The Tanakh is also called [ארקמ], Mikra or Miqra.
Because the books included in the Tanakh were largely written in Hebrew, it may also be called the Hebrew Bible. (Parts of Daniel and Ezra, as well as a sentence in Jeremiah and a two-word toponym in Genesis, are in Aramaic - but even these are written in the same Hebrew script.) Perhaps these portions were written by the original Hebrew prophets, who knew that they were intentionally speaking to an Aramaic audience, as an aside.
According to the Jewish tradition, the Tanakh consists of twenty-four books (enumerated below). The Torah has five books, Nevi'im contains eight books, and Ketuvim has eleven.
These twenty-four books are the same books found in the Protestant Old Testament, but the order of the books is different. The enumeration differs as well: Christians count these books as thirty-nine, not twenty-four. This is because Jews often count as a single book what Christians count as several.
As such, one may draw a technical distinction between the Jewish Tanakh and the similar, but non-identical, corpus which Christians call the Old Testament. Thus, some scholars prefer Hebrew Bible as a term that covers the commonality of Tanakh and the Old Testament while avoiding sectarian bias.
The Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments contain six books not included in the Tanakh. They are called deuterocanonical books (literally "canonized secondly" meaning canonized later).
In Christian Bibles, Daniel and the Book of Esther sometimes include extra deuterocanonical material that is not included in either the Jewish or most Protestant canons.
The books of the Torah have generally-used names which are based on the first prominent word in each book. The English names are not translations of the Hebrew; they are based on the Greek names created for the Septuagint which in turn were based on Rabbinic names describing the thematic content of each of the Books.
The Torah ("Pentateuch") consists of:
The books of Nevi'im ("Prophets") are:
The Ketuvim ("Writings") are:
The adoption of the Christian chapter divisions by Jews began in the late middle ages in Spain, partially in the context of forced clerical debates which took place against a background of harsh persecution and of the Spanish Inquisition (the debates required a common system for citing biblical texts). From the standpoint of the Jewish textual tradition, the chapter divisions are not only a foreign feature with no basis in the mesorah, but also open to severe criticism of two kinds:
Nevertheless, because they proved useful – and eventually indispensable – for citations, they continued to be included by Jews in most Hebrew editions of the biblical books. For more information on the origin of these divisions, see Chapters and verses of the Bible.
The chapter and verse numbers were often indicated very prominently in older editions, to the extent that they overshadowed the traditional Jewish masoretic divisions. However, in many Jewish editions of the Tanakh published over the past forty years, there has been a major historical trend towards minimizing the impact and prominence of the chapter and verse numbers on the printed page. Most editions accomplish this by removing them from the text itself and relegating them to the margins of the page. The main text in these editions is unbroken and uninterrupted at the beginning of chapters (which are noted only in the margin). The lack of chapter breaks within the text in these editions also serves to reinforce the visual impact created by the spaces and "paragraph" breaks on the page, which indicate the traditional Jewish parashah divisions.
These modern Jewish editions present Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles (as well as Ezra) as single books in their title pages, and make no indication inside the main text of their division into two parts (though it is noted in the upper and side margins). The text of Samuel II, for instance, follows Samuel I on the very same page with no special break at all in the flow of the text, and may even continue on the very same line of text.
Rabbinical Judaism believes that the Torah was transmitted side by side with an oral tradition. Other groups, such as Karaite Judaism, the ancient Saducees, and Christianity do not accept this claim. Indeed, many terms and definitions used in the written law are undefined within the Torah itself; and the reader is assumed to be familiar with the context and details. This fact is presented as evidence to the antiquity of the oral tradition. An opposing argument is that only a small portion of the vast rabbinic works on the oral tradition can be described as mere clarifications and context. These rabbinic works, collectively known as "the oral law" [הרות לעבש הפ], include the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the two Talmuds (Babylonian and Jerusalem), and the early Midrash compilations.