Origins, history, language

Where does the title ‘BIBLE’ come from?

The Bible comes from the Greek words ta biblia (single: 'biblion') meaning the books – any books. The words may have come from the port of Byblos in Syria, known to have been an exporter of papyrus. Biblos in old Greek originally meant the inner bark of the papyrus plant from which the earliest books were made.

The word hasn’t changed much in 2,000 years: in modern Greek it has become biblio and in English it comes through in words like bibliography, a booklist. The word papyrus itself gave us our English word ‘paper’.

The title ‘Bible’ is often used with the implication that this was the collection of books, the books you really ought to read, the right books. But as a name for the sixty-six books we call the Bible, it only really caught on in the fifth century AD – when the books had already been around for five centuries.