No one knows when the first Hebrew put pen to parchment,
or stylus to clay.
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OLD TESTAMENT
Law
History
Poetry
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Major Prophets
Minor Prophets
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The Writing of the Bible Begins
No one knows when the first Hebrew put pen to parchment,
Moses is the first person the Bible identifies as a writer. Perhaps as
early as the 1400s B.C. Moses wrote down the many laws God gave
him-probably those preserved in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,
and Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 31:9). But hundreds of years before Moses,
Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation, may have written the dramatic
stories about his life that are preserved in Genesis. He came from the
Persian Gulf region where writing was already at least 1000 years old.
Most of the rest of the Old Testament-stories, poems, songs, genealogies,
nuggets of wisdom, prophecies, and all the other genres of Hebrew
tradition were likely passed along orally, then eventually collected and
recorded by scribes. The writing probably began in earnest after Israel
established itself as a powerful nation, during the reigns of David and
Solomon in about 1000 B.C. As scrolls began to wear out, scribes carefully
duplicated the text onto fresh scrolls.
Exactly who wrote the Old Testament remains a mystery; most books don't
say. The first five books of the Bible, for example, are anonymous. But
ancient Jewish tradition says Moses wrote them. Some Bible authors, on the
other hand, are clearly identified; many prophets wrote the books named
after them.
All but a few sections of the Old Testament are written in Hebrew, the
language of the Jews. A few passages are written in Aramaic, a similar
language that the Jews picked up when they were exiled to Babylon. After
twenty-some-year-old Alexander the Great swept through the Middle East in
the early 300s B.C., Greek became the prevailing language.
Within about a century, an Egyptian king decided to create a new holding
for his renowned library in Alexandria. As legend has it, he asked the
high priest in Jerusalem to loan him about 70 top scholars who would
translate the five revered books of Moses into Greek. The result-the first
Bible translation-became known as the Septuagint, meaning 70. Over the
next hundred years or so, the rest of the Hebrew Bible was added. When New
Testament writers later quoted the Old Testament, they quoted it from this
Greek translation.
Rome destroyed Jerusalem in A.D. 70, leaving the Jews with no temple for
offering animal sacrifices. So the Jews began to offer sacrifices of
praise and prayer by reading from their sacred writings. The problem was
that the Jews had a wide array of revered books, and many versions of some
books. No one knows exactly how or when the Jews settled on the books that
make up their TANAKH (Bible), which Christians call the Old Testament. The
five books of Moses, known as the TORAH (books of Law), were probably
among the first ones widely accepted.
The books of the prophets likely came next, followed last by books known
as the Writings: Psalms, Proverbs, and others. Eventually
eliminated-partly because they were not originally written in Hebrew-were
many books published in the popular Greek translation. They were called
the Apocrypha, meaning "secondary" or "hidden" works, and would later
reappear in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles.
The Bible isn't one book, but a library of many books. Most Protestant
Bibles have 66 books-39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New-arranged in
the order and categories shown here. Old Testament books by prophets, for
example, appear together-starting with the Major Prophets (meaning the
longer books), followed by the Minor Prophets. This arrangement is
different for some other Bible-believing faiths.
Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles include the Apocrypha, a
collection of books that appeared in the Septuagint, a Greek translation
made from the Hebrew Bible about 200 years before Christ. Jews, however,
later decided against keeping these books in their Bible.