The Number and Books of the Bible

The next introductory material is about the number and books of the Bible.  In Hebrew tradition, the Old Testament (OT) was divided into twenty-four books, placed in three categories.  The first was The Law, consisting of the first five books of Genesis through Deuteronomy, the Prophets, and the Writings.  The Christians divided and rearranged the books into thirty-nine.  Then the Roman Catholics, the Greek Orthodox and various Protestant sects did more rearranging, as they did for the books of the New Testament (NT).  I didn't find it terribly interesting, so head to wikipedia if you want more of the whys and hows. The seven books of the Apocrypha round out both the Catholic and King James versions of the Bible.

The first entry in the Asimov annotations deals with Genesis. In Hebrew, the first volume of the OT is referred to as "bereshith", which literally means "in the beginning".  Later Greek translators gave the volume the descriptive name of "Genesis", which means "coming into being".  Moses is traditionally regarded as the author of Genesis, but Asimov says it was almost certainly the work of editors working from a number of sources long after Moses.