Old Testament. The Old Testament is the first part of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew writings by the Israelites believed by most Christians and religious Jews to be the sacred Word of God.
The second part of Christian Bibles is the New Testament, originally written in the Koine Greek language. The books that comprise the Old Testament canon, as well as their order and names, differ between Christian denominations.
The Catholic canon comprises 46 books, and the canons of the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches comprise up to 49 books and the most common Protestant canon comprises 39 books. The 39 books in common to all the Christian canons correspond to the 24 books of the Tanakh, with some differences of order, and there are some differences in text.
The additional number reflects the splitting of several texts into separate books in Christian bibles. The books which are part of a Christian Old Testament but which are not part of the Hebrew canon are sometimes described as deuterocanonical.
In general, Protestant Bibles do not include the deuterocanonical books in their canon, but some versions of Anglican and Lutheran bibles place such books in a separate section called Apocrypha. These extra books are ultimately derived from the earlier Greek Septuagint collection of