Bible scholars have long debated whether the Old Testament was written in an era before the Babylonian captivity of the Jews, or after … Texts on potsherds found in the Israeli fortress of Arad indicate that the first version is most likely correct, according to the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Where did the Old Testament come from?
According to generally accepted Christian canons, the first part of the Bible - the Old Testament - is divine revelation. The biblical texts belong to different authors, and the Christian canon states that they were written from the 15th century BC to the 1st century AD.
The first handwritten texts of the Bible, which became public, appeared in the 6th-5th centuries BC. They were brought together by the Jewish high priest and the scribe Ezra. The main text of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, some parts of it in Aramaic. The New Testament was written in ancient Greek.
It is believed to have been compiled in the 1st century AD. However, a number of secular researchers believe that both the Old and New Testaments were written in much later times, or the ancient texts were rewritten and translated with great distortions, so that they turned out to be very far from the original sources in form and content …
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Apocrypha and the Babylonian captivity
In addition to the books included in the canon of Christian Scripture, there are also known apocrypha - manuscripts that are not recognized by the church as canonical. Nevertheless, they deserve the closest interest of theologians, and just those who are interested in the history of religion …
It is believed that the apocryphal originated long before the Christian religion. Their history is closely connected with the period of the so-called Babylonian captivity, which lasted from 598 to 539 BC. This is the name of a series of forced migrations of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah to Babylonia.
The "deportation" of the Jews was a punitive measure in response to the uprisings against the Babylonian rulers who wanted to bring Judea and its people under their rule. In July 586 BC, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, seeking to secure the lands bordering with Egypt, captured and destroyed Jerusalem. At the same time, the Temple of Yahweh was destroyed - the First Temple, erected during the time of King Solomon himself (965-928 BC), the main Jewish shrine … Approximately ten percent of the Jewish population were taken captive. Among the captives was also the king of Judah, Jeconiah.
The expulsion of the Jews to Babylonia lasted 16 years, until 582 BC. The great captivity lasted almost 70 years. True, Jewish settlers lived in tribal communities and tried not to forget about their origin.
After Babylonia was conquered by the Persians and became part of the Achaemenid kingdom, King Cyrus II the Great, striving to achieve popularity among the Babylonian population, issued a decree allowing the Jews to return to their homeland: “Whoever is of you, of all His people, may God be him with him - and let him go to Jerusalem, which is in Judea, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel, the same God who is in Jerusalem. (Book of Ezra 1: 3).
Although many descendants of the settlers chose to stay in Mesopotamia, 42,360 Jews returned to Judea and began to restore the Jerusalem temple (later called the Second Temple), which was completed in 516 BC: “And the heads of the generations of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and Levites, everyone in whom God has stirred up his spirit to go and build the house of the Lord that is in Jerusalem. (Book of Ezra 1: 5).
Many experts believe that it was in exile that the Jews formed their national identity, and only with the emergence of the Jewish diaspora was the canon of the biblical books of the Old Testament compiled (in the Jewish tradition it is called the Tanakh). Before that, the Jews did not have sufficient literacy to carry out such a "project".
Arad shards
However, recent finds on the territory of a small ancient southern Jewish fortress Arad refute this opinion. We are talking about 16 shards of clay, where the Hebrew texts are written. The artifacts date back to around 600 BC.
Israeli archaeologists have found that the authors of the texts are at least six people. One of the "documents" is an order to the deputy intendant
fortress on the issue of food to Greek mercenaries. If the lower officers communicated among themselves in writing, even far from the centers of culture in a substandard fortress, then it can be assumed that the Jews became literate long before the Babylonian captivity, so that at that time they could already read and write sacred texts. So the canon of the Old Testament may be much older than it is commonly believed.