When Could They Have Written the Bible?

And Why It Matters

The dating of the biblical sources is a hotly debated topic in biblical studies. It can seem arcane and technical–what does it matter if something was first written down in 800 or 500BCE? In fact there is a lot at stake here: at issue is when and where the books of the Bible came from, and therefore who their authors and audience were. Knowing when and where the texts were written could tell us a lot about their purpose–and therefore how to interpret them. Are they foggy legends of a distant past, or eyewitness accounts of things as they happened? Literary art designed to provoke complex emotions, or direct, literal instructions from God? Many assume that the Bible says Moses wrote all of its first books, the so-called “five books of Moses” or Pentateuch, at God’s dictation. But the actual text never says this. So how do we know when the Hebrew Bible really comes from, and what it was for?

One reason scholars have been curious about the dates of the Bible’s composition is that for the earlier narratives (roughly, the events described in Genesis through Samuel) it’s unclear how the writers could have known what they were talking about. Who was there to witness and then describe creation in Genesis 1, before any human existed? If you add up the dates in the biblical text, the Bible says the Exodus happened sometime before 1200 BCE, with the stories of Abraham and other parts of Genesis even earlier. And those stories don’t even mention writing down events relating to Abraham or the Exodus.

It turns out that the earliest actual physical evidence for the Hebrew Bible is much, much later than the events it’s describing: the earliest partial fragments of biblical texts date to a bit before 200 BCE–over a thousand years after many of the events they describe. And our oldest complete Hebrew Bible is far later: the version we usually translate from, Codex Leningradensis, dates from around 1008 CE. The Aleppo Codex, another valuable manuscript, is a bit earlier (c. 920 CE) but damaged.* If the earliest extended passages of the Hebrew Bible are in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a few of which (like 4QSamuel(a), a copy of the book of Samuel), date to perhaps 250 BCE, this means many of the Bible’s most important events are supposed to have happened well over a millennium before we have any first-hand evidence of their writing.

How Much Can Change in 200 Years? The Case of Davis, California

To get a sense of how much can change in 1,000 years–and how hard it could be to get reliable information about the past in an age before electronic media, or even widespread writing–consider Davis, California. What was Davis like 200 years ago?

Davis from the air, 1999

None of this was here, and it can be hard to even imagine what it was like. There were no white people, roads, towns, or buildings at all. The land was inhabited by Patwin, a part of the larger Wintun group of people who had already been living in the Central Valley for well over 3,000 years. They hunted, worked and lived all over this area in many small villages, and some burials have been accidentally discovered on our own campus. So where did they go? The first white explorers, trappers who arrived around 1833, brought a Malaria epidemic that killed thousands of Patwin people. Most of the rest were wiped out or displaced–often by the Federal or state government, or by European settlers–by the year 1923. That’s when the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber interviewed some of the remaining people

Think of how difficult it would be for a Patwin person today if they wanted to create a bible-like scriptural text of early Patwin history and beliefs. How could you find out exactly what your ancestors thought or did right here even 200 years ago? You could interview elders for the valuable ancient traditions they remember, read older texts like the interviews that Kroeber wrote down from 1923. But there are no words directly from 1823. In fact all of us might face similar challenges in understanding how our great-great-great grandparents lived, what they thought or experienced, and sometimes even who they were. But it is especially impressive to consider that it is hard to know a lot about what it was like 200 years ago in the very place we are reading this.

Now imagine you’re an ancient Hebrew writer trying to do that, but for much further in the past–1000 years before you lived.

How would someone writing 1,000 years later know what people believed or experienced back then? There seem to be three main ways: you could just decide to have faith and believe what you’ve been told about the way it was, you could base it on traditions that you’d heard verbally, or you could examine ancient evidence. First, of course, there’s total faith: you could just feel certain that the Bible’s writers found out about these events directly from God, through divine revelation. On the one hand, that means you’re fine personally–you don’t need to worry about evidence or arguments! On the other hand, as we’ve seen, the Bible doesn’t say that either. And with no evidence or arguments, you don’t have much basis to persuade anyone else that this is true. Second is spoken traditions–these are uniquely valuable, telling us things that never got written down, as well as including things like songs, movements, and places that you can’t get from a book. But since you can’t be sure what the tradition looked like in the past, it is sometimes hard to be sure whether the tradition was changed or even created 50 or 500 years ago.

This leaves us with ancient writing and archaeological evidence, from statues of gods to beer jugs; these are special because they come directly from the time and place we are curious about. And they are surprisingly clear about when the Hebrew Bible could have been written. In fact, I am so fascinated by ancient inscriptions and what they tell us about ancient Israel and Judah that I wrote my first book, The Invention of Hebrew, about it.**

1000 Years of Graffiti and the Invention of Hebrew (c. 850 BCE)

What I learned in researching my book is that the alphabet itself is much older than Hebrew writing, which itself seems to have been developed sometime roughly around 850 BCE. The alphabet was invented quite early, around 1900 BCE and probably in Egypt by speakers of a West Semitic language (the language group including Arabic, Aramaic, and the Canaanite languages) ancestral to Hebrew. But surprisingly, all of our evidence shows that it was only used casually, for graffiti and short notes, for the first thousand years of its existence!

How can we tell that the early alphabet wasn’t used for skilled, professional writing? Because all of our examples are irregular and sloppy, showing no uniform standards. Compare these examples of two of the very first inscriptions from Egypt around 1900, this newly discovered lice comb with a magical insecticide spell (!!) from Lachish in Israel from around 1200, and this list of names from Khirbet Qeiyafa, near Jerusalem, from around 1050 BCE.

Early alphabetic inscription from Wadi el-Hol in Egypt c 1900 BCE. Note that fourth fron the left is the first letter of the alphabet, aleph, as a pictographic ox head with horns, an eye, and a smiling mouth.

Early alphabetic inscription from Sinai (Sinai 345, also the cover of my book!) in Egypt c. 1800. Note second from the left, the rather different looking ox-head aleph with horns and eye.

Canaanite Ivory Comb with Anti-Lice Incantation from Lachish in ancient Judah, c. 1250 BCE.

Canaanite name-list from Khirbet Qeiyafah near Jerusalem, c. 1050 BCE. Note that the writing is so irregular that the alephs face three different directions, none of which was used in later Hebrew.

A practice letter in the first known standardized, recognizably Hebrew script, from Kuntillet Ajrud (Inscription 3.6) in the Sinai, around 825 BCE. Note that while there is some variation of about 10-15 degrees in angle, the alephs are far more uniform than the earlier ones and now all have the same orientation.

The elegant and uniform Siloam Tunnel inscription from Jerusalem. The Classical Hebrew of this text reads like narratives in the Bible and commemorates the building of a cistern to withstand the siege of Sennacherib, also mentioned in the Bible (2 Kings 20:20 and 2 Chronicles 32:4) and Assyrian royal inscriptions. In this inscription the alephs all look nearly identical, evidence of a scribe who had written a lot.

These pictures tell the story: while the alphabet was used for short prayers and graffiti for about 1000 years, it was only adapted to write Hebrew as well as related languages like Aramaic by the 9th century BCE. In addition to the above inscriptions from the far south at Kuntillet Ajrud, we also have some crucial slightly earlier inscriptions from the north at Tel Rehov that look like they are halfway between the generic Canaanite script and Hebrew, evidence that it was being formed during the early 9th century. This is the earliest point at which Hebrew literary texts could have been written, what I call the Invention of (written) Hebrew.

The second-to-last inscription, from Kuntillet Ajrud, about 825 BCE, is the first that is written in a really clear and consistent script. This makes it the first one showing the signs of a professionally trained scribe: someone who would actually have been paid to sit around all day writing a lot of texts. And its contents are the first signs of a real bureaucracy. It is a practice letter that reads:

Message of Amaryāw:
“Say to my lord, are you well? I bless you by Yahweh (“the Lord”) of Têmān and His asherah (=a goddess, and the Lord’s divine wife). May He bless you and may He keep you, and may He be with my lord…”

Here we first see not only a glimpse of early Israelite society, over 100 years after we would date King David, but a religious world that is different from the one we might expect from the Bible.

The next question–just because they theoretically could have written biblical texts then, back in 825, how do we know if they actually did? After all, we have been writing English in some form or other for 600 years, but that doesn’t mean that the US Constitution or this blog post both date back to 1400 CE! We’ll look at that next.

—————-Notes————-

*A complete Hebrew manuscript of only the Prophets (Joshua through Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the 12 minor prophets) has a note at the beginning from the scribe saying it’s even earlier, claiming he completed it in 896 CE. But the handwriting is slightly suspicious since it doesn’t match the rest of the text, and recent carbon dating puts it 100 years later, indicating that this note was a forgery to make the scroll look older and therefore more important and valuable.

** I was incredibly proud that it won an award named after the teacher I first learned about these inscriptions from, Frank Moore Cross, who was one of the main editors of the Dead Sea Scroll and who I consider the 20th century’s greatest American scholar of Hebrew inscriptions.