DBT9 - The Bible is most likely 2500 - 3000 (B.C.!) years old, thus pre-dating the scientific and ethical achievements of the Greeks, whose cultural blossoming began around the 8th Century BC. The very word 'Bible' is most likely derived from the Assyrian Seaport of 'Byblos' and it became a Greek word describing what we now know as the Bible but known to Ancient Greeks as the Papyrus Scroll. Eventually 'biblos' simply meant book.
However there were several civilizations pre-dating the Greeks, who had thinkers, practiced religion and lived by moral rules (when they were not butchering their enemies), and had thoughts about an after-life. The very first religious texts in existence are the 'Pyramid Texts' dating to 2600 BC - and were Egyptian, (only to be read by the Pharao btw, but he was God in persona), but principal God of the Egyptians was Osiris, whose story is one of resurrection.
Next text is the 'Epic of Gilgamesh' (written about 2100 BC) a story of a wild man (Enkidu) being transformed into a human by a priestess to challenge a wilful king 'Gilgamesh'. After many battles they become friends, the king becomes more human - eventually Enkidu (the wild man) dies and Gilgamesh is looking for him in the afterlife. The Mesopotamians (or Babylonians, today's' Iraqis and Syrians) worshipped many gods but already had a story about the Garden of Paradise, the Flood, the Creation and the Tower of Babel. It is the world's oldest religion and it influenced Judaism, Christianity and Islam
When one considers the expulsion (or The Exodus) of the Jews from Egypt which happened around 1300 BC and the story which follows with Moses leading them through the Red Sea and then getting the Ten commandments from G.d - one has to assume that the Hebrew Slaves who had spent many generations in Egyptian captivity and apparently thrived, hence the Pharao sent them away, because they got too numerous, must have picked up a lot of knowledge as well as parts of the religion of the Egyptians, who had a strong belief in the afterlife and went to great troubles about their burials etc. - as we all know.
So the biblical texts would originally be based on an oral tradition as kept by the Hebrews in captivity and would have simply incorporated information from their daily lives in Egypt, where they spent a number of generations, including medical and scientific knowledge (smart as they are to this day!) - but as yet it was an oral tradition, possibly they had scrolls as they saw the Egyptians do - just my guess - so most likely the early parts of the Bible would have been a long oral tradition.
Here is an extract of what Professor John K. Riches, Professor Divinity and Biblical Criticism (Glasgow) says: 'the biblical texts themselves are the result of a creative dialogue between ancient traditions and different communities through the ages' and 'the biblical texts were produced over a period in which the living conditions of the writers - political, cultural, economic and ecological - varied enormously.
Another scholar, Timothy H. Lim, Professor Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism, Edinburgh, says that the Old Testament is "a collection of authoritative texts of apparently divine origin that went through a human process of writing and editing'
. . . . . he states that it is not a magical book nor was it literally written by G.d and passed to mankind. Parallel to the solidification of the Hebrew canon (ca 3rd century BC), only, firstly, the Torah and then the Tanakh began to be translated into Greek and expanded, now referred to as the Septuagint or the Greek Old Testament in Christian Bibles. The New Testament Gospels were derived from oral traditions in the second half of the first century.
Some of the above is contradictory; some of which I knew - having had a life-long interest in religions - but mostly verified by Wikipedia - and it goes to show that what was a religion from the human melting pot of the Middle East, with all its interdictions, rules, songs and dietary prescriptions relevant to a hot climate (and nonsense today), has become a culture-forming and humanitarian way of living. Even if some of us don't acknowledge the Bible as G.d-inspired, it certainly has inspired all of our Western institutions and deserves our respect just from that point of view and its language is beautiful and often consoling, but a scientific rule book, it is not. Go Well Taurisk
