The Old Testament tells the story of how God selected his chosen people, it tells the story of the Israelites from their conquest of Canaan to their defeat and exile in Babylon. The Old Testament is the story of the Jewish peoples and their very unique relationship with God.
In Christianity different Bibles contain a different amount of Old Testament books. Originally when The Bible was compiled during the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine, the Christian Bible contained forty six Old Testament books, and the Catholic Bibles still do, the Protestant Bibles however thirty nine Old Testament books.
The first five books are known as the Torah and are regarded as the Books of Moses dictacted to him by God, with the exception of the last eight verses of Deuteronomy, which describe the death and burial of Moses.
Between 280 and 130 B.C.E. the books of The Old Testament were translated from Hebrew into Greek, originally these scriptures were written, and read, as separate scrolls, bound books and Bibles did not, yet, exist. The Greek translations of the Bible contain several books not found in the modern Hebrew Bible, and so differs from what was originally intended.
Around 400 C.E. Pope Damasus I, commissioned Jerome, the leading scholar of the day, to produce an updated Latin version of the Bible, Latin had by this time replaced Greek as the language of these early Christians. Jerome used the Hebrew Bible for his translation of The Old Testament and ignored the Greek translations. His Old Testament became part of the standard Bible as used in Western Churches, while in Eastern Churches they use the Greek.
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