Unlocking the Hebrew Scriptures with their secret password

As a social experiment I have been asking people, “How many books are there in the Bible?”

Although the correct answer depends on how you count, most people end up making wild guesses.

It makes a difference whether you are Catholic or Protestant. My Catholic Bible has 73 books: 27 in the New Testament, and 46 in the Old Testament.

In any case, almost everybody gets the total number wrong. But my favourite response has been from my mother-in-law, who correctly answered, “Four.”

Yes, correctly. If you consider the New Testament as one whole book, then that counts as one.

What about the so-called “Old Testament”? In fact, these Hebrew Scriptures are traditionally subdivided into three.

So, there you have it: one Greek volume, and three Hebrew volumes, giving four books in total.

Don’t believe me? You can pick up a Hebrew Bible at the bookstore, bound as a set of three separate volumes.

In Robert Alter’s magnificent translation, a complete collection published just this year, you get three hardcover books together in a nice slipcase that says: The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary.

True, you can also buy these Hebrew Scriptures bound together in one volume. For example, the Jewish Publication Society has a portable one-volume edition with the Hebrew and English side by side.

But the traditional Hebrew name for the Jewish Scriptures bears witness to their threefold division: the Tanakh.

“Tanakh” is the transliteration into our English alphabet of a Hebrew word that is actually an acronym: “Ta-Na-Kh.”

When written in Hebrew, this acronym is constructed from three letters of the Hebrew alphabet: tav, nun, and kaf.

The three letters are taken from the first letters of three Hebrew words, which are the names for a subdivision into three books: Torah (which means “Teaching”), Nevi’im (“Prophets”), and Ketuvim (“Writings”).

Perhaps a better transliteration of the acronym would simply be three English letters: T-N-K.

But I guess most people wouldn’t know how to pronounce the acronym “TNK” in English. It presents the same dilemma posed by a supervillain from the Superman comic books, Mr. Mxyzptlk, whose name people found confusing (even in its shortened version, “Mxy,” because it is still a string of consonants – as is “Tnk”).

Superman could defeat Mr. Mxyzptlk and send him back to his home in the Fifth Dimension only if he could trick him into saying or spelling his name backwards: “Kltpzyxm,” which is pronounced, “kel-tip-zix-um.”

Interestingly, the Hebrew alphabet consists of nothing but consonants. And when printed on the page, the letters of the Hebrew words run across the page from right to left.

Of course, this looks “backwards” to someone who is used to reading English books, where the letters of the words run from left to right.

Thus, in Hebrew, the acronym for what we could count as the three “books” of the Hebrew Scriptures would follow this order on the page: K-N-T.

As with the trickster Mr. Mxyzptlk, I think it might be fun to ask someone how to say the name of the Hebrew Scriptures backwards. (To pique their interest, you could claim this is the secret password to the Kingdom of Heaven.)

I would argue that the correct answer to this intriguing question is: “Canada.” I derive this pronunciation from adding the appropriate vowels to round out the backwards acronym “K-N-T” into: “Ka-Na-Ta” (in the same way “Kltpzyxm” is pronounced aloud by adding the appropriate vowels: “kel-tip-zix-um”).

In truth, the name “Canada” originates from the St. Lawrence Iroquoian word Kanata, which means “village” or “settlement.”

The word Torah is sometimes badly translated as “Law,” but it really means “Teaching,” since it consists of the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy), which contain not just law but also prose and poetry. Laws and commandments are embedded within a narrative teaching us how to interpret them.

The scholar Yoram Hazony argues we gain an even better view of the threefold structure of the Hebrew Scriptures if, first, we see that Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings – the first four books of Nevi’im (“Prophets”), which come immediately after the five books of Torah – form a single narrative whole (of nine books, from Genesis to Kings) that he calls “The History of Israel.”

Second, the orations of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the 12 Minor Prophets proceed to offer a prophetic commentary on (and critique of) this History.

Third, the Ketuvim (“Writings”) form a diverse collection, with genres different from prophetic oratory, offering further perspectives on Israel’s history.

However you slice it, clearly my mother-in-law, a life-long Mass-goer, has intuited the deepest structure of the Greek and Hebrew Scriptures. Maybe she also knows the secret password?