But When Did They (Probably) Write the Bible? Part 1 of 2

600 Years of Possibility

We have seen from the archaeological evidence that people were already being trained to write Hebrew in an elegant script by about 825 BCE. Unlike the script of just 200 years before, which was casually taught to people and only used for short notes or graffiti, this was meant for serious texts. You can tell from the fluid, curved, and efficient lines that this is a script meant to be written rapidly for long amounts of time. This kind of flowing, easy script written with a brush or pen is called a cursive, in contrast to the heavy, stiff lines of a monumental script meant to be slowly carved into hard materials like stone. This also tells us about what they could have written in Hebrew. In contrast to the painstaking effort of carving a short monument, a good writer of cursive could write dozens of lines of accounting or official correspondence in an hour, or hundreds of lines of hymns or chronicles in a day.

But just because biblical narratives and poetry theoretically could have been written down by 825, this doesn’t prove that they actually were. After all, people can use a written language for a long time–we have been writing English in some form or other for over 600 years (if you count the first written English as appearing around the time of Chaucer) but that doesn’t mean that Shakespeare, the US Constitution, and this very blog post all date back to 1400 CE! The history of written Hebrew only provides a 600+ year range of possible dates between the ninth and the third centuries BCE. By itself, all it tells us is that biblical texts must have come together at some point roughly between 825 and 225 BCE.

So to get more specific, let’s consider the logical possibilities for when biblical texts could have been written, and check each one with concrete evidence.

Pre-Literary Traditions

Some scholars have suggested that some parts of the Bible must date to before Hebrew writing was invented. In this view, these texts were composed without being written down, then passed down by retelling and memory, until they were finally put into writing sometime after 825.

This idea of pre-literary tradition in the Bible is very plausible, because poetry, storytelling, jokes and prayers are universal features of being human. Every day we talk, sometimes playing with our words and expressing remarkable ideas, images, or phrases. But most of it never gets written down. Every culture creates important verbal art, yet many never feel the need to write it. This means that even before Hebrew script, there have to have been Hebrew poems and stories. But how would we know that any specific passage in the Bible comes from this pre-literary tradition?

Some classic passages of the Bible look intriguingly like they come from an earlier culture. These hints come through in both style and content. In their style, they speak a distinctive poetic language and feature fiery visions of Yahweh as a fighting storm god, nomadic warrior tribes, and astonishingly bold characters. And in their content, they assume things that only make sense for an earlier period. A good example is Judges 5, the “Song of Deborah.” It is presented as a victory song starring the military leader Deborah (literally “bee,” perhaps because of the sting). It memorializes her successful defense of the northern territory of Israel from warlords who were terrorizing it, with the help of direct intervention from the Lord (Yahweh), who is depicted as a storm-god marching out accompanied by torrential rains and earthquakes from his home in the south to help them.

1 On that day Deborah and Barak son of Abinoam sang…

4 O LORD, when You came forth from Mount Seir,
Marched out from the country of Edom,
The earth trembled;
The heavens dripped,
Yes, the clouds dripped water,
5 The mountains quaked—
Before the LORD, Him of Sinai,
Before the LORD, God of Israel.
6 In the days of Shamgar son of Anath,
In the days of Jael, caravans ceased,
And wayfarers went
By roundabout paths.
7 The townspeople had to hide,
Hide in Israel,
Till you arose, O Deborah,
Arose, O mother, in Israel!

There are two main reasons scholars think this poem may come from a pre-literary tradition: first is the style of poetic language, which has some grammatical features that are close to earlier written languages. The second one, in terms of content, is more surprising: it lists the tribes of Israel, praising the ones who showed up to fight and blaming the ones who stayed home. But it lists only ten tribes, where there are famously supposed to be twelve, as in Genesis 29-30, Genesis 49, all Jewish traditions afterward–yet here there are just ten! And it includes a tribe, Machir, never mentioned in other lists. A clue as to what changed is that the most famous missing tribe here is the southern tribe of Judah, which became influential after the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722. In other words, the Song of Deborah represents an earlier political picture, before Judah mattered.

4 From Ephraim came they whose roots are in Amalek;
After you, your kin Benjamin;
From Machir came down leaders,
From Zebulun such as hold the marshal’s staff.
15 And Issachar’s chiefs were with Deborah;
As Barak, so was Issachar—
Rushing after him into the valley.
Among the clans of Reuben
Were great decisions of heart.
16 Why then did you stay among the sheepfolds
And listen as they pipe for the flocks?
Among the clans of Reuben
Were great searchings of heart!
17 Gilead tarried beyond the Jordan;
And Dan—why did he linger by the ships?
Asher remained at the seacoast
And tarried at his landings.
18 Zebulun is a people that mocked at death,
Naphtali—on the open heights.

Finally, it describes the brutal assassination of the sleeping enemy general Sisera by a warlike Israelite woman named Jael–a precursor of the famous later decapitation of the drunk enemy general Holofernes by the widow Judith (here in a painting by the remarkable Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi)

24 Most blessed of women be Jael,
Wife of Heber the Kenite,
Most blessed of women in tents.
25 He asked for water, she offered milk;
In a princely bowl she brought him curds.
26 Her left hand reached for the tent pin,
Her right for the workmen’s hammer.
She struck Sisera, crushed his head,
Smashed and pierced his temple.
27 At her feet he sank, lay outstretched,
At her feet he sank, lay still;
Where he sank, there he lay—destroyed.

The simplest explanation of Judges 5 is that it comes from a culture and time period sometime before the 9th century. But where and when? The complexity here is that these traditions can be fluid and adaptable, so we can’t be sure whether its current form is from the 12th century BCE or the 10th, or whether it was subtly reshaped centuries later. What we can be pretty sure of is that its heart comes from a northern tribal culture that existed outside, and probably before, the standard tribal lists and narratives of the later Bible. Poems in the Pentateuch that are often agreed to represent pre-literary traditions are:

Genesis 49, the “Blessing of Jacob,” Exodus 15, the “Song of the Sea” the poetry of the prophet Balaam’s oracles in Numbers 23 and 24,
Deutonomy 32, the “Song of Moses,” and Deuteronomy 33, the “Blessing of Moses.”

Chronicles, Prayers, and Prophecies: Early Collecting and Interweaving of Texts

So when do we first find actual examples of literature in the alphabet?

The 9th Century: Royal Historical Narratives and War-God Poems

In the ninth century we find the first Hebrew poems and scribal practice texts in Hebrew at Kuntillet Ajrud, in the far south. We also find the first narratives of historical events in the Levant in the ninth century with a victory monument at Dan, in the far north, written in Aramaic, and one in the mid-south at Dibon, written in Moabite–a language and script almost identical to Hebrew. This Moabite inscription in fact mentions a king known from 2 Kings 3 who is said to have driven off the Israelites by sacrificing his own son to his god. In this inscription also he boasts of winning a battle against Israel with the help of his dynastic god, Kemosh!

“I am Mesha, .. king of Moab, man of Dibon. My father was king over Moab for thirty years, and I became king after my father. And I made this high-place for (the god) Kemosh . . . because he has delivered me from all kings, and because he has made me look down on all my enemies.

Omri was the king of Israel, and he oppressed Moab for many days, for Kemosh was angry with his land. And his son reigned in his place; and he also said, “I will oppress Moab!” In my days he said so. But I looked down on him and on his house, and Israel has been defeated; it has been defeated forever!”

Finally, the 9th century already has evidence of Hebrew hymns and prayers. There is a poem written on the wall at Kuntillet Ajrud about God marching forth and the earth trembling that sounds a lot like the storm-god passage from Judges 5:4-5! Inscription 4.2 reads:

2. […] in earthquake. And when God (El) shines forth in the heig[hts, Y]ahwe[h…]
3. […] The mountains will melt, the hills will crush […]
4. […] earth. The Holy One over the gods […]
5. […] prepare [to] bless Baal on a day of war […]
6.[…]the name of God on a day of wa[r…]

The 8th Century: Prophecy, Bureaucracy, and a Stonecutters’ Monument.

In the eighth century we start finding a whole range of administrative texts in Hebrew keeping track of supplies and shipments. The biggest set come from Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel. We also find a significant set from Arad, a center for the southern kingdom of Judah.

In a tunnel underneath Jerusalem we find a fascinating monument to the building of an aqueduct, a way of supplying precious water to a city under siege. This inscription, deep in the Siloam tunnel, seems to describe exactly what King Hezekiah is said to have done around 700 BCE in preparation for the Neo-Assyrian siege of Jerusalem. What is especially interesting here is that unlike the Mesha or Dan monuments, this inscription does not mention any king. Its heroes are the workers themselves, the stonecutters who built the tunnel at great risk and probably had one of their own carve it–a memorial to their own livesaving work.

Finally, we find the first prophetic text, written on a wall like the earlier Kuntillet Ajrud poems. It is found in the north just across the Jordan river from Samaria and it is written in a kind of Aramaic that shares some features with Hebrew. In this text, the prophet Balaam famous from the book of Numbers is described as speaking directly to “his people.” He warns them of an apocalypse in which the sun-god will “sew up the sky” and put a seal of darkness on it, the normal rules of the world will be turned upside-down, and the king will be punished.

It is unusual in having certain parts written in red, emphasizing the practical parts of the message.

In the conclusion, it urges that this message be publicized and passed on. A final section also marked in red says:

“[That they may] know the account (of Balaam), proclaim out loud to the people (lit. ‘by speech/tongue’), “(This is) your judgment and your punishment!” Say…

In other words, by the late 8th century BCE we have direct evidence that people were writing down histories, prophecies, prayers and other poems in Hebrew and closely related languages all over the Levant.

But what does this say about what they were doing on other media that did not survive? Here we can speak more broadly of the period from the eighth through seventh centuries BCE. In the book of Kings, we have detailed chronicles from a state that was destroyed in the 8th century–the northern kingdom of Israel, which was conquered by the Assyrians in 722. Yet we have very specific accounts of events and chronologies of Israel’s kings.

To create the framework of the books of Kings, the northern Israelite chronicles were woven together with the chronicles of the southern kingdom of Judah, synchronized in chronological order so that the events in north and south for each year and king line up. While we can’t be sure exactly when this editing took place, we know that they were already actively making synchronistic chronicles in Assyria and Babylon (see here for specific examples).

In the end, this makes it very plausible that the earliest written Hebrew literature was already being created by 700 BCE. Not certain, because our earliest physical copies are over 400 years later and it can be hard to be sure whether any specific text has been changed, but it’s a good bet. Because what we have woven throughout much of the books of Kings is the kind of thing that people were writing in the eighth century BCE, and often displaying the kind of knowledge of events that would come from that period.This means that the most logical possibility is that, like the editing that produced the Balaam prophetic inscriptions, Hebrew writers were likely already editing chronicles and prophecies in this period, between 722 and 586 BCE.

In part 2, we will cover Prose Narratives and Collecting, Interweaving, and Creating a Literature

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.