The Hebrew Bible (Latin Biblia Hebraica, also Hebrew Scriptures, Jewish Bible) is a term used by biblical scholars to refer to the Tanakh (Hebrew: תנ"ך‎), a canonical collection of Jewish texts, and the common textual source of the several canonical editions of the Christian Old Testament. These texts are composed mainly in Biblical Hebrew, with some passages in Biblical Aramaic (in the books of Daniel, Ezra and a few others).

The content, to which the Protestant Old Testament closely corresponds, does not act as source to the deuterocanonical portions of the Roman Catholic, nor to the Anagignoskomena portions of the Eastern Orthodox Old Testaments. The term does not comment upon the naming, numbering or ordering of books, which varies with later Christian Biblical canons.

The term is an attempt to provide specificity with respect to contents, while avoiding allusion to any particular interpretative tradition or theological school of thought. It is widely used in academic writing and interfaith discussion in relatively neutral contexts meant to include dialogue among all religious traditions, but not widely in the inner discourse of the religions which use its text.

Francesca Stavrakopoulou (born 1975 in Bromley, England with an English mother and a Greek father) is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion in the University of Exeter's department of Theology and Religion.The main focus of her research is Israelite and Judahite history and religion. She is noted for her academic and media roles: presenting a three-part television series on the BBC The Bible's Buried Secrets (2011; not to be confused with the 2008 NOVA program of the same name), and for contributions to Channel 4's series The Bible: A History. She describes herself as 'an atheist with huge respect for religion' and regards her work as 'a branch of history like any other'.

Her DPhil from the University of Oxford, which examined the creation of an imagined past within the Hebrew Bible, was subsequently published with the title King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities. Her second book was Land of our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims. She has also co-edited Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah and Ecological Hermeneutics: Biblical, Historical and Theological Perspectives. She was a junior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, before moving to Exeter.