Faith & RitualGreek → English
Bible
/ˈbaɪbəl/noun
The collected scriptures of Judaism and Christianity, or any work treated as the final authority on a subject.
The Greek roots
βιβλία
biblía
books, scrolls
Literally: “the books”
Follow a root:βιβλία1 word
The story of the word
τὰ βιβλία is a plural, the books, and it entered Latin as a plural before scribes read biblia as a feminine singular and made it one volume. The root βύβλος is the papyrus reed, named in Greek after Byblos, the Phoenician port that shipped it, so the holiest word in the language began as the name of a packaging material. The plural sense is the honest one: sixty-six documents in the Protestant canon, written across roughly a millennium.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
bibliographybibliophilebibliotherapy
In a sentence
Her grandmother's Bible had a pressed fern at the Book of Ruth.