Chapter 3: How the Old Testament Was Written

God commands his words to be written

The Bible does not hide how it began. Again and again it records that God told his servants to write, and that they did. “And the LORD said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book” (Exodus 17:14). “And Moses wrote all the words of the LORD” (Exodus 24:4). “And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book, until they were finished,” he gave the book to the Levites to be kept beside the ark of the covenant “that it may be there for a witness against thee” (Deuteronomy 31:24-26). Writing was never an afterthought. The covenant, to be binding on later generations, had to be written down.

The Law

The five books of Moses, the Pentateuch, have been regarded since ancient times as the foundation of the Old Testament. The later writers speak of “the book of the law of Moses” (Joshua 8:31; 2 Kings 14:6; Nehemiah 8:1), and Jesus and the apostles spoke of Moses as the author of the Law (Luke 24:27; John 5:46-47; Acts 15:21). Genesis, which covers events before Moses’ lifetime, was understood to have reached him by revelation and by the records of the patriarchs. Scholars date Moses at roughly the fifteenth to thirteenth century BC, depending on how the Exodus is dated; the question remains debated among conservative scholars. The tradition recorded in the Talmud also assigns the Pentateuch to Moses (b. Baba Batra 14b).

The historical books and the prophets

Joshua “wrote these words in the book of the law of God” (Joshua 24:26). Samuel “told the people the manner of the kingdom, and wrote it in a book, and laid it up before the LORD” (1 Samuel 10:25). The books of Kings and Chronicles point to older written sources: “the book of the acts of Solomon” (1 Kings 11:41), “the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel” (1 Kings 14:19), and the records of the prophets Nathan, Gad, and Iddo (1 Chronicles 29:29; 2 Chronicles 9:29). The historians were editors and compilers under God’s guidance, drawing on court records, prophetic accounts, and genealogies. These sources were reliable documents, and the Spirit guided the writers in using them.

The prophets also wrote. Isaiah was told, “bind up the testimony, seal the law among my disciples” (Isaiah 8:16). Habakkuk was commanded, “Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it” (Habakkuk 2:2). The fullest account of how a prophetic book was made is Jeremiah 36. In the fourth year of King Jehoiakim, God told Jeremiah to take a scroll and write all that he had spoken; Jeremiah dictated, and Baruch the scribe wrote them “with ink in the book” (Jeremiah 36:2, 4, 18). The king cut the scroll with a penknife and burned it in the fire. Then God told Jeremiah to take another scroll, “and there were added besides unto them many like words” (Jeremiah 36:32). The word of God could not be destroyed by a king.

Poetry and wisdom

David, “the sweet psalmist of Israel” (2 Samuel 23:1), wrote many of the psalms. The Psalter itself is a collection, gathered in stages: the superscriptions name David, Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon, Moses, and others. Solomon “spake three thousand proverbs: and his songs were a thousand and five” (1 Kings 4:32), and “These are also proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah copied out” (Proverbs 25:1) shows the later work of collecting and preserving. Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon complete the books of wisdom and poetry.

Ezra, the scribe

After the Babylonian exile, Ezra “was a ready scribe in the law of Moses” who “had prepared his heart to seek the law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments” (Ezra 7:6, 10). In Jerusalem, the people gathered in the square before the Water Gate, and Ezra read from the book of the law from morning until midday. “So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8). This is the first picture of the Bible being read, explained, and applied to the whole community, a pattern the church has followed ever since.

Dating and authorship

Several Old Testament books are anonymous: Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Esther, and others. The Bible does not name their authors, and this does not weaken their authority. Their authority comes from God who inspired them, not from the name on the scroll. The Talmud preserves Jewish traditions of authorship (b. Baba Batra 14b), which are useful historical testimony though not themselves inspired.

Summary. The Old Testament did not fall from heaven in a finished volume, nor was it a loose collection of folk tales. It came in stages across many centuries, through men whom God raised up to speak and write, and whose writings were kept before the people as the covenant words of God.