The Old Testament and the Torah overlap but are not the same thing. The Torah is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Old Testament is a Christian designation for a much larger collection that includes the Torah along with historical, poetic, and prophetic books. The distinction between these two terms reflects more than vocabulary: it maps onto different religious traditions, different canonical structures, and different ways of reading the same ancient texts.
To complicate matters further, the scope of the “Old Testament” itself varies across Christian traditions. The Protestant Old Testament contains 39 books, the Catholic Old Testament adds seven deuterocanonical texts, and the Orthodox Old Testament adds still more. Meanwhile, the Jewish Tanakh contains the same textual material as the Protestant Old Testament but organizes it into a different structure — one that tells a different story with the same source material. The relationship between all these collections is a question of canon, theology, and editorial choice. For a more detailed comparison of the Torah and the Pentateuch (the Greek-derived term for the same five books), see the companion article on Torah vs Pentateuch.
What “Torah” Means — and How Far the Term Reaches
The Hebrew word Torah comes from the root y-r-h, meaning “to instruct” or “to guide.” The common English translation “law” captures only part of the word’s range. Torah encompasses narrative, genealogy, poetry, ritual instruction, and legal codes — not just commandments.
In its narrowest usage, Torah refers to the five books traditionally attributed to Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
These five books contain the narrative arc from creation through the death of Moses, along with extensive legal collections: the Covenant Code (Exodus 20-23), the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17-26), the Priestly legislation (much of Leviticus and Numbers), and the Deuteronomic law code (Deuteronomy 12-26).
Scholars like Julius Wellhausen and Richard Elliott Friedman have identified multiple source traditions woven together within these books — a compositional history spanning several centuries, with most scholars dating the Torah’s final compiled form to roughly the 5th century BCE.
Within Judaism, the Torah holds a position that no other part of the Tanakh occupies. Torah scrolls are handwritten on parchment by trained scribes (soferim), housed in decorated arks, and read publicly on an annual or triennial cycle that structures the liturgical calendar. The scholar James Kugel, in How to Read the Bible (2007), traces how the Torah gradually acquired this unique authoritative status in ancient Israelite religion — a process that was neither instantaneous nor inevitable.
But “Torah” also extends beyond these five books. The concept of Torah she-be’al peh (the Oral Torah) holds that Moses received not only the written text at Sinai but also an oral tradition of interpretation, eventually codified in the Mishnah (around 200 CE) and elaborated in the Talmud (around 500 CE). In this broader sense, “Torah” can encompass the entire body of Jewish religious instruction — written and oral, biblical and rabbinic. This broader meaning has no direct parallel in Christian usage of “Old Testament.”
What “Old Testament” Means — and What It Implies
The term “Old Testament” is a Christian designation for the first major division of the Christian Bible, distinguished from the “New Testament” — the collection of Gospels, letters, and other writings centered on Jesus and the early church. The word “testament” translates the Latin testamentum, itself a rendering of the Greek diatheke (covenant).
“Old Testament” thus means “old covenant” — a theological label that implies a relationship to a “new covenant” established through Jesus.
The term itself encodes a Christian interpretive framework: the scriptures of Israel constitute a prior dispensation that the Christian tradition reads in light of what follows. Jewish tradition does not describe its own scriptures as “old” anything. Within Judaism, the Tanakh stands as a complete collection, not a prelude. Scholars working in academic contexts often prefer the terms “Hebrew Bible” or “Tanakh” to avoid either tradition’s built-in framing, though even these alternatives carry their own implications — “Hebrew Bible” excludes the Aramaic portions of Daniel and Ezra, for instance.
The scope of the Old Testament depends on which Christian tradition defines it. The Protestant Old Testament contains 39 books. The Catholic Old Testament includes seven additional texts — Tobit, Judith, 1-2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), and Baruch, plus additions to Esther and Daniel — which Catholics call deuterocanonical and Protestants call apocryphal. The Ethiopian Orthodox tradition includes still more texts, such as 1 Enoch and Jubilees. There is no single “Old Testament” — the collection expands and contracts depending on the tradition.
Same Texts, Different Architecture
The most consequential difference between the Tanakh and the Christian Old Testament lies not in content but in arrangement. The Tanakh and the Protestant Old Testament contain the same textual material, though they count the books differently — 24 in the Tanakh, 39 in the Protestant Old Testament, because the Jewish tradition combines several books that the Christian tradition separates (1-2 Samuel becomes one book, 1-2 Kings becomes one, and the twelve Minor Prophets are counted as a single Book of the Twelve).
The Tanakh organizes its 24 books into three divisions:
Torah (Teaching): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy
Nevi’im (Prophets): Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings (the Former Prophets), then Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve (the Latter Prophets)
Ketuvim (Writings): Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the Five Scrolls (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther), Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles
The last book of the Tanakh is 2 Chronicles — and the last verses describe the Persian king Cyrus permitting the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple (2 Chronicles 36:22-23). The Jewish Bible closes with restoration: a return to the land, a rebuilding of what was destroyed.
The Christian Old Testament rearranges these same books into four sections: Pentateuch, Historical Books, Poetry and Wisdom, and Prophets. The critical editorial move is placing the prophets last. The Protestant Old Testament ends with Malachi, whose final chapter speaks of God sending the prophet Elijah “before the great and dreadful day of the LORD” (Malachi 4:5). In the Christian reading tradition, this becomes a bridge to the New Testament — Elijah is identified with John the Baptist (Matthew 11:14), and the prophetic voice that closes the Old Testament points forward to the arrival of Jesus.
Roger Beckwith, in The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church (1985), traced how the rearrangement of biblical books served early Christian interpretive purposes. Brevard Childs, in Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (1979), explored how canonical arrangement itself functions as a form of interpretation — the same texts, placed in a different sequence, generate different theological meanings.
The Tanakh ends with return. The Christian Old Testament ends with expectation.
How Canon Shapes Reading
The difference between “Torah” and “Old Testament” operates on two levels simultaneously: scope and framing.
On scope, the Torah is five books. The Old Testament is 39 (Protestant), 46 (Catholic), or more (Orthodox). The Torah sits inside the Old Testament as its foundational core, but the Old Testament reaches far beyond it — into the historical narratives of Joshua through Kings, the poetry of Psalms and Proverbs, the wisdom literature of Job and Ecclesiastes, and the prophetic collections from Isaiah through Malachi.
On framing, the terms signal different reading traditions. When someone says “Torah,” they are typically speaking from within, or in reference to, the Jewish tradition — where these five books occupy a position of unique authority and where the broader Tanakh represents a complete, self-contained collection. When someone says “Old Testament,” they are typically speaking from within, or in reference to, the Christian tradition — where these texts form the first part of a two-part Bible, a beginning that the Christian canon reads as moving toward the New Testament.
The practical consequence is that the same passage can function differently depending on which collection frames it. Isaiah 7:14 — “a young woman shall conceive and bear a son” — sits within the Tanakh as part of the prophet Isaiah’s message to King Ahaz during the Syro-Ephraimite crisis of the 8th century BCE. Within the Christian Old Testament, the same verse is read through the lens of Matthew 1:23, where it becomes a prophecy of the virgin birth of Jesus. The Hebrew word almah (“young woman”) is rendered as parthenos (“virgin”) in the Septuagint, and this translation choice shaped centuries of Christian interpretation. The text is the same. The canonical architecture around it shapes what it seems to say.
This is part of what makes the broader study of the Abrahamic religions so textually rich — traditions that share source material can produce strikingly different readings from that shared base, and the differences are often baked into the structure of their respective canons rather than residing in the texts themselves.
The Texts Between the Traditions
The boundary between the Tanakh and the various Christian Old Testaments also raises a question about the texts that fall between traditions — the books that some canons include and others exclude.
The deuterocanonical books occupy a revealing middle ground. Texts like Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and 1-2 Maccabees were composed in the Hellenistic period (roughly 332-63 BCE) and circulated widely in Greek-speaking Jewish communities. They appear in the Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible produced in the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE — which became the primary scriptural text of the early church. When the Catholic and Orthodox canons include these books, they are following the broader Septuagint tradition. When the Protestant and Jewish canons exclude them, they are following a narrower definition of the canon that solidified later.
The same texts, included in one canon and excluded from another, raise the underlying question: who decides what counts? The canonization process itself was neither sudden nor unanimous — it unfolded over centuries, shaped by communal practice, theological debate, and institutional authority. The Quran’s relationship to the Bible adds another layer: the Quran engages with some of this same shared material but from a position of independent revelation rather than canonical continuity.
Reading Across the Boundary
The vocabulary we use to describe these collections — Torah, Old Testament, Tanakh, Pentateuch, Hebrew Bible — carries assumptions about which reading tradition we are standing in, even when we do not intend it to. Each term maps onto a tradition, a canon, and a set of interpretive priorities.
The Torah is five books that function as the foundational layer of Jewish life and learning. The Old Testament is a larger collection that functions as the first half of the Christian Bible. The Tanakh arranges its books to end with restoration. The Christian Old Testament arranges its books to end with anticipation. The textual content they share is extensive — and the theological frameworks they build around that shared content are distinct.
For readers approaching these texts for the first time, the distinction between these terms is a practical entry point into a much larger set of questions about how the same ancient writings came to serve different communities in different ways. Uncanon presents these texts in their compositional context — with scholarly notes on when each was composed, who scholars think wrote it, and what was happening historically when it was written — so you can read with that background already in place.