A Biblical Survey of the Old Testament

This brief and concise study of the Old Testament will cover, systematically, the history of the ancient world out of which our thirty-nine books of the Old Testament emerge. This Old Testament introduction deals with matters of language, customs, historical situations, persons, places, and events alluded to in the various books of the Bible. This examination will deal specifically with the Hebrew and Aramaic languages - the study of these languages will help one understand the Biblical meaning of these words in their context. This Biblical survey will examine the history of the Hebrew people, their pagan surroundings, and the religion and culture of the other non-Hebrew people groups. This survey will investigate the authorship of several books in the Old Testament Canon, because, the authorship reflects and relates to the reliability of the ancient text. This concise guide will examine the dates of some books of the Old Testament since the dates will clue us in on the cultural issues at that time related to the people of God. This survey will investigate the specific historical settings in which the authors spoke on God's behalf. Also, this examination of the Old Testament, will cover some facts about Textual Criticism. This methodology of recovering the Old Testament text to its pure original form, helps erase many transcription errors that have crept into our ancient texts. In addition to this, and lastly, this brief and concise study will look at the history of the transmission of the texts. We will investigate the way the original autographs were copied into other languages and various manuscripts families. Although by no means an exhaustive investigation, this survey will give one a brief and concise understanding of our Old Testament Bible.