What is the Hebrew Bible? (A Book Report, and Timeline)

The Hebrew Bible, or TaNaKh – or "Old Testament" for you Christocentrists out there – is a library of religious writings whose compilation and editing was completed in the middle of the second century of the Common Era - 150 CEish. The name "TaNaKh" is a Hebrew-alphabet acronym enumerating the three categories of literature in this library: Torah, Neviim, Kethuvim. Or, loosely: law, prophets, writings.

Now, the relevant scriptures had been written, rewritten, and edited over the previous five hundred or more years, deriving in many cases from earlier spoken histories and myths that had themselves evolved out of the general religio-cultural stew of the ancient Near East. That the early stories of the Bible hold features in common with Canaanite and Mesopotamian myths is well-known; that the Bible wasn't delivered in either a cohesive or an exclusive way to the Israelites is undeniable.

Further, the history that the Bible relates - the emigration of the Israelites into contemporary Israel/Palestine after escaping slavery in Egypt - simply never happened. The Israelites appear to have been one Canaanite people among many, gradually distinguishing themselves as a culturally-confederated group of tribes in the period between 1200 and 900 BCE. The Egypt stuff looks to have come into their mythos as a result of an earlier period, 1800-1200 BCE, when Egypt had ruled over Palestine.

This brings us to the most important caveat to bear in mind when reading the Bible. We think of the Bible as a book - a fixed text - but for a reeally long time it was a living, often spoken document being rewritten, amended, and reassessed to meet the narrative needs of the day. Stories about stuff that had supposedly happened a long time back were constantly repurposed to speak to the the then-current situation. In this instance, an effectively prehistoric period when Egypt had occupied Palestine, helped echo the then-current situation... some 600 years later... of captivity under the Assyrian empire. More on which in a moment.

(This is a process we certainly see continuing today. Hebrew scholars have gone on "exegeticizing", and making stuff up about, the Bible all through the Middle Ages and straight into Madonna's Quabbballah class. Ditto for the Christian Bible. The heavily coded and allegorical [and also thoroughly demented] rantings of Revelation - plainly written to predict the fall of the Roman Empire - are interpreted with straight faces today as saying something about 9-11.

(More succinctly, I need give you just two words: John Hagee.)

Well, if the Bible was constantly recast to meet the needs of the then-present, it comes as no surprise that the text as we receive it is intimately framed by the destruction of the Second Temple in 70CE, and, more distantly, by the Babylonian Captivity.

What the heck are these two events? Let's take them in historical order.


The Babylonian Captivity

As of 600 BCE, the Israelite peoples lived in two kingdoms within Canaan (Palestine). To the north, Israel; to the south, Judah. Both were vassal states to the dominant and enormous Assyrian Empire (aka Babylon, or Mesopotamia, or Iraq). The northern kingdom of Israel had run afoul of Assyria some 132 years before, and gotten themselves pretty-well stomped in the process (the army of Tigleth-Pileser III sacked their capital at Samaria in 732 BCE). Ever since then, Israel had been playing it cool by Assyria. Come 600 BCE, however, it was Judah's turn to get uppity. And so Nebuchadnezzar, King of Assyria and Man Whose Very Name Sounds Frightening, sent over an army to lay waste to the southern kingdom of Judah. In particular, his army destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, built there more than three centuries earlier by King Solomon. (I said that the next bit we're getting to is the destruction of the Second Temple? Well, this was how the first one went down.)

In the aftermath, tens of thousands of Judah's "best people" - scholars, craftsmen, the rich, and anybody else Pol Pot would have killed - were rounded up and taken back to the home country where Nebuchadnezzar could keep an eye on them, and/or milk them for skilled labor.

This, then, was the Babylonian Captivity. It lasted about 60 years, from 597-537 BCE (the Temple having been destroyed in 586) and ending when Cyrus the Great, founder of the even-stronger-than-Assyrian Persian Empire, whacked Assyria, absorbed its territory, and let its captive peoples go home.

But in the meantime, these homesick Hebrews had set to putting stuff into writing. Some of the major Prophets, like Ezekiel, lived and wrote during the time of the Captivity (others, like Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, and Isaiah, had written in the century or two before, warning of the Israelites' impending downfall).

More significantly, the Torah was also first compiled during this time, at least in an inchoate form. In compiling it, the Israelite scholars drew on texts originating in both the northern and southern Israelite kingdoms that they brought with them into Assyria - the "J" and "E" narratives, so-called because of the names ascribed in each to god.

It works like this:

Israel = Northern Kingdom
Elohim = god
(a more-anthropomorphic god in a definitely-not-monotheistic setting)
"E" Manuscript

Judah = Southern Kingdom
Yahweh = god
(a more abstract god in a still-not-monotheistic setting)
"J" Manuscript

The Torah favors the southern traditions, for the straightforward reason that it was southerners from Judah who set about editing the Bible while captive in Babylon. Bits of both narratives are thrown cheek-by-jowl into the Torah, however - resulting in such nonsense as that Noah took one pair of all types of animals onto the ark (Genesis 6) except for taking seven pairs of the clean animals (Genesis 7) for a sailing trip of 150 days (Genesis 8:3) that lasted 40 days (Genesis 8:6).

Anyway, if the Torah has a recurring theme, it's of the Jews entering into a covenant with their god, repeatedly flouting it, then repeatedly getting laid low for flouting it. One may just consider that a spiritually accurate history of the Jewish people, if you will - who by any account have had to deal with a number of instances of being laid low. But I think it also reflects the specific circumstances of the Babylonian Captivity, whose scribes looked to scripture for an explanation of how they got into such a pickle.

Woven into the Torah with these J and E narratives were the Deuteronomist (D) writings, composed pretty recently at that point, around 622 BCE; they represented a movement of reform in religious observation. The bits of the Torah written during the Captivity itself and in the period thereafter are known as the Priestly (P) tradition - particularly comprising Leviticus and Numbers.

The parsing of the Torah into these four narrative strains - J,E,P, and D - is known as the Documentary Hypothesis. However, in something like the sense that evolution is "just a theory", this "hypothesis" about the Bible's composition is one that no serious person, after studying the evidence, would doubt.


The Hellenistic and Roman Periods, and the Destruction of the Second Temple

My, this is running long, isn't it? Well, at least I sure am entertaining myself. Wheeeee!

Okay, when the exiles returned to Jerusalem in 537 BCE, Cyrus the Great of Persia authorized the rebuilding of their Temple; this Second Temple was completed around 20 years later in 515. Under Ezra - the head scribe in Jerusalem at the time and a liaison to Cyrus back in Persia - the Priestly tradition of Biblical composition kicked into gear.

And in the next couple centuries new Biblical writings continued to accrue - not so much in the Torah or Neviim (Prophets) anymore, which had reached something like their current states, but in the Bible's third section of Kethuvim, or writings. This includes books like Chronicles, Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, etc.

The world certainly continued changing around Israel during this period as well: the Persian Empire fell to Alexander the Great in 333 BCE, ushering in a couple of centuries of Hellenization (ie, Greek-ization) in Palestine. Scholarship-wise, this led to the Greek-language translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint. But the Hellenistic rulers of Palestine - the Seleucids - were hated by the Jews for imposing elements of Greek religion, and were thrown out in the Maccabean Rebellion of 167 BCE (which, incidentally, gave us Hanukkah). For the first time in a long time, an independent Jewish state of Judah was reestablished.

Of course that didn't last. In 63 BCE Pompey conquered Judah on behalf of the Romans, ending the (corrupt) Hasmonean Dynasty which had ruled there following the Maccabean Revolt.

This "Late Second Temple Period" under the Romans was turbulent. Splinter movements among the Jews like the Essenes and Pharisees were going strong. Charismatic, apocalyptic, and messianic cults formed around figures like Theudas, John the Baptist, and Jesus. According to the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus, a guy calling himself "The Egyptian" managed to convince 30,000 people to move out of Jerusalem with him into the desert, where, using his mind, he was going to cause the city's walls to fall down. No word on how that worked out.

Many of these movements were violently repressed by the Romans - and in 70 CE, they sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in order to put down a Jewish rebellion that had managed to hold the Romans outside the city for the previous four years. All that was left standing of the Temple was the Kotel, or Western Wall, or Wailing Wall. That's where all those guys in the hats are standing around bobbing back and forth today.

(Incidentally, the absence of a proper Temple is the reason Jews no longer sacrifice animals to God. You can't read much of the Bible without learning that God really wants us to sacrifice lots and lots of animals to him. So as soon as all our problems in the Middle East are solved, and the Temple gets rebuilt, I suppose it'll be time to crack us open some fatted bulls.)

The destruction of the Second Temple proved a decisive pivot-point in world history. As an event, it was integral to the formation of early Christianity; and it also marked the beginning of a new period of Jewish scholarship (the Midrash tradition of commentary) which effectively put a cap on the text of the Hebrew Bible as it then stood.

So, um, yeah. That's where the Hebrew Bible came from.

[Insert the "shave and a haircut - two bits!" music here.]


***

Maybe it would be useful to summarize all the information above in a brief timeline....

1800-1200 BCE
Egypt rules Palestine.

1200-900 BCE
After the Egyptians withdraw from Palestine, the Israelites emerge as a people. In Jerusalem, Solomon builds the First Temple.

732 BCE
The Assyrians (Iraq) attack the northern Hebrew kingdom of Israel (as distinguished from the southern Hebrew kingdom of Judah). Israel is so utterly defeated that the ten tribes of Israelites who comprised the nation, go on to be known as "the lost tribes of Israel".

600s BCE
Many of the Bible's prophetic writings emerge (Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah), warning of another coming fall for the Israelites.

597 - 537 BCE
The Assyrians attack the southern kingdom of Judah, and carry off tens of thousands of white-collar types to Mesopotamia (ie, the Babylonian Captivity). The compilation and editing of the books of the Torah (law) and Neviim (prophets) begins in this period. Prophets like Ezekiel also write at this time.

537-515 BCE
Cyrus the Great of Persia (Iran) conquers the Assyrians (Iraq), repatriates the captive Israelites to Israel, and authorizes the building of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

333 - 167 BCE
The Hellenistic (Greek) period begins with Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persians, and lasts until the Jews' Maccabean Revolt in Jerusalem in 167. Much of the Kethuvim ("writings") of the Hebrew Bible are composed in this period: Chronicles, Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, etc. The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint) is also completed in Alexandria in this period.

63 BCE
Pompey conquers Palestine for the Roman Empire (well, the Roman Republic. It only becomes an Empire after Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE).

66-70 CE
The Romans sack Jerusalem and destroy the Second Temple in order to put down a Jewish rebellion there. In the decades following, Christianity emerges out of the Jewish religion; Judaism itself develops an exegetical tradition called Midrash, with the implication that the proper text of the Hebrew Bible is now considered finalized.


Hey, that was useful.