The Storied Layers of Scripture: How the Bible was Crafted Over Centuries
A Deep Dive into the Origins of the Bible
Have you ever wondered how the Bible, a seminal text revered by millions, was written? How did we get the leather-bound, red-letter, rice paper document we have today?
Maybe the better question is how did a disparate collection of oral traditions, writings, and mythic-sized history evolve over centuries into the structured scriptures we recognize?
Today, I want to introduce you to the world of the Bible through the field of textual criticism. Criticism, in this case, does not mean being critical; it means thinking about something so hard that your forehead breaks out in a cold sweat.
At least that’s what it does to me!
Today, we will focus on the Old Testament–mostly because I tried to do both and wound up writing a War and Peace-sized novel that nobody wants on a Thursday afternoon.
So, Part One!
The Bible, as we know it, is less a single stationary book than it is a centuries-long process. To get what we know today as the Bible, manuscripts were collected, then amended, redacted, added to, compiled, and translated.
Modern-day Christians have inherited a relatively stable version of the Bible and still have to contend with 900 English translations.
Before anyone panics, it doesn’t mean that the Bible is not the Bible. Christian folks who regularly read the good book are likely aware that the Bible is a collection of books, that that collection grew over time, that Catholics have retained some books that Protestants don’t have, and so forth.
The field of textual criticism looks at how we got the words of the Bible that we have today. Obviously, they were transmitted somehow.
But how?
Because of the storm of words and information we all live in, this is hard to fathom, but most ancient religions did not have books. As New Testament scholar Bart Ehrmann notes:
“Books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world. These religions were almost exclusively concerned with honoring the gods through ritual acts of sacrifice. There were no doctrines to be learned, as explained in books, and almost no ethical principles to be followed, as laid out in books.”1
Case in point: Hebrews 9:4 records that the Ark of the Covenant, a golden case containing the most sacred articles of the Hebrew religion, held:
1.) a golden pot of manna
2.) Aaron’s walking staff that had budded
3.) the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments.
That’s it. We don’t have a book yet, folks.
Honestly, we didn’t even really have Jews at this point—only Judeans, the people of Judah, and the Israelites, the people of Israel.
In the summer of 586 B.C.E., following an extended, brutal siege by the Babylonian Empire, the king of a small kingdom attempted to flee his country.
Compiling the first manuscripts:
In the summer of 586 B.C.E., following an extended, brutal siege by the Babylonian Empire, the king of a small kingdom attempted to flee his country. However, he was apprehended and taken away in golden fetters, while his people were relocated and exiled. That should have been the end of the Judeans. It was the end of many others who fell before Babylon’s scythe.
However, during the Babylonian exile, groups of Judean scribes determined to preserve their culture began to assemble the Hebrew Bible. It served as a "textual memory," or, in modern parlance, an external second brain for a nation whose people had been scattered. Lament and loss figured heavily, as one might expect of an exiled people.
These scribes gradually built a "prehistory of peoplehood,"2 gathering up oral stories from various areas, redacting things after gaining new perspectives, and harmonizing texts from different regions and tribes.
This is why God creates humans twice in the Bible. The scribes preserved two creation stories; instead of giving one prominence, they placed them in parallel. (The second starts in Genesis 2:4. Remember, chapter divisions are a relatively modern invention.)
Some scholars believe that Cyrus, the king of Persia who overthrew Babylon and inherited its empire, allowed nations to govern themselves as vassal-states of the empire as long as they had documents outlining their laws. Perhaps the Bible was assembled as a way to gain freedom for the Jews who wanted to return to Judah.
Under the Persians, Judeans were allowed to return to the site of their defeat and rebuild. Their leader Ezra, brought the first five books of the Bible with him from Babylon and read them to the people, translating and explaining the words to them.3 Ezra was extremely strict with his newly minted Jewish citizens, ordering them to divorce their foreign wives, observe the Sabbath, and avoid the Samaritans who were nearby.
According to Stephen M. Wylen, the book of Ruth, about a foreign woman who marries a Jewish man, was written around this time to counter Ezra's exclusivist laws.4 (It is interesting to think that one Bible book could be a rebuttal to another Bible book.)
Ezra’s scrolls could be considered the epicenter of the Torah. This is when it is first recorded as being canonized and read regularly.
Transmission of Writing:
We obviously do not have scrolls from the hands of Ezra.
In fact, the earliest manuscript that we have from any Hebrew Bible source is the Great Isaiah Scroll from the cache of Dead Sea Scrolls found in 1946. This dates to somewhere between 250-150 years before Christ. The next earliest scroll dates is from almost a thousand years later.
Textual critics call these still-in-existence scrolls “extant,” which can be remembered as the opposite of extinct.
Actually, the Dead Sea Scrolls give us a pretty good look at what it was like to “read the Bible” in the years between Ezra and Jesus. Books or portions of books were written on scrolls; the collection had not been canonized, and different communities kept their own collections.
People outside of the religious class had minimal access to these scrolls.
Alongside the canonized Torah, the Jewish people started collecting the words of Prophets (Nevi’im) and Writings (Ketuvim). This is where we get the eventual Jewish word for the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, which they call the Tanakh, which is an acronym for Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim.
Most scrolls from this era did not make it. Papyrus and parchment are delicate, susceptible to time, mold and water damage, fire, and a variety of other factors. In addition, the Jewish people would take worn-out scrolls and "archive" them in a genizah, a temporary storage container for writings. Every seven years, the writings in the genizah are buried and allowed to return to the earth.
Every seven years, the writings in the genizah are buried and allowed to return to the earth.
They replaced the scrolls archived in the genizah with newer versions, so the writing was preserved. There were different types of scribes, those that handwrote the scrolls, and those that went about and corrected the scrolls.
Extant writings preserved from ancient times are almost always a near-miraculous mixture of the exact right conditions and happy accidents. The Dead Sea Scrolls were hidden in preserving pottery in an extremely dry environment and found by a Bedouin child. Many believe that the caves holding the scrolls were a type of genizah.
Found genizot (plural of genizah) have offered textual critics thousands of manuscripts to catalogue and compare. 350,000 fragments were found in the Cairo genizah!5 They name them all sorts of fascinating things, like Q35A and P18 or P18C, and it definitely does not make me want to fall asleep instantly when trying to keep track of them.
God bless those textual critics.
But as you might imagine, there are enough differences between the scrolls to keep textual critics busy. There was no publishing press, just human folks copying by hand from a rather immense and varied body of literature with minimal contact between communities.
This truly is the secret of how we have the words of the Bible today–people wrote them down, and kept writing them down. The New Testament often speaks of the priests and scribes…now you know what the scribes were doing.
Period of Translations:
During this period, we also begin to see Targums. Targums are translations from the old Hebrew Script to the common speech of the day. Many Targums are in Aramaic, but one of the most famous is in Greek.
(Artist rendition of the Library of Alexandria based on archeological detail)6
As the legend goes, a Greek pharaoh named Ptolemy II wanted to collect all the books in the world at the Library of Alexandria. He was informed he had missed the sacred scriptures of the Jews. So he sent a letter to the High Priest in Jerusalem, who sent him seventy-two elders. These elders were Israel’s finest sages, representing all of the twelve tribes of Israel, and they all spoke Greek. When they arrived in Egypt, Ptolemy II locked each scribe in a cell with the scriptures and ink, pens, and papyrus. They were not allowed to leave until they had a complete translation of the scriptures into Greek. At the end of seventy days, each scribe emerged, Greek translation in hand. And when all seventy manuscripts were compared, they were all exactly alike.
(This certainly untrue legend comes to us from the Letter of Aristeas who got many historical details wrong, and the “locked the scribes in cells” was a later addition. The miraculous legend was likely created to give Greek Jews and Christians who couldn’t read the original Hebrew scripture the sense that the Greek Translation was equally holy and blessed as the original Hebrew.)
This is the basis for the Septuagint (sept for seventy elders), which was the version quoted by Paul, and eventually became the landmark translation of scripture used by Christians. Until King James! More on that later.
Around the year 100, Jewish scribes completed their work of gathering manuscripts, and with much debate, rabbis decided which manuscripts would be canonized and considered holy.
For Christians following along, this means that the Hebrew Bible was not canonized during the life of Jesus.
Obviously, the gospels record Jesus quoting from the Torah, Prophets, and Psalms, but it is possible that other writings such as Ruth, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and so on were not as popular at the time. Jesus also appears to use phrases that are similar to those found in the uncanonized Book of Enoch.
Some scholars argue that the Dead Sea Scroll cache was not a genizah, but rather a way to hide books that their community valued but were not canonized.
Intentions Preserved:
The last thing we will look at today is the Masoretic Text.
Above is a full, high quality scan of all the extant parts of the Aleppo Codex.7
Sources disagree on when the practice began. Some say that around the time of the temple destruction in 70 CE, which resulted in the devastating loss of both Jewish adherents and their manuscripts, the rabbis began to do something they had never done before. They translated not only the Hebrew Scriptures into a more modern Aramaic but also included explanations in the margins to preserve rabbinic teachings.
The Hebrew on the original manuscript scrolls was an ancient form, and the writing lacked vowel markings; certain words were no longer commonly used, and their definitions were obscure. Explanations for all these things and more were held in oral tradition and passed down from rabbis to students.
Other sources say that this practice did not begin until the early middle ages, when Hebrew scribes began including notes from the oral tradition to preserve and protect the scriptures. Side margin notes (Masorah parva) helped indicate which word was intended, preserve the correct vowels from the vowel-less earlier script, and include grammar notes. Masorah Magna were the longer notes in the top and bottom margins of a manuscript and usually included more interpretation or meaning of the scripture. All together, this is called the Masoretic Text.
“Each major manuscript has its own masorah, and its own sets of masoretic notes. One of the most important of these manuscripts that the Masoretes annotated was the Leningrad Codex, dated to 1008 C.E., that was rediscovered in the middle of the 19th century, and subsequently made the basis of the most widely used critical Hebrew Bible today, that of the Biblia Hebraica series.”8
As the Christians took over the Septuagint, the Jewish population moved away from it and leaned heavily on the Masoretic Texts. However, later, under the direction of King James, the Church pivoted, and the King James Version of the Bible was compiled from the Masoretic Texts as well.
Conclusion:
Most current Old Testaments in the Christian Bibles are based on the Masoretic text as found in the Aleppo Codex, but also the ongoing work of textual critics as they compare and contrast manuscripts and fragments to find the most agreement and the oldest traditions. This incredible work takes attention to detail and collaboration on a global scale.
At the end of the day, does it make a difference to know how the Bible was compiled?
Personally, from an academic standpoint, I think it is interesting to investigate the differences between manuscript fragments and scrolls and ponder what they mean. Why did one community write it one way, and another preserve it slightly differently? It gives the sense of a very alive tradition, held in the minds of real people, written by the hands of actual humans. It is the profound work of centuries of scribes and religious people, passing these words and stories from one to the other because it was important to them.
It is also important to grapple with the fact that the text was not transmitted to us in as clean a manner as we would like. Manuscripts have mistakes, things are crossed out, amended, missing. Stories are different between fragments, some longer or shorter, dialogue changes, pieces are omitted. Books that were treasured by communities were not canonized.
For myself, it softens the edges of the scriptures. We have mysteries to ponder. In a way, it makes us softer people—less apt to weaponize verses and more likely to seek wisdom in them.
It gives the sense of a very alive tradition, held in the minds of real people, written by the hands of actual humans. It is the profound work of centuries of scribes and religious people, passing these words and stories from one to the other because it was important to them.
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Ehrman, Bart, Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, Harper Collins, 2005.
Wright, Jacob L. Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Nehemiah 8:1-8.
Wylen, Stephen M. The Jews in the Time of Jesus: An Introduction. New York: Paulist Press, 1996.
Wolf, Lior, Rotem Littman, Naama Mayer, Tanya German, Nachum Dershowitz, Roni Shweka, and Yaacov Choueka. 2011. “Identifying Join Candidates in the Cairo Genizah.” International Journal of Computer Vision 94 (1): 118–35. doi:10.1007/s11263-010-0389-8.
Artist's Impression of the Ancient Library of Alexandria." Photograph. Wikimedia Commons. Accessed April 18, 2024. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ancientlibraryalex.jpg.
Aleppo Codex FULL High-Resolution." PDF file. Wikimedia Commons. Last modified June 23, 2019. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1_Aleppo_Codex_FULL_high-resolution.pdf.
Meyer, Anthony R. "Introduction to the Masorah: The Masorah of Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ)." Ancient Jew Review. September 11, 2020. https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2020/9/11/introduction-to-the-masorah-the-masorah-of-biblia-hebraica-quinta-bhq.