Twenty-Four Books of the Holy Scriptures

The Leeser Bible, published as The Twenty-Four Books of the Holy Scriptures, was the first complete Jewish English translation of the Tanakh to appear in the United States. Its scope is the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, arranged according to the traditional Jewish division into twenty-four books and rendered from the Hebrew on the basis of the Masoretic Text. The work is classified as a fresh translation rather than a revision of an existing English version, and it follows a formal approach shaped by Jewish interpretive tradition, drawing on the classical commentators. Among its distinctive features, it avoided explicitly Christian renderings, which had characterized the English Bibles otherwise available to Jewish readers of the period. It went on to become a major English Bible for American Jews, serving in synagogue, school, and home use until later Jewish translations gradually supplanted it.