How did the Bible Appear? The Old Testament

The Old Testament

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. "Genesis 1:1-5

The first five books of the Bible have been written by Moses in the silence of the desert. In Genesis Moses describes the creation, the first human beings and also the way man departed from God; in this book Moses writes about the big catastrophe, the flood that destroyed all life.

But how did Moses know what were the events that occurred on Earth and especially those that were before his time?

Professor Paolo Martiey, associated with the University of Rome started his archeological activities back in 1964 in Tal Mardih, on a 3,2 square kilometers heel where he found the king’s palace of the old civilization of Ebla together with more than 16.000 clay tablets and in 1975 they also found the clay tablets representing the state archives. Their importance is remarkable because they date back to 2500 B.C.

From the biblical point of view these are important because cities mentioned in the Bible are also mentioned on these tablets. Cities like Sodom and Gomorrah, or Abraham’s city, Haran, are also described here. Ebla puts an end to the impression that the forefathers of Abraham were some illiterate shepherds. From other discoveries, it is clear enough that writing was not foreign for these old times, therefore, it was not foreign for the writers who put the Bible "on paper".

In conclusion, when Moses wrote the book of Genesis he might have used written documents from his predecessors like Noah, Jacob and Abraham or maybe even by Adam.

In Exodus, Moses heard God speaking and he wrote everything God had told him and after 40 years of wilderness, Joshua is the one who enters with the people of Israel in the Promised Land. The people of Israel did not have kings as authority over them but in times of oppression they had judges and Samuel was the most important of them and the last of the judges as well. He founded a so called "school of the prophets" and Israel entered thus in the era of the prophets. The prophets played an essential role as the nation of Israel started being governed by kings and the kings were guided by prophets.

Prophets not only spoke the voice of God to the kings but they had to write those messages as well. This is the way the following books of the Bible came to life: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings which represent the early prophets. After them, the major prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel followed and then the 12 minor prophets. The "writings" category such as the book of Daniel, Ester and Chronicles are written during and after the Babylonian captivity; to this category also belong the Psalms, Proverbs and the book of Job.

Consequently the books comprising the Law of Moses, the books of the prophets and the writings complete the Old Testament.

Believed to have started around the year 1500BC, the Old Testament’s writing was completed by 400BC. Not long after that, Alexander the Great and his empire - the Greek Empire - conquered the territories (including Israel) and as a result, the spoken language of the country was the Greek language. This is the motive that leads to the translation of the Bible into the Greek language around the year 250 BC.

The way the scribes worked to give us a flawless version of the Bible and an extremely accurate one, is a whole story in itself. However the scrolls found near the Dead Sea dating from 1000BC, attest the perfectly preserved accuracy of the Bible we have today.

Yes, God gave us His Word and His Words will never pass away, even when the heavens and earth will!