Remember that, except for a few scattered verses in Aramaic, these books were all written in Hebrew. Now the Hebrew alphabet had no vowels and no punctuation. What is more, all the letters were run together. If you wrote that way in English, you would get something like this:
MTHLRDYRGDWHBRGHTYTFTHLNDFGYP TTFTHHSFBNDGYSHLLHVNTHRGDSBFRM
If you can guess where the vowels go, and what they are, and how to divide the words thus found, you can finally figure out that this sentence reads:
I AM THE LORD YOUR GOD, WHO BROUGHT YOU OUT OF THE LAND OF EGYPT, OUT OF THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE. YOU SHALL HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME. ( Ex. 20: 2, 3)
And even though omitting the vowels saves space, it is obviously quite a stunt to read this kind of writing; to deal with this problem "vowel points" began to be used on later manuscripts, little marks placed under or over the consonants to indicate what vowels should be inserted where.
As time went on, more and more Jews learned Greek, and fewer and fewer could read Hebrew accurately. Therefore, beginning about 270 B.C. and extending up into the Christian Era, Jewish scholars made translations of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek. These documents were the ones used by the early Christians, and are known as the Septuagint (from septuaginta = seventy) because according to a tradition seventy (-two) scholars produced the translation in seventy (-two) days.
About a dozen books in the Septuagint were not included among the approved Jewish Scriptures by the Council of Jamnia. These books are called the Apocrypha (meaning "hidden" or "obscure"). Our Old Testament does not include them, since it is based upon the Hebrew documents. They are included in Roman Catholic Bibles, since the official Roman Catholic translation made extensive use of the Septuagint.
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