From shards to scrolls: how the Old Testament came to be written

The Old Testament (also known as the Hebrew Bible) is one of the great treasures of human culture. It is a mostly anonymous work, written by a number of writers, and consists of a diverse mixture of ancient literature: myths, stories, laws, oracles, songs, proverbs. It describes the history of the Israelite peoples during the first millennium BCE, but the earliest complete copies of the Hebrew Bible stem from many, many centuries later in the 11th century CE. In Jewish and Christian tradition the Bible was given by divine inspiration to prophetic figures and subsequently passed on faithfully from one generation to the next. A raft of archaeological discoveries over the last century has provided new insights into the composition of the Bible. But particularly in the last 20 years new attention to the texts that have survived have revolutionized our understanding of the Bible’s origins. In this course our focus will not be on the content of the Hebrew Bible itself, but those discoveries that help us understand the scribal world that gave rise to the text. We will examine texts from the ancient Near East such as royal inscriptions and ancient accounts of prophecy that will give us insight into the origins of the biblical texts. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the earliest Greek translations will help us see how those early texts grew and expanded to become the text with which we are now familiar.