08/25/2021 – When Was the Hebrew Bible Written?

Have you ever thought about the history of Judaism and then wondered about when these stories were written? If you’ve never learned about this before, this is going to be a super interesting video, so stick with us. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. This video is closed-captioned here on YouTube and the transcript is available at TenOnReligion.com. I’m so excited for this episode because I really love Jewish history. Also, if you like religious studies content go ahead and smash that subscribe button because it really helps keep this channel going. Okay, we’re going to do a few things here. First some introductory information including a quick overview of what the Hebrew Bible is followed by a quick overview of Jewish historical periods up to the Roman period. Then we’re going to get into how ancient Jewish literature developed and look at two ways to approach the question of “when was the Hebrew Bible written?” – the literary approach and the archaeology approach. So, let’s dive right in.

A grouping of sacred texts, authoritative writings, or scriptures is called a canon – a word meaning rule or standard. We’re going to be talking about the Hebrew canon, sometimes called the Jewish canon, but most often referred to as the Hebrew Bible. For those of you more familiar with Christianity or even Islam, the Hebrew Bible is basically the part of the Bible that Christians refer to as the Old Testament, although that was a term that emerged much later in history, around the fourth century CE. Historically, the Hebrew Bible was divided into three general sections called the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. It’s often referred to as the Tanakh which is an acronym in the Hebrew language for the Torah (or Law), Nevi’im (or Prophets), and Ketuvim (or Writings). T-N-K, get it? These three general sections add up to 24 total books. The Law contains five books called the Pentateuch (a Greek word meaning “five books”), The Prophets are eight books, and the Writings are eleven. So that’s “the what” – what is the Hebrew Bible. There were later historical books compiled together in a second canon, or Deuterocanonical books, but because they were added later, this is not what we’re focusing on today.

I’m going to briefly give you some important dates in Jewish history for some context, but don’t worry too much about the numbers right now as I will refer back to this in a short while. For historians it’s much more complicated than this, but basically everything before 587 BCE is Biblical history or Ancient Judaism = pre-587 BCE. We’re going to get into this a little more, but the northern kingdom of Israel was defeated by the Assyrians in 722 and finally the southern kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians in 587 and taken into exile. The exile period is from 587 BCE to 539 BCE. Then the Persian Empire took over and the Persian period (or, post-exile) is from 539 to 332 BCE. That’s when Alexander the Great conquered the entire area and spread the Greek way of life, known as Hellenism, throughout the Mediterranean world. The Hellenistic (or, Greek and Syrian) period is from 332 until 63 BCE. In 63, the Roman general Pompey conquered the geographical area of Judea and placed it under Roman rule. This lasted until 135 CE when Jews started to slowly disperse for a variety of reasons that are beyond the scope of this episode. So, now that we have discussed what the Hebrew Bible is and provided a rough sketch of the time periods, let’s talk about the process of development.

As with most ancient texts, religious or not, the core of the stories originates in oral tradition – verbal renditions which are passed along from generation to generation. As time passes, more firm narratives are formed. Eventually, the writing process begins, but up until the last few hundred years, reading and writing were considered separate skills, and relatively few people knew how to do either, so there was only a select group of people involved. Slowly, the various written texts were further edited and expanded to arrive at something closer to the final form we have today. So how do we assign years, dates, or even centuries to any part of this process in the Hebrew Bible? Over the past 140 years or so, there have been two main ways to approach this question – the literary approach and the archeology approach, although they’re not completely separate from each other. The question is, which one should take the driver’s seat? Should one look in the text first and then the purpose of archeological work is to confirm a textual interpretation? Or should one see what the results of archeological investigations yield and then try to determine when and how the text was constructed? Because the literary approach has been around for over a hundred years, it’s more widely taught and thus more familiar to some people. But even though there’s been many advances in archeological discovery over the past four decades, it’s still not as familiar to most people so I’m going to spend a little more time discussing the archeological approach. After that, a short evaluation, and some concluding thoughts on when the Hebrew Bible was written, which you won’t want to miss.

What can we learn by investigating the written text? This is known as historical criticism and includes textual criticism, source criticism, form criticism, and literary criticism and their definitions are all easily found on Wikipedia if you want to learn more. The most important event in this literary approach occurred when a German scholar named Julius Wellhausen unveiled the documentary hypothesis in the late 1800’s. The documentary hypothesis suggested that the Pentateuch was originally compiled from four independent sources which were written over the course of around 500 years. These were called the Jawhist (Yahwist) or J source, the Elohist or E source, the Deuteronomist or D source, and the Priestly or P source. The J source was dated to the time of David’s son Solomon around 950 BCE followed by the E, D, and finally the P source during the time of Ezra in the 5th century. The four sources were eventually woven together by various editors to create a seamless narrative. The evidence for this can even been seen at the beginning of the Pentateuch in the first few chapters of Genesis where there are obviously two ancient creation accounts interwoven into one story. The documentary hypothesis was the dominant view in Hebrew Bible scholarship up until the 1970’s when Wellhausen’s view was rejected because the number of original sources and the dating of those sources were further scrutinized and called into question. New finds and discoveries in ancient texts continue to make this an interesting conversation though and most historians still ascribe to some version of the documentary hypothesis today.

The archeology approach takes a different tactic by attempting to discern through archeological on-site investigations when and where people lived, and what kind of societies they created. Few biblical historians today accept the narratives of Abraham and the patriarchs or Moses and exodus account at face value, but after the development of the political nation of Israel begins, things get a little more complicated. Now there’s been some shaking up in the field since the late 1990’s by a new dating framework for events called the “low chronology.” Two figures who have been very important in this endeavor are Israel Finkelstein and his colleague Neil Asher Silberman, who published both The Bible Unearthed and David and Solomon, two important works detailing what can be known through such archeological findings. What they discovered was that there was little evidence for early Israelite history other than the Canaanites who already lived there. Rather, the evidence shows a very different picture. Previously, it was largely thought that Israel was a united monarchy underneath David, who, according to the biblical text, conquered Jerusalem and made it the capital roughly around the tenth century BCE. The problem is, there is no archeological record of any large structures or societal remains in the south during that time frame to support the idea of administering a sizable kingdom. The evidence indicates there were large structures about 500-1000 years earlier, and again 250 years later, but none during the time when the text indicates David was a king of a large, united monarchy and even less evidence for anything close to what is described as Solomon’s even larger kingdom. At that time, Jerusalem was only a small highland village perhaps controlling a few nearby insignificant towns.

The first evidence of a large settlement of any kind in the area occurred several generations after David and his son Solomon. This was in north and was started by a king named Omri mentioned in 1 Kings 16. The large power in the area, the Assyrians, referred to Israel as the “house of Omri” which, ironically, is one of the first extrabiblical records discovered which directly testify to the existence of any character mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Why is this important? Because archeology tells a different narrative then the one in the Bible. According to Finkelstein’s archeological interpretation, Omri and his descendants ruled the kingdom, not David, and the capital was in Samaria in the north, not Jerusalem in the south. The tiny southern kingdom of Judah was essentially a vassal state to Israel in the north which had a population ten times larger.

Taken simply on raw data, Israel, as an entity, can only be verified from evidence outside the Bible and what we get is rather slim. Take the first outside reference to Israel in the Merneptah Stele, about 1203 BCE. The next mention of Israel is in the Mesha Stele, dated to 840 BCE, which refers to King Omri, who ruled the northern kingdom of Israel based in Samaria. In those 363 years, there is no mention in external sources of a kingdom of Judah, a united kingdom of Israel and Judah, nor David and Solomon. Without extra-biblical support, it appears that Omri’s kingdom of Israel based in Samaria became a nation before Judah to the south, which is a complete turnaround from the biblical text.

When the Assyrian superpower conquered Israel in 722 BCE, Judah became a vassal state to Assyria, entering into a larger regional economy spurring a growth of new buildings. Its population also surged with an influx of Israelites from the north and making the social and political situation ripe to craft a narrative of a united monarchy after the fall of Israel. This likely happened during the time of King Hezekiah in the 700’s who reformed the various religious practices as a means of aiding the political unity of the native Judahites and the Israelite refugees. Since most of the people in the area were polytheistic, part of this religious reform included a focus of worshipping Yahweh alone, an ancient storm and warrior deity which then slowly became the national god. Spoken Hebrew obviously has vowel sounds, but ancient Hebrew writing only had consonants, not vowels, so no one really knows the correct pronunciation of this name for God as originally written as YHWH. The worship of YHWH alone with religious practices centering in Jerusalem starts in the 700’s BCE as an effort to unite both of these people groups.

Now stick with me as we get closer to answering our main question of “when was the Hebrew Bible written?”. As the southern kingdom of Judah continued to grow after the military conquest of the northern kingdom, so did the narrative. Because Judah was the surviving entity, they got to write the national story however they saw fit. But it took a step for the worse when King Josiah was murdered [stabbing motions] in 609 BCE by Egypt near the city of Har Megiddo, or in Greek, Armageddon. Jerusalem was destroyed 23 years later by the Babylonian Empire, and Josiah, who was in the line of David, was made sort of like a martyr figure. They vowed that good and evil would battle in the future and much prophecy centered around the concept of an “anointed one” or “messiah,” making David the center of the story. Over the next seven centuries there were many “messiahs” in Jewish history trying to restore a narrative in the past which might not have ever occurred. Persia then conquered and took over the area and some of the exiles moved back to Judah. During and after the exile in Babylon, the narrative was re-envisioned, and started to be compiled and written down. Even though they were a colony of Persia, as long as they practiced the ancient rituals and laws they did not have to wait for a political restoration. Their identity remained intact via a religious ideology. Their province was now called “Yehud” in the Aramaic language, and the people “Yehudim.” The final form of the main narrative probably occurred sometime between the post-exile Persian period and the Greek and Syrian period. Still, some of the material such as Daniel and Lamentations, for example, may not have been written until the late second century BCE which would put the final text we have today firmly in the Hellenistic period, only one or two hundred years before another movement emerged following one of these messiahs named Jesus of Nazareth.

Now for my evaluation and concluding thoughts. There’s an internal dispute among biblical archeologists over how to properly interpret the findings. Some interpret the archeological data so as to fit the biblical text essentially giving the biblical text more weight, while others only draw conclusions based on what the archeological evidence allows in order to stimulate and provoke an effort to curiously reconsider and examine how the text may have been constructed. In either case, the biblical texts are likely embellished versions of reality which contain occasional pockets of information that reflect some historical events. Just like my previous episode on Gadamer’s hermeneutics, our present interest creates the past that we want to see, and it sometimes says more about us that it does about the past. If the biblical texts were not contemporary records testifying to historical events, then the next question becomes what was the function of these narratives? But that’s a question for another time.

Okay, even though I talked quite a bit to explain the archeology approach, there’s actually a lot of details which I did not have time to explain. If one puts more weight into the literary approach, the Hebrew Bible was written and edited largely in its final form around the fifth century BCE, but if one puts more weight into the archeology approach, it’s more like the second century BCE. So, what do you think? Leave a comment on what you found the most interesting about either approach. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.