The Categories of the Books of the Old Testament

Recently I wrote and submitted to Associated Content an article about each of the first five books of the Old Testament, but it occurred to me that I should have begun with an overview of the types of books found in the Old Testament. That way, a reader of each article can place the book in its proper category and location within the Old Testament.

The Categories of the Books. It is important to emphasize at the beginning that the Old Testament is not presented to us in a straight-forward, consecutive narrative. Instead, Bible scholars have long recognized that the Old Testament consists of 39 books arranged by type of writing, although there is some crossover between the categories. For example, history is not limited to the books classified as history. While the first five books are known collectively as Torah or Law, they do contain a great deal of history.

Here are the four categories of Old Testament books:

The Torah-The first five books of the Old Testament
The History books-The next 12 books
The Poetical books or, simply, the Writings-The five books that follow the history books
The Prophets--The final 17 books of the Old Testament