*Detailed information about the Tanach has been moved to Tanach (Hebrew Bible)*

Tanach (Hebrew Scriptures)
The Tanach (mistakenly known as the "Old Testament") is made up of the Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim. The Tanach was canonized in approximately 500 BCE by the Men of the Great Assembly. The Tanach was not originally broken into chapter and verses. The idea of chapter and verses - as well as the breaking apart of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles - is a leftover from Christians in the 13th century. Before the study of Torah a brocha (blessing) is said in which the person thanks G-d for giving the Jews Torah. There have been many rabbis who have written commentaries on the Torah. Any complete study of the Torah needs to include some commentary from these sages. (For further information see: Who wrote the Tanach?)

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Talmud
The Talmud is a basis of Jewish Law. The Talmud consists of the Mishnah and Gemara. The Written and Oral Torahs was handed down through the successive generations from the time of Moses. [See a page of Talmud] The Talmud is divided into 6 seders (orders) and 39 different tractates.

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Prophecy and Prophets
A prophet is a spokesman for G-d, a person chosen by G-d to speak to people on G-d's behalf and convey a message or teaching. Prophets were role models of holiness, scholarship and closeness to G-d and set the standards for the entire community. The Talmud says there were hundreds of thousands of prophets. Most of the prophets conveyed messages that were intended solely for their own generation and were not reported in scripture. Scripture identifies only 55 prophets (48 male and 7 female) of Israel. Not all prophets were Jewish.. A well-known gentile prophet is Balaam (Numbers 22). Some of the prophets, such as Jonah, were sent on missions to speak to the gentiles. The gift of prophecy has ended for both gentile and Jew but it will be restored during the Messianic Age.

Prophecy is not a gift that is arbitrarily conferred upon people. The gift of prophecy is the culmination of a person's spiritual and ethical development. When a person reaches a sufficient level of spiritual and ethical achievement, the Shechinah comes to rest upon him or her. Likewise, the gift of prophecy leaves the person if that person lapses from his or her spiritual and ethical perfection.

The greatest of the prophets was Moses. It is said that Moses saw all that all of the other prophets combined saw, and more. All subsequent prophecy was merely an expression of what Moses had already seen.

Prophets of the Tanach

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Jewish Apocrypha
The Jewish Apocrypha (from the Greek, meaning "secret" or "things hidden away") and Pseudepigrapha are made up of various books - written mostly in Greek with some in Hebrew or Aramaic - that were written by Jews but never canonized in the Tanach. Some of these books have been included in Protestant and Catholic Bibles but are not part of the Jewish Holy Texts. The Protestant Bibles place these texts between the "Old Testament" and "New Testament" and are referred to as the Apocrypha. The Catholic Bibles places these texts throughout the Bible and are referred to as the Deuterocanonical. Jewish Apocryphal texts are generally divided into four types: historical, prophetic, lyric, and didactic.
 

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Dead Sea Scrolls
Timetable of Discovery and Debate

In 1947, young Bedouin shepherds entered a long-untouched limestone cave and found jars filled with ancient scrolls. That initial discovery by the Bedouins yielded seven scrolls and began a search that lasted nearly a decade and eventually produced thousands of scroll fragments from eleven caves. During those same years, archaeologists excavated the Qumran ruin, a complex of structures located on a barren terrace between the cliffs where the caves are found and the Dead Sea. Historical, paleographic, and linguistic evidence, as well as carbon-14 dating, established that the scrolls and the Qumran ruin dated from the third century BCE to 68 CE - during the late Second Temple Period - the scrolls are older than any other surviving biblical manuscripts by almost one thousand years.

The Dead Sea Scrolls texts are identified by a number and letter combination, indicating the cave from which they were recovered. This initial code is followed by either a second number (the catalog file number assigned to each fragment as it was  archived) or by a few letters that abbreviate an alternative name given to a fragment by researchers, usually the supposed title of the text.

Generally speaking the manuscripts fall into one or more of the following genres:  Biblical texts, Pentateuch stories and commentaries; legal and ritual texts; prophets stories and commentaries; psalms and poetry; wisdom literature; prophecy and visions; sectarian literature; and "miscellaneous things that don't fit anywhere else".  Some texts can be assigned to several categories depending on the subjective reading of the interpreter.

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Bible Code
Bible code research dates to at least the 12th century, when rabbinical scholars first wrote about discovering meaningful words hidden in the Hebrew text of the Torah. Tradition holds that everything and everyone that ever was or ever will be was recorded in the text of the first five books of the Bible. Thus, Rabbis encouraged caution in Torah copyists by reminding them that just one letter lost in their work could bring about the end of the world.

The original statistical research, done by three Israeli mathematicians, was published in Statistical Science. These mathematicians reduced the Book of Genesis to a single continuous text string without spaces or vowels, 304,805 characters long. Using Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS), they tested for a list of 32 famous Jewish scholars and calculated probabilities of their names occurring near the day and month of their birth or death. There have been interesting codes found that refer to such topics as Rabin's assassination, John F. Kennedy's assassination, and Rabbi Kahane's murder.

There is evidence that the Bible Code is purely fictional. Dr. James Price has found many instances of blasphemous statements by using the Bible Code. For example, in Genesis 41:27 he found the code for "We will awaken, YHVH (G-d's proper Name) is an abomination." For more information, please read this article The Yeshua Codes: Fact or Fiction

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