The Historical Context of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament

Table 1, below, gives the historical contexts in which the various books of the Bible were produced, and approximate dates. Writings did not originate in a vacuum but out of the events in the history of Judaism and Christianity which they are often a response to. Some sense of date and events is helpful in understanding the message of the various writings of the Bible.

Table 1: Outline of Bible History

The Development of the Hebrew Bible

Using the resources of the biblical scholarship of the last several centuries, it is possible to describe the process that brought the different portions of the Bible into their final form. The following section provides a general overview of that process. Dates listed, unless otherwise noted.

Oral tradition preserved much of the early traditions within the Hebrew community for centuries. Contained within that tradition were the stories that are included in Genesis 1-11, the material about the Patriarchs, and the story of Moses and the exodus, as well as others. (1900 B.C.E.)

About the time of Moses, the first written traditions began to develop, probably very limited. Possibly many of the laws of the Pentateuch were included as they began to be collected around the Ten Commandments. (1290 B.C.E.)

The oral tradition continued to grow simultaneously with a primitive written tradition. These traditions were preserved by special persons in the community and interpreted current history from the religious belief that Yahweh, God, was active in that history, indeed was revealed in his actions in their history. (1250 B.C.E.)

With the establishment of monarchy, most of the existing oral material was written down and court histories began to be kept. Some oral tradition continued as well. (1020 B.C.E.) When Israel was divided into two kingdoms (Judah and Israel), each community developed and maintained its own traditions, both oral and written, and these traditions preserved the point of view of the South and the North. (922 B.C.E.)

In both the Northern and Southern kingdoms, prophets began to play a central role. The traditions surrounding a prophet were, at first, maintained orally. By about 750 B.C.E. the prophets or their disciples began to record their prophecies in poetic form and these were preserved by the religious communities of both kingdoms. (922 B.C.E.) In addition, in the Southern kingdom (Judah) the priests (the most prominent religious group) began to preserve and shape the religious tradition. (922 B.C.E.)

Following the fall of the Northern kingdom (Israel) to Assyria in 722/21 B.C.E., some of those who preserved the religious traditions of the North escaped to Judah and the process of the merger of the two traditions began. (700 B.C.E.) The combined religious traditions of Israel and Judah were introduced into the community of Judah during the reign of King Josiah. Portions of the Hebrew Bible, most likely the Pentateuch, began to assume the authority of scripture. (521 B.C.E.)

The fall of the Southern Kingdom to Babylon and the period of exile which followed, brought a further merger of the two traditions. Prophetic and priestly traditions were woven together and the religious point of view of both these traditions were preserved. Synagogues began to develop in this period and the preserved religious traditions became central to the community of faith. (587 B.C.E.)

The literary traditions, the written texts, began to replace the living prophets as Judaism sought to understand the events in their history and the theological interpretation of those events was extremely important to the editors /redactors who shaped the Hebrew Bible. With Hellenization this process was intensified as Israel looked to the past to understand and live out its relationship with the God of Israel. By 165 B.C.E. religious authority was rooted in the literary traditions of the Hebrew Bible and by the end of the first century C.E., the Hebrew Bible which survives today had emerged from the community. In the nineteenth century, the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis argued for four previous primary sources for the Pentateuch (and in subsequent sections of the Hebrew Bible, also). Noting different names for God in stories told two or more times, lists transmis of kings that had not appeared yet in the time of Moses, the repetition of the phrase, "until this day" etc., the authors suggested that at least the first five books known h of the Bible were composed of four separate sources identified as J (the Southern tradition), E (the Northern tradition), P (the Priestly tradition) and D (Deuteronomy). While there is currently a great deal of debate over the specific identification of the sources, that there are numerous sources woven together in the Hebrew Bible is not being questioned in the discussion.

Textual History

Bible focuses on the preservation and transmission of the Bible in the original languages (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek) and to translation of to Bible into other languages. Since we have no "original" texts, we are dependent on manuscripts copied and passed on and early translations from original languages into other ancient languages.

Until the late 1940's with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest complete Hebrew manuscript available for textual study dated from around 1000 C.E. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves along the shores of the Dead Sea gave us manuscripts from c.a. 200-100 B.C.E., over 1000 years older than the previous manuscripts. Portions of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther were discovered there and illustrated the high degree of accuracy of the transmission of the text from 200 B.C.E. to 1000 C.E.