The Old Testament is not one book but a library. Christians count thirty-nine books in it; Jewish tradition counts the same writings as twenty-four. They include law, history, poetry, proverbs, prophecy and letters of a kind, written over many centuries in Hebrew, with a few chapters in Aramaic. No one sat down and wrote it from beginning to end. So how did it come to be written at all?

This article looks at what we know: what writing was like in ancient Israel, what the oldest inscriptions show, and what the books themselves say about how they were made. It is the first in a series on how the Bible came down to us.

A world that wrote

Writing was invented long before Israel existed. By around 3200 BCE scribes in Mesopotamia were pressing wedge-shaped signs into clay, and Egyptian scribes were writing hieroglyphs. These systems had hundreds of signs and took years to learn.

The alphabet was a simpler idea: one sign for each consonant sound. It grew up among speakers of Semitic languages in the second millennium BCE, and by about 1000 BCE a family of closely related alphabets was in use along the eastern Mediterranean: Phoenician, Aramaic, and Hebrew among them. An alphabet of twenty-two letters can be learned in weeks rather than years. That did not make everyone literate, but it put writing within reach of far more people than before.

Archaeologists have found the evidence. The Gezer Calendar, a small limestone tablet from about the tenth century BCE, lists the farming months in an early form of Hebrew. An abecedary (a list of the alphabet in order, the kind of thing a student copies) was found built into a wall at Tel Zayit in 2005, from about the same period. An ink inscription on a pottery shard from Khirbet Qeiyafa, found in 2008, is one of the oldest known texts that may be Hebrew; scholars still debate how to read it. By the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, the evidence multiplies: administrative notes on pottery (ostraca) from Samaria, Arad and Lachish, seals with owners’ names, and the Siloam inscription, carved in a water tunnel in Jerusalem around 700 BCE to celebrate the moment the two teams of diggers met.

Christopher Rollston, who has studied these inscriptions in detail, argues that they show a trained scribal class using standardised letter forms, spelling and numerals across the kingdom. Writing was a profession, taught in some kind of school, and used by the state, the temple and the wealthy. That is the world in which the books of the Hebrew Bible were written.

The oldest biblical words we can hold

In 1979 the archaeologist Gabriel Barkay was excavating burial caves at Ketef Hinnom, just outside the old city of Jerusalem. In one chamber his team found two tiny rolled-up strips of silver, amulets meant to be worn around the neck. It took years to unroll them safely. When they were opened and read, they contained a blessing almost identical to the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24–26: “Yahweh bless you, and keep you. Yahweh make his face to shine on you, and be gracious to you...”

The silver scrolls are dated by most scholars to the late seventh or early sixth century BCE, before the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE. A new study with modern imaging, published by Barkay and colleagues in 2004, confirmed both the reading and the early date. They are the oldest known objects that carry words also found in the Bible. They do not prove that the book of Numbers existed in its present form at that time, but they show that this blessing was in use, in words very close to ours, more than four centuries before the Dead Sea Scrolls.

What the books say about themselves

The Old Testament often tells us that things were written down, and by whom.

  • Moses is said to write down laws and records (Exodus 17:14; 24:4; 34:27; Deuteronomy 31:9, 24), and the “Book of the Law” is placed beside the ark (Deuteronomy 31:26).
  • Joshua writes “in the Book of the Law of God” (Joshua 24:26), and Samuel writes the rights of the kingship “in a book” (1 Samuel 10:25).
  • The books of Kings repeatedly send the reader to other records: “the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel” and “of Judah,” which are now lost.
  • In Jeremiah 36, the prophet dictates his words to the scribe Baruch son of Neriah, who writes them on a scroll. King Jehoiakim cuts the scroll piece by piece and burns it; Jeremiah dictates it again, “and many similar words were added to them” (Jeremiah 36:32).
  • Proverbs 25:1 says that “the men of Hezekiah king of Judah” copied out a collection of Solomon’s proverbs.

These notes show us a process, not a single moment. Words were spoken, remembered, written, collected, copied, added to and arranged. Jeremiah 36 is a small picture of the whole: a prophet’s spoken words, a professional scribe, a scroll, a second edition.

Oral and written together

In the ancient world, writing did not replace memory; the two worked together. David Carr, in Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, shows how education across the ancient Near East meant learning key texts by heart, with written copies serving as a reference and a teaching aid. Deuteronomy itself tells parents to repeat God’s words to their children and to write them on doorposts (Deuteronomy 6:6–9). The psalms were sung; the proverbs were taught; the stories of the ancestors were told at festivals and around the table. When these were written down, the written form was still meant to be read aloud and heard.

This matters for how we think about accuracy. A text that is memorised and recited by a community is not easily changed by one person, because others know how it goes. But a community can also, over time, adapt how it tells something. Both forces are visible in the Bible’s history, and both are part of how it came to be.

When were the books written?

Here scholars disagree, and honesty requires saying so. Traditional Jewish and Christian views connect the books closely with the figures they are named after: Moses for the Torah, Samuel for the books of Samuel, David for many psalms, Solomon for wisdom literature, and the prophets for their books. Much modern scholarship sees a longer process of composition and editing, with many books reaching their final form during or after the Babylonian exile in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. William Schniedewind, in How the Bible Became a Book, argues that the late eighth and seventh centuries, under kings like Hezekiah and Josiah, were a key period, because that is when writing spread most widely in Judah.

What almost everyone agrees on is this: by the third and second centuries BCE, the books of the Hebrew Bible existed, were being copied as scripture, and were being translated into Greek. The Dead Sea Scrolls, from the third century BCE onwards, include copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther. From that point on, we are not guessing; we have the manuscripts.

A change of alphabet

One more change happened along the way. The Hebrew of the monarchy was written in what is now called the paleo-Hebrew script, a cousin of Phoenician. After the exile, Jews increasingly used the Aramaic script, the “square” letters that are still used for Hebrew today. The Talmud remembers this change and links it to Ezra (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 21b–22a). The Dead Sea Scrolls show the transition in progress: most are in the square script, a few are entirely in paleo-Hebrew, and some write the square script but put the divine name, YHWH, in the old letters out of reverence.

Throughout this period Hebrew was written with consonants only. The vowels were known to readers and passed down in the reading tradition. The vowel signs printed in Hebrew Bibles today were added much later by the Masoretes, whose work is the subject of another article in this series.

Why this matters for a translation

Open Word Bible translates the Old Testament from the Hebrew of the Westminster Leningrad Codex, a careful transcription of a manuscript completed in 1008 CE. That manuscript stands at the end of a very long road: from spoken words, to scrolls written by professional scribes, to collections, to copies of copies, to the Masoretic tradition. The rest of this series follows that road, and asks at each stage how we can know that what reached us is what was written.

Sources

  • Barkay, Gabriel, Andrew G. Vaughn, Marilyn J. Lundberg, and Bruce Zuckerman. “The Amulets from Ketef Hinnom: A New Edition and Evaluation.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 334 (2004): 41–71.
  • Carr, David M. Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • Rollston, Christopher A. Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel: Epigraphic Evidence from the Iron Age. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010.
  • Schniedewind, William M. How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
  • Tappy, Ron E., P. Kyle McCarter, et al. “An Abecedary of the Mid-Tenth Century B.C.E. from the Judaean Shephelah.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 344 (2006): 5–46.
  • van der Toorn, Karel. Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
  • Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 21b–22a.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.