Archeological surveys suggest the region was depopulated by as much as 80 percent, and in Babylon the situation was grim for the exiles—with the exception of the royal family. It is hardly credible that Jewish exiles working on Babylonian canal projects wrote or even valued literature.
However, the royal entourage of the last kings of Judah were living in the southern palace of the Babylonian kings, and they retained their claim to the throne in Jerusalem.
They collected literature from the royal and temple library, as well as wrote and edited literature that advanced their claims and standing. But the high status of the royal family and its role in the formation of biblical literature seems to disappear by the end of the sixth century B. The region of Palestine, especially in the hills around Jerusalem, continued to be sparsely populated and impoverished in the fifth and fourth centuries B.
These were dark times for Jerusalem and the Persian province of Yehud. In past scholarship, it was "dark" simply because we knew so little about this period of history. Increasingly, archeology has filled in the void but painted a bleak picture.
Most biblical literature was written long before this dark age. However, the priests who took over the leadership of the Jewish community during this period preserved and edited biblical literature.
By the time of the fall of Babylon in B. The very language of Scripture changed as society became more textualized. Most tellingly, the Hebrew word torah , which originally meant "teaching, instruction," increasingly began to refer to a written text, "the Torah of Moses," also known as the Pentateuch in the Second Temple period B.
The tension between the authority of the oral tradition and the written word, the teacher and the text, continued in the Second Temple period among the various Jewish groups. The priestly aristocracy controlled the temple library and the sacred texts. They were literate elites whose authority was threatened by the oral tradition.
Groups like the Pharisees, in contrast, were largely composed of the lay classes. They invested authority in the teacher and the oral tradition. Both early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, which grew out of the lay classes, struggled with the tension between the sacred text and the authority of the oral tradition in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple in A. Although they acknowledged the authority of the written Scriptures, they also asserted the authority of the living voice of the teacher.
Christianity, however, quickly adopted the codex—the precursor of the modern book. Codices, with bound leaves of pages, appeared in the first century A. The codex could encompass a much more extensive series of texts than a single scroll could contain.
In bringing together a collection of scrolls, the codex also defined a set and order of books and made possible a more defined canon. It was with the technological invention of the codex that the "Bible" as a book, that is, the Bible as we know it, first got its physical form.
The adoption of the codex probably encouraged the authority of the written Scriptures in the early Church. Judaism, in contrast, was quite slow in adopting the codex and even today it is a Torah scroll that we find in a synagogue ark.
Eventually, Judaism too would cloak its oral tradition in a written garb. Still, a fierce ideology of orality would persist in rabbinic Judaism even as the oral Torah and the written tablets were merged into what, according to doctrine, is one pre-existent Torah that was with God at the very creation of the world.
Scientists have discovered the earliest known Hebrew writing — an inscription dating from the 10th century B. The breakthrough could mean that portions of the Bible were written centuries earlier than previously thought.
The Bible's Old Testament is thought to have been first written down in an ancient form of Hebrew. Until now, many scholars have held that the Hebrew Bible originated in the 6th century B. But the newly deciphered Hebrew text is about four centuries older, scientists announced this month.
By John Drane Last updated The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as 'religious'. The Old Testament is the original Hebrew Bible, the sacred scriptures of the Jewish faith, written at different times between about and BC.
The Hebrew Bible has 39 books, written over a long period of time, and is the literary archive of the ancient nation of Israel. It was traditionally arranged in three sections. The first five books , Genesis to Deuteronomy.
They are not 'law' in a modern Western sense: Genesis is a book of stories, with nothing remotely like rules and regulations, and though the other four do contain community laws they also have many narratives. The Hebrew word for Law 'Torah' means 'guidance' or 'instruction', and that could include stories offering everyday examples of how people were meant to live as well as legal requirements.
These books were later called the 'Pentateuch', and tradition attributed them to Moses. Some parts undoubtedly date from that period, but as things changed old laws were updated and new ones produced, and this was the work of later editors over several centuries. The Prophets is the largest section of the Hebrew Bible, and has two parts 'former prophets' and 'latter prophets'. The books of 'latter prophets' preserve sayings and stories of religious and political activists 'prophets' who served as the spiritual conscience of the nation throughout its history, reminding people of the social values that would reflect the character of God.
Sometimes, the prophets could be mime artists and dramatists, accompanying their actions by short spoken messages, often delivered in poetic form. These were the sound bites of their day, which made it easy for others to remember them and then write them down.
The 'former prophets' consist of Joshua , Judges, Samuel, Kings. They are history books, but what makes them also 'prophets' is that they not only record information, they interpret it, explaining its significance in relation to other events in the history of Israel, and of the wider world of their day. These include Psalms songs, prayers and liturgies for worship , Proverbs sayings of homespun wisdom , Job a drama that explores the nature of suffering , plus the 'five scrolls' 'Megiloth' which were grouped together because each had associations with a particular religious festival: Ruth the Jewish Feast of Weeks, also called Shavuot , Song of Solomon Passover , Ecclesiastes Tabernacles , Lamentations Destruction of Jerusalem , and Esther Purim.
This section also includes the last books of the Hebrew Bible to be written: Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles all history books , and Daniel visions of a better world.
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