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• 1 Esdras

  A Greek-language retelling of the return from Babylonian exile, drawn from Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, and carrying one episode found in no Hebrew scripture.

• 1 Maccabees

  A Jewish history of the second-century-BCE revolt against Seleucid rule — the persecution under Antiochus IV, the war of Judas Maccabeus, and the rededication of the Temple.

• 2 Maccabees

  A Greek history of the early Maccabean revolt, told for its martyrdoms — and an early Jewish witness to bodily resurrection and to prayer for the dead.

• Acts of the Apostles

  The fifth book of the New Testament — a narrative of the earliest Christian movement, from the Ascension and Pentecost through the missionary journeys of Peter and Paul.

• Agnus Dei

  The "Lamb of God" — a short liturgical chant addressed to Christ near the breaking of the bread in the Western Mass, and the lamb-and-banner emblem that carries the same image.

• Amos

  A book of the Hebrew Bible among the twelve Minor Prophets, ascribed to an eighth-century herdsman whose oracles bind worship to justice.

• Amulet

  An object worn or carried to ward off harm — among the oldest and most widespread of religious artifacts, and the broad category from which the talisman is usually distinguished.

• Apostolic Fathers

  The conventional name for a small body of early Christian writings, roughly late first to mid-second century, by authors held to stand one step from the apostles themselves.

• Ars Moriendi

  The late-medieval "art of dying" — Christian manuals on the deathbed temptations and the good death, instructing the dying and those who attended them how to meet the final hour.

• Assumption of Moses

  A first-century Jewish apocalyptic work cast as Moses's farewell prophecy to Joshua, surviving in a single incomplete Latin manuscript and surveying Israel's history down to a final deliverance.

• Atharvaveda

  The fourth and latest-canonized of the Vedas — a Sanskrit collection of hymns, healing charms, protective spells, and curses set beside speculative verse on the order of things.

• Avesta

  The collected scriptures of Zoroastrianism, composed in the old Iranian language called Avestan — liturgy, hymn, and law, with the archaic Gathas ascribed to Zarathustra at their core.

• Benedictus

  The Canticle of Zechariah, Luke 1:68–79 — the prophecy spoken at the naming of John the Baptist, sung at Morning Prayer in the Western daily office.

• Bible

  The collection of scriptures held sacred in Judaism and Christianity — not one book but a curated library, assembled over centuries and counted differently by different communities.

• Book of Baruch

  A short deuterocanonical book set in the Babylonian exile and ascribed to Jeremiah's scribe — canonical for Catholic and Orthodox Christians, apocryphal for Jews and most Protestants.

• Book of Common Prayer

  The single English-language service book of the reformed Church of England, first issued in 1549 and fixed in 1662 — the frame within which a whole national church prayed.

• Book of Daniel

  The biblical book of court tales and apocalyptic visions — the four kingdoms, the figure "like a son of man," and a kingdom held to outlast every empire.

• Book of Enoch

  An ancient Jewish apocalypse ascribed to the patriarch Enoch — a composite of visionary books on the fall of the angels, the secrets of heaven, and the judgment to come.

• Book of Ezra

  The Hebrew Bible's account of the return from Babylonian exile and the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple, named for the priest-scribe who reforms the restored community.

• Book of Habakkuk

  The eighth of the Hebrew Bible's Minor Prophets — three short chapters that press God on why the wicked prosper, and answer that the righteous shall live by his faithfulness.

• Book of Haggai

  One of the twelve Minor Prophets — a short oracle of 520 BCE urging the returned exiles to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

• Book of Hosea

  The first of the twelve Minor Prophets, set in the northern kingdom of Israel, which casts a troubled marriage as the figure for God's bond with a faithless people.

• Book of Joel

  A short book among the twelve Minor Prophets of the Hebrew Bible — a vision of the Day of the Lord, opened by a locust plague and closed by a promised outpouring of the divine spirit.

• Book of Jonah

  The short prophetic narrative of the Hebrew Bible in which a reluctant prophet flees his commission, is swallowed by a great fish, and resents the mercy God extends to a foreign city.

• Book of Jubilees

  A second-century BCE Jewish retelling of Genesis and early Exodus, framed as an angelic revelation to Moses, that orders history into jubilees and presses for a 364-day solar calendar.

• Book of Judges

  The seventh book of the Hebrew Bible, narrating the era between Israel's settlement and its first kings through a recurring cycle of apostasy, oppression, and deliverance by charismatic leaders.

• Book of Malachi

  The last of the twelve Minor Prophets and the closing book of the Christian Old Testament — a short post-exilic work built around a coming messenger and the return of Elijah.

• Book of Micah

  The sixth of the Hebrew Bible's twelve Minor Prophets — a short book of judgment and reprieve, source of the Bethlehem oracle and the verse asking what the Lord requires.

• Book of Mormon

  The scripture published by Joseph Smith in 1830 and held by Latter Day Saints to be the translated record of ancient peoples in the Americas — a second witness, alongside the Bible, to Christ.

• Book of Nahum

  The short prophetic book of the Hebrew Bible whose three chapters pronounce, in dense poetry, the fall of Nineveh and the end of Assyrian power.

• Book of Nehemiah

  The Hebrew Bible's account of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile, told largely in the first-person voice of the Persian king's cupbearer.

• Book of Numbers

  The fourth book of the Torah, recounting Israel's forty years in the wilderness — named in English for its two censuses, and in Hebrew for the desert itself.

• Book of the Dead

  The modern name for the ancient Egyptian funerary spells written to guide and protect the dead through the perils of the afterlife and the judgment of the heart.

• Book of Tobit

  A short Jewish narrative of the Assyrian exile, in which a disguised angel guides a young man, heals two afflicted households, and binds a demon — counted as scripture in some canons and not in others.

• Book of Wisdom

  A Greek-language Jewish wisdom book, written pseudonymously in the voice of Solomon, that praises divine Wisdom as a living presence and teaches the immortality of the righteous soul.

• Book of Zechariah

  A prophetic book of the Hebrew Bible, named for the prophet Zechariah — a sequence of dated night-visions followed by oracles that later readers mined for messianic meaning.

• Book of Zephaniah

  The ninth of the Hebrew Bible's twelve Minor Prophets — three short chapters built around the coming Day of the Lord, a reckoning that ends in a remnant restored.

• Books of Samuel

  Two books of the Hebrew Bible narrating Israel's turn to kingship — the prophet Samuel, the failed reign of Saul, and the rise of David.

• Clementine Literature

  A pair of early Christian romances — the Homilies and Recognitions — that follow Clement of Rome, the apostle Peter, and Peter's running debates with Simon Magus.

• Coffin Texts

  The corpus of ancient Egyptian funerary spells inscribed mostly on Middle Kingdom coffins — successor to the Pyramid Texts and source of the later Book of the Dead.

• Daozang

  The Daoist Canon — the collected scriptures, alchemical, ritual and revelatory texts of Daoism, gathered over centuries and organized in the scheme known as the Three Caverns.

• Deuterocanonical Books

  The set of Old Testament writings — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, the two books of Maccabees and others — held as Scripture by Catholic and Orthodox churches but set outside the Hebrew and Protestant canons.

• Deuteronomy

  The fifth book of the Torah, cast as Moses's farewell addresses on the edge of the promised land — the book that gives Judaism the Shema and its central command to love God.

• Dhammapada

  A short anthology of Buddhist verse in the Pali canon, traditionally ascribed to the Buddha — among the most widely read of all Buddhist texts.

• Diamond Sutra

  A short Mahayana Perfection of Wisdom scripture on non-attachment and the emptiness of fixed marks — and, in its 868 dated copy, the oldest dated complete printed book.

• Dies Irae

  The medieval Latin sequence on the Day of Judgment, long sung in the Requiem Mass, whose plainchant opening became Western music's standing figure for death.

• Ecclesiastes

  A wisdom book of the Hebrew Bible, spoken by the figure called Qoheleth, that weighs human effort against death and the limits of what anyone can know.

• Edda

  The two medieval Icelandic works — one a book of poems, one a handbook of poetry — that together preserve most of what survives of Norse mythology.

• Epistle of Barnabas

  An anonymous early Christian treatise, later ascribed to Paul's companion Barnabas, that reads the whole Mosaic Law as allegory written for Christians from the start.

• Epistle of James

  A short New Testament letter on the practice of faith — its insistence that belief without works is dead, its warnings about the tongue, and its rite of anointing the sick.

• Epistle of Jude

  A short, fierce New Testament letter against teachers it deems corrupt — notable for quoting the Book of Enoch and an apocryphal dispute over the body of Moses as if they were scripture.

• Epistle to the Colossians

  A New Testament letter to the church at Colossae, framed as Paul's, arguing for the supremacy of Christ over every cosmic power against a rival "philosophy" of angels and ascetic rules.

• Epistle to the Ephesians

  A New Testament letter ascribed to Paul, addressed to the church at large, in which Christ is set above the cosmic powers and the believer is raised with him into the heavens.

• Epistle to the Hebrews

  The anonymous New Testament treatise that reads Christ as eternal high priest after the order of Melchizedek, ministering in a heavenly sanctuary the earthly Temple only copied.

• Epistle to the Philippians

  A letter of Paul to the Christian community at Philippi, written from prison and carrying the early hymn of Christ's self-emptying.

• Epistle to the Romans

  Paul's longest and most systematic letter, written to a church he had not yet visited, setting out his account of sin, grace, and how Jew and Gentile stand before God.

• Epistle to Titus

  A short New Testament letter, framed as Paul's instruction to Titus on ordering the churches of Crete — one of the three Pastoral Epistles, and among the most debated as to authorship.

• Epistles of John

  Three short New Testament letters in the Johannine tradition, turning on light against darkness and on love, and written against teachers the author treats as having broken away.

• Ezekiel

  A prophetic book of the Hebrew Bible, set among the Judean exiles in Babylon, whose opening chariot-throne vision became foundational for later Jewish mysticism.

• First Book of Chronicles

  The first of the two biblical books of Chronicles — a retelling of Israel's past from Adam to David, opening with long genealogies and closing on the reign of David.

• First Book of Kings

  The biblical book that carries Israel's monarchy from Solomon's accession and the building of the Temple into the divided kingdom and the prophet Elijah.

• First Epistle of Peter

  A short New Testament letter written to encourage scattered Christians under pressure, attributed to the apostle Peter and best known for its language of a chosen people and a "royal priesthood."

• First Epistle to the Corinthians

  Paul's letter to the church at Corinth — a working pastor's reply to a divided congregation, holding the chapter on love, the body as image of the community, and the argument for a risen spiritual body.

• First Epistle to the Thessalonians

  Paul's letter to the young church at Thessalonica, widely held by scholars to be the earliest surviving Christian writing, centred on the awaited return of the Lord and the fate of the dead.

• First Epistle to Timothy

  A New Testament letter on church order, addressed to a younger overseer and closing with a warning against what it calls falsely named "knowledge."

• Gloria in Excelsis Deo

  The "Glory to God in the highest" — the Greater Doxology of the Christian Mass, an early hymn of praise built from the words the angels are said to have sung at the Nativity.

• Gloria Patri

  The short Trinitarian doxology of Christian prayer — "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit" — recited after psalms and through the rhythm of devotion.

• Gospel

  An account of the life, death, and teaching of Jesus — from the Greek for "good news"; the four works in the Christian canon, and a wider body of texts the canon left out.

• Gospel of James

  A second-century apocryphal gospel of Mary's birth and childhood — the source of much later Marian tradition, including the names of her parents and the claim of her perpetual virginity.

• Gospel of Judas

  A second-century Gnostic gospel, lost for centuries and published in 2006, that recasts Judas not as the betrayer but as the one disciple who understood.

• Gospel of Matthew

  The first book of the New Testament — an anonymous first-century life of Jesus, written for a Jewish-Christian audience, that presents him as the fulfilment of Israel's scripture.

• Gospel of Thomas

  An early Christian sayings-gospel: 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, preserved in Coptic among the Nag Hammadi codices, with no narrative of his life or death.

• Guru Granth Sahib

  The central scripture of Sikhism — an anthology of devotional hymns that the tradition venerates not as a book about a Guru but as the living, final Guru itself.

• Heart Sutra

  The shortest and most-recited of the Mahayana Perfection of Wisdom texts, built around the claim that form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

• Holy Water

  Water set apart by blessing for ritual purification, protection, and the marking of sacred boundaries — a sacramental held to carry consecrated power into ordinary use.

• I Ching

  The ancient Chinese divination classic of sixty-four hexagrams — consulted by yarrow stalk or coin, layered with commentary, and read for two thousand years as both oracle and book of wisdom.

• Incense

  Aromatic resin or wood burned in worship for its rising smoke and scent — used to honor the divine, purify a space, and, in many traditions, to figure prayer ascending to God.

• Isaiah

  A major prophetic book of the Hebrew Bible, ascribed to the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem and now widely read by scholarship as the work of more than one hand.

• Jataka Tales

  The Buddhist corpus of stories told as the Buddha's former lives — birth narratives in which the future Buddha, as animal or human, works out the long discipline of becoming awake.

• Jeremiah

  A prophetic book of the Hebrew Bible, set in Judah's last decades before the Babylonian conquest and named for the prophet whose oracles, life, and laments it gathers.

• Joshua

  The sixth book of the Hebrew Bible — the account of Israel's entry into Canaan under Joshua son of Nun, and the division of the land among the tribes.

• Ketuvim

  The third and last division of the Hebrew Bible — the "Writings," a mixed gathering of poetry, wisdom, and history that includes the Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and Daniel.

• Lamentations

  The short biblical book of five poems mourning the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple — grief rendered in tight acrostic form.

• Letter of Jeremiah

  A short deuterocanonical work, framed as a letter from the prophet Jeremiah to the Babylonian exiles, given over almost entirely to an attack on the worship of manufactured idols.

• Leviticus

  The third book of the Hebrew Torah — a manual of sacrifice, priesthood, and purity, given as the speech of God to Moses at Sinai.

• Mahabharata

  The great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of one ruling house — a vast poem of dharma and ruin that carries the Bhagavad Gita within it.

• Mishnah

  The first written compilation of Jewish oral law, redacted around 200 CE — the foundational text of rabbinic Judaism and the core around which the Talmud was built.

• New Testament

  The second division of the Christian Bible — twenty-seven Greek writings, from gospels to letters to an apocalypse, that the early church gathered as scripture alongside the Jewish books.

• Old Testament

  The Christian name for the older portion of the Bible — the Hebrew scriptures of ancient Israel, received and reordered by the church and read as the first half of a single revelation.

• Parable of the Good Samaritan

  A parable told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, in which a despised Samaritan rescues a beaten stranger — read for centuries as a teaching on neighbour-love and, allegorically, on Christ.

• Parable of the Prodigal Son

  The Gospel parable of a son who squanders his inheritance and returns to a father's welcome — read by some later traditions as an image of the soul's exile and homecoming.

• Pentateuch

  The first five books of the Hebrew Bible — Genesis through Deuteronomy — received in tradition as the Torah of Moses and, in modern scholarship, as a composite shaped over centuries.

• Prayer of Manasseh

  A short penitential prayer, fifteen verses in Greek, put in the mouth of King Manasseh of Judah repenting in Babylonian captivity — canonical in Eastern churches, apocryphal in the West.

• Proverbs

  The Hebrew wisdom book of the Bible, a collection of moral sayings whose opening chapters give Wisdom a voice and a presence of her own.

• Psalms

  The collection of one hundred and fifty Hebrew poems of praise, lament, and petition that stands at the head of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible and anchors Jewish and Christian prayer.

• Psalms of Solomon

  A collection of eighteen Jewish psalms from the first century BCE, falsely ascribed to Solomon, voicing a sharp hope for a Davidic deliverer.

• Pyramid Texts

  The oldest body of Egyptian religious writing — spells carved in Old Kingdom royal pyramids to carry the dead king into the afterlife and up among the gods.

• Qur’an

  The foundational scripture of Islam, held by Muslims to be the literal speech of God revealed in Arabic to the prophet Muhammad over roughly two decades.

• Rigveda

  The oldest of the four Vedas — a collection of Sanskrit hymns to the gods, composed orally in the second millennium BCE and held to be the foundation of Vedic religion.

• Samaveda

  The Veda of chant — the third of the four Vedas, in which verses largely drawn from the Rigveda are set as melodies for liturgical singing.

• Second Book of Chronicles

  The second half of the biblical Chronicles — the reign of Solomon and the building of the Jerusalem Temple, then the kings of Judah down to the Babylonian Exile.

• Second Book of Kings

  The biblical book carrying the history of the divided Hebrew monarchy to its end — the miracles of Elisha, and the destruction of both Israel and Judah.

• Second Epistle of Peter

  A short New Testament letter written under the name of the apostle Peter, warning against false teachers and defending the deferred promise of the Lord's return.

• Second Epistle to the Corinthians

  Paul's most personal surviving letter, written to a community that had turned against him — and the source of the ascent to the "third heaven" that later visionaries kept returning to.

• Second Epistle to the Thessalonians

  A short New Testament letter written to the church at Thessalonica, best known for its warning that a "man of lawlessness" must appear before the Day of the Lord.

• Second Epistle to Timothy

  A short New Testament letter framed as Paul's last words to his colleague Timothy — the most personal of the three Pastoral Epistles, and read by tradition as a farewell from prison.

• Sibylline Oracles

  Greek hexameter prophecies composed mostly by Jewish and Christian writers wearing the mask of the pagan Sibyl — pseudonymous scripture that made an oracle of the nations testify for the one God.

• Sirach

  An early second-century BCE Hebrew wisdom book — known also as Ecclesiasticus — that fuses practical counsel with a hymn to a personified Wisdom present at creation.

• Soma

  The pressed ritual drink at the center of Vedic sacrifice — a plant, the juice extracted from it, and a god of the same name; its botanical identity is long disputed.

• Song of Songs

  The Hebrew Bible's book of love poetry — frankly erotic, with God never plainly named in it — and the most allegorized text in either testament.

• Syllabus of Errors

  The 1864 catalogue of eighty propositions condemned by Pope Pius IX — the Roman church's sharpest formal refusal of pantheism, naturalism, rationalism, and the claims of modern liberal society.

• Talisman

  An object made and consecrated to draw a specific power into itself — distinguished, in the magical literature, from the protective amulet by being manufactured rather than merely worn.

• Talmud

  The central compendium of rabbinic Judaism — the Mishnah and its surrounding commentary, the Gemara — recording centuries of legal and scriptural debate.

• Tanakh

  The Hebrew Bible as Judaism receives it — the canon in three parts, Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim, in an order and division of its own.

• Tao Te Ching

  The short, aphoristic classic at the root of Taoism — traditionally ascribed to Laozi — on the Tao, the unforced action called wu wei, and the strength of yielding.

• Ten Commandments

  The set of injunctions the Hebrew Bible records as given to Moses at Sinai and inscribed on two stone tablets — counted differently across the traditions that hold them.

• Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

  A set of pseudepigraphal deathbed speeches put in the mouths of Jacob's twelve sons, blending moral exhortation with visions of the end — and long disputed between Jewish and Christian origins.

• The Chaldean Oracles

  A body of Greek hexameter verse, ascribed in antiquity to Julian the Theurgist, that the later Neoplatonists treated as revealed scripture.

• The Didache

  An early Christian church manual, probably late first or early second century, setting out moral teaching, baptism, fasting, the eucharist, and the ordering of the community.

• The Holy Grail

  The sacred vessel of Arthurian romance — first a mysterious dish, later the cup of the Last Supper — and the object of a quest that has carried an unusually large symbolic afterlife.

• The Nag Hammadi Library

  The cache of thirteen Coptic codices unearthed near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945, whose Gnostic and Hermetic texts reopened a body of writing long known only through its opponents.

• The Shepherd of Hermas

  A second-century Christian work of visions and moral teaching, recording the call to repentance after baptism — once read alongside scripture, later left outside the canon.

• The Zohar

  The central book of theosophical Kabbalah — an Aramaic mystical commentary on the Torah, ascribed to a second-century sage but composed in thirteenth-century Spain, mapping the hidden life of God.

• Torah

  The five books of Moses at the heart of Jewish scripture — held in tradition to be revelation, and read in Kabbalah as a coded body of divine names.

• Tripitaka

  The "three baskets" of the early Buddhist canon — monastic discipline, the discourses, and systematic doctrine — preserved most fully in the Pali Tipitaka of the Theravada.

• Urim and Thummim

  The sacred lot-objects carried in the breastpiece of the Israelite high priest, used to seek divine answers; their physical form is nowhere described and remains unknown.

• Yajurveda

  One of the four Vedas — the priest's working text for the fire sacrifice, gathering the formulas spoken while the ritual acts are carried out.

• Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

  The aphoristic foundation of classical yoga — a short Sanskrit work attributed to Patanjali that orders the discipline of stilling the mind into eight limbs ending in absorption.