In the following analysis I have tried to mention at least in passing all the medieval plays on Old Testament subjects that have been published or listed in bibliographies. The inevitable omissions are unintentional. The texts and details mentioned specifically are of two main kinds: those that are common to a number of plays from different language groups and those peculiar to one play for which a source may or may not be available. Extra material is given from the less easily accessible texts – the two unpublished Valenciennes plays in French, for example, or the Dutch rhetoricians' plays. The existence of the widely available, detailed analysis of the English cycles by Rosemary Woolf has allowed me to treat these well-known plays less fully.

Some plays in both Latin and vernacular contain only material from the Old Testament, usually a single episode or related group. More commonly a sequence of Old Testament episodes or at least a scene of the Fall of Man is found at the beginning of cyclic Corpus Christi or passion plays, for, as Gréban puts it in the prologue to his Passion, ‘La creacion du monde est la chose sur quoy depend tout ce qui vient apres’ (the creation of the world is the event on which depends all that happened after: 13).