Tanakh

In the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, Amalek is a nation whose soldiers ambushed the Israelites as they made their way to the Promised Land.

These documents — versions of what Jews call the Tanakh, or what Christians would call the Old Testament — are mostly in Hebrew, although some were written in Aramaic, Greek and Nabataean-Aramaic.

Even so, “Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible, which the old Tolstoy taught himself to read in the original; Homer; Dante; Chaucer; Cervantes; above all Shakespeare: These stand with ‘War and Peace.’

By that time, the Egyptian faith had changed remarkably little for nearly a millennium, despite the lack of a central religious text – no Qur’an, no Bible, no Tanakh.

For religious Jews, it forms one half of the Revelation on Sinai, along with the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh.