The Orthodox Old Testament includes the books you know from your Protestant Bible plus several others, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, additions to Daniel and Esther, and a few more depending on the edition. We didn’t add them. Protestants removed them during the Reformation.
Here’s what happened. The early Church used the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made a couple centuries before Christ. Greek-speaking Jews used it. The apostles used it. When the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, it’s usually quoting the Septuagint. The Church Fathers read it, preached from it, quoted it in their writings. It was the Bible of the early Church.
The Septuagint contains more books than the later Hebrew canon that developed after Christ. Those additional books were written in Greek or survive only in Greek, and they were part of the scriptures the Church received and used in worship from the beginning.
Fast forward to the 1500s. The Reformers wanted to go back to what they saw as older and purer sources. Martin Luther and others decided to align the Old Testament with the Hebrew Bible used by Jews rather than the Septuagint used by Christians. So they pulled out the books that weren’t in the Hebrew canon. Some early Protestant Bibles still printed these books in a separate section called the Apocrypha, but eventually most Protestant publishers dropped them entirely.
The Orthodox Church kept using what it had always used. We call these books the Anagignoskomena, which just means “things that are read.” They’re read in our services. They’re part of our liturgical life. They inform our theology.
And that theology matters. Take 2 Maccabees, which describes Jews praying for their dead and believing in resurrection. That’s not some obscure detail, it reflects the Church’s practice of praying for the departed, something we do at every Divine Liturgy. Or consider the Wisdom of Solomon, with its beautiful reflections on divine wisdom and the immortality of the soul. Sirach offers practical moral instruction that sounds remarkably like Proverbs. The story of Susanna (one of the additions to Daniel) shows God vindicating the innocent and has been a source for iconography and preaching for centuries.
These aren’t just nice stories. They’re scripture.
I know this can feel strange if you grew up Baptist or Church of Christ here in Southeast Texas. You learned your 66 books. You might’ve been told the other books were added by Catholics or that they contain errors. But the historical record is clear: the Church used these books for fifteen centuries before the Reformation. The Orthodox Church, which predates Protestantism by a millennium and a half, has always included them.
Does this mean your Protestant Bible is wrong? Not exactly. The New Testament is the same (though that’s another article). The 39 books of the Old Testament that Protestants have are absolutely scripture, we have them too. But we believe the Church received a fuller Old Testament through the Septuagint, and we’ve kept it.
When you pick up an Orthodox Study Bible, you’ll find these additional books right there in the Old Testament where they’ve always been. Don’t skip them. Read Tobit’s story of faithfulness and angelic guidance. Read Judith’s courage. Read the wisdom literature that shaped Christian thought for centuries. You’ll find they fit naturally with the rest of scripture because they were always meant to be there.
If you’re visiting St. Michael’s and this is new to you, don’t worry. Nobody expects you to have these books memorized. But as you journey deeper into Orthodoxy, you’ll hear them read in services. You’ll see them quoted by the Fathers. You’ll discover they’ve been shaping Christian worship and thought since the beginning. The Orthodox Bible isn’t bigger because we added books. It’s bigger because we kept them.
