What Is The Bible?

Welcome back!

What is the Bible?  Is the Bible a book?  This is not a trick question. The Bible looks like a book. It has pages the way any other book has pages. It is bound between two covers. It is even called a book. And yet, the idea that the Bible is a book leads to all sorts of misunderstanding about what the Bible really is.

Let’s start with the name. The name “Bible” actually comes from the plural word, “books” in Greek. In Greek, one book is a biblos. More than one book are biblia.

The Bible (biblia) is a collection of writings, more accurately called “the books.”  Within this thing called the Bible, there are collected writings, which are themselves called “books,” such as The “Book of Genesis,” “the Book of Exodus,” “the Book of Leviticus,” and so on.

When they are bound together, all of the separate books are combined into a single document, and are treated as one single book. The benefit is that it gathers all of this material into one single document.

Why is this a problem?  A modern book, written by a single author, is a unified, coherent work. When we think of the Bible as a single book, we lose sight of the fact that it is a collection of writings, over a long period time, in different geographical locations, and even in different languages and dialects.

For most of their existence, the various “books” of the Bible were written on separate scrolls, not onto the pages of a single book.

When we see the Bible as a collection of writings, we are more able to see the differences between the various writings and not try to impose a unified perspective that does not exist in the separate books of the Bible.

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson