The Old Testament in Christian Bibles contains all of the books included in the Jewish Scriptures. Some Christian traditions also include books that are not part of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). Most of these books are included in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint, which was made by Greek-speaking Jewish scholars living in Alexandria, Egypt, in the third century B.C. The Septuagint is the Bible that the apostles and other early Christians used. Most of the times when New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, they use the Septuagint.

In the table shown here, the Protestant Old Testament contains only the books found in the Hebrew Bible, but they are grouped differently than in Jewish Bibles. The Catholic Old Testament contains all of the books found in the Hebrew Bible plus the other books that are part of the Septuagint. The Orthodox Old Testament includes all of these books, plus 3 Maccabees (and sometimes 4 Maccabees in an appendix), the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151, which appear in some versions of the Septuagint.

The comparative list below shows the order in which these books usually appear in Bibles printed for each of these Christian traditions, with the exception of the Prophetic Books in Orthodox Bibles, where the Minor Prophets (Hosea through Malachi) are usually placed before Isaiah. Orthodox Bibles also place Amos and Micah after Hosea.

Several ecumenical or interconfessional Bibles include the books that are not part of the Hebrew Bible in a separate section between the Old and New Testaments, where they are called Deuterocanonical or Apocryphal books. Books listed below in the “Catholic” and “Orthodox” columns that are rendered in italics are part of the traditional Protestant Apocrypha.