‘Old Testament’ vs. ‘Hebrew Bible’

There’s been a push in recent years for the Old Testament to be relabelled the ‘Hebrew Bible’ because ‘old’ has negative connotations.

My first reaction was no, the Bible is the name for Christian scripture so to use ‘Bible’ for Jewish scripture isn’t acceptable. But ‘bible’ comes via Old French and Latin from Ancient Greek ‘biblia’ meaning ‘books’. Hence the Bible named after its role. The same is true of God (from Old English ‘god’ meaning ‘deity’) or how people use ‘Mum/Dad’ as proper nouns when ‘mum/dad’ are ordinary nouns.

But the reasoning for replacing ‘Old Testament’ with ‘Hebrew Bible’ still gives me pause. ‘Old’, it’s reasoned, is considered bad with negative connotations, connotations that are only accentuated when compared with, or placed next to, the new (i.e. the New Testament). Yet renaming something to get rid of the negatives simply legitimises and confirms these connotations as true (because you can’t get rid of something unless it’s real). Elderly people get enough trouble as it is.

So I’m going to stick with ‘Old Testament’.