How did the Bible Appear? The Old Testament

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. ...

And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day." - Genesis 1:1-5

The first five books of the Bible have been written by Moses in the silence of the desert. In Genesis, Moses describes the creation, the first human beings, and also the way, man departed from God. In this book, he writes about the big catastrophe, the flood that destroyed all life.

But, how did he know what were the events that occurred on Earth and especially those that were before his time?

Professor Paolo Matthiae, associated with the University of Rome, started his archeological activities back in 1964 in Tell Mardikh, on a 32 square kilometers heel.

Here he found the king's palace of the old civilization of Ebla together with more than 16,000 clay tablets, and in 1975, he also found the clay tablets representing the state archives. Their importance is remarkable because they date back to 2500 BC.

From the biblical point of view, these are important because cities mentioned in the Bible are also mentioned on these tablets. Cities like Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham's city, Haran, are also described here. Ebla puts an end to the impression that the forefathers of Abraham were some illiterate shepherds.

From other discoveries, it is clear enough that writing was not foreign for these old times. Therefore, it was not foreign for the writers who put the Bible "on paper." To conclude, when Moses wrote the book of Genesis, he might have used written documents from his predecessors like Noah, Jacob, and Abraham, or maybe even by Adam.

In Exodus, Moses heard God speaking, and he wrote everything God had told him, and after 40 years of wilderness, Joshua was the one who entered with the people of Israel in the Promised Land. The people of Israel did not have kings as authority over them, but in times of oppression, they had judges.

Samuel was the most important of them and the last of the judges, as well. He founded a so-called school of the prophets, and Israel entered thus in the era of the prophets. The prophets played an essential role as the nation of Israel started being governed by kings, and the kings were guided by prophets.

Prophets not only spoke the voice of God to kings, but they had to write those messages, as well. This is the way the following books of the Bible came to life: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, which represent the early prophets. After them, the major prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel followed, and then the 12 minor prophets.

The "writings" category such as the books of Daniel, Ester, and Chronicles were written during and after the Babylonian captivity; to this category, also belong the Psalms, Proverbs, and the book of Job. Consequently, the books comprising the Law of Moses, the books of the prophets, and the writings complete the Old Testament.

Believed to have started around the year 1500 BC, the Old Testament's writing was completed by 400 BC. Not long after that, Alexander the Great and his empire, the Greek Empire, conquered the territories (including Israel), and as a result, the spoken language of the country was the Greek language.

This is the reason why the Bible was translated into the Greek around the year 250 BC. The way the scribes worked to give us a flawless version of the Bible and an extremely accurate one is a whole story in itself. However, the scrolls found near the Dead Sea, dating from 1000 BC, attest the perfectly preserved accuracy of the one that we have today.