History of the Bible

The History of the Bible

The Bible was not written in one specific year or in a single location. The Bible is a collection of writings, and the earliest ones were set down nearly 3500 years ago.

When was the Bible written?

The first five books of the Bible are partly about Moses and are commonly called the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch are the first 5 books of the Bible.

Moses lived between 1500 and 1300 BC, though he retells events in the first eleven chapters of the Bible that happened long before his time , including the creation and the flood.

His retold stories were handed on from generation to generation in songs, narratives, and poetry.     In those early societies there was no writing as yet and people passed on these oral accounts with great detail and accuracy.

The earliest writing began when symbols were carved or pressed on to hard clay.                              The Egyptians re-created this technique and made an early form of writing known as hieroglyphics. The Bible tells us that Moses was "educated in all the learning of the Egyptians", so he would have been familiar with the most used writing systems of his time. We also read that God gave Moses "two tablets of the Testimony, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God"(Exodus 31:18). All this leads to the conclusion that the earliest writings in the Bible were set down around 1400 BC.

The writings of the thirty or so other contributors to the Old Testament span a thousand years! They recount the times and messages from Moses' successor, Joshua, to the last of the Old Testament prophets, Malachi, who wrote his little tract around 450 BC.