The Bible
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The Bible (from Koine Greek: τὰ βιβλία, tà biblía, or "the books") is a collection of religious texts or scriptures composed beginning around c. 1200 BCE, compiling instructions, stories, poetry, parables and prophecies originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek, that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, Islam, and many other religions.
The texts were compiled by different religious communities into various official collections. The earliest, called the Torah in Hebrew and the Pentateuch in Greek, contained the first five books of the Bible; the second oldest was a collection of narrative histories and prophecies called the Nevi'im; the third collection, the Ketuvim contains psalms, proverbs, and narrative histories.
Christianity (which began as an outgrowth of Judaism in the first century AD) used these texts as the basis of the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, with further gospels, Pauline epistles and other texts quickly coalescing to become the New Testament. The term "Bible" can refer to either the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Bible.
The Bible (and its study) has had a profound influence on culture and history worldwide. It was the first book to be mass-produced, and remains the best-selling publication of all time, with estimated sales of around five billion copies. At present it has been translated into approximately half of the world's languages. Believers in the Bible generally consider it to be a product of divine inspiration, though interpretations can vary considerably.
The Bible has also informed and influenced the work of The Residents, who have often used the collection as a point of cultural reference and parody, most notably on their 1998 concept album Wormwood: Curious Stories From The Bible, which depicts a selection of the more violent or salacious tales from the collection, mostly from the Old Testament.