit of God, he rebuked the king and people of Judah
for transgressing the divine commandments (2 Chron. 24:20-22). Zechariah (c 800 BC) was not
chronologically the last faithful prophet to die as a martyr; some two centuries later a prophet
named Uriah was put to death in Jerusalem because his witness was unacceptable to king Jehoiakim