The monumental work that constitutes the Bible as a whole is the expression of the religious conscience with which a people has read and interpreted its history, but it is also a wide sample of its own political, social, cultural, legislative, literary and religious forms. of the peoples with whom the Israelites have been related, and of the way in which those same forms have influenced Jewish history. This adaptation of a large part of the Old Testament is a journey through the itinerary followed by Israel according to biblical tradition: the divine promises, the exit from Egypt, the alliance at Sinai, the conquest of the promised land, the establishment of the monarchy, the division of the kingdom, the destruction of Jerusalem and exile, the Maccabee movement. Neither the distance in time, nor a hypothetical lack of interest in the narrative matter, nor the sometimes repetitive and insistent style, which we have tried to avoid in this edition, should distract the reader from a text whose reading and knowledge lead to the core of the Western Judeo-Christian tradition. Such is its wealth: sacred writing for the Jews, the word of God for Christians, an object of study by historians, philologists and theologians, and a point of reference for the work of archaeologists. In short, it seems unnecessary to indicate that a text capable of hosting such a cultural heritage deserves a careful reading.