BibleProject - The Bible had Editors? – Paradigm E3

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

How can a collection of ancient manuscripts written by numerous people over thousands of years tell one unified story? In this episode, Tim, Jon, and Carissa dive into how the Bible was written and how such a diverse collection of authors, literary styles, and themes can form one divinely inspired, unified story.View full show notes from this episode →Timestamps Part one (00:00 - 13:30)Part two (13:30 - 22:00)Part three (22:00 - 36:00)Part four (36:00 - 45:40)Part five (45:40 - end)Referenced ResourcesThe Shape of the Writings (Siphrut: Literature and Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures), Julius Steinberg and Timothy J. StoneThe Journey from Texts to Translations: The Origin and Development of the Bible, Paul D. WegnerLee Martin McDonald’s collected worksDominion and Dynasty: A Theology of the Hebrew Bible, Stephen G. DempsterThe Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative, Christopher J. H. WrightInterested in more? Check out Tim’s library here.Show Music “Defender (Instrumental)” by TENTS"Aftersome" by ToonorthShow produced by Cooper Peltz, Dan Gummel, and Zach McKinley. Show notes by Lindsey Ponder. Powered and distributed by Simplecast.

Hey, this is Cooper at Bible Project. I produce the podcast in Classroom. We've been exploring a theme called the City, and it's a pretty big theme. So we decided to do two separate Q and R episodes about it. We're currently taking questions for the second Q and R and we'd love to hear from you. Just record your question by July 21st

and send it to us at infoatbiboproject.com. Let us know your name and where you're from, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds and please transcribe your question when you email it in, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds, and please transcribe your question when you email it in. That's a huge help to our team. We're excited to hear from you. Here's the episode.

Hi, this is John from Bible Project, and we are in the third episode in a series about what kind of literature the Bible is. We're calling this the paradigm series. In the last episode we looked at the Orthodox view that the Bible is both human and divine. Today, we're going to look at how the Bible is actually many different scrolls that altogether tell one unified story. So who wrote these scrolls and made them so elegantly tell one unified story? Who wrote the Bible? Now if you take a normal book, say like Moby Dick and you asked you wrote it, well, that's easy. Herman Melville It took a 18 months back in 1850. Who wrote one fish two fish redfish bluefish?

Dr. Seuss. Who wrote dark matter? That's actually a pretty fun quantum sci-fi thriller by Blake Crouch. This is easy, right? So who wrote the scrolls we find in the Bible? Yeah, so ancient literature in general, and then biblical literature as an example, has a different kind of authorial history than how we imagine it today. It's traditional literature. It's community traditional literature. Which doesn't mean it was written by anybody and everybody. But it was literature that was

studied, edited, compiled, reshaped over the course of many generations. And that's a part of its origins that's, I think, different than how we think of books today. The scribes take oral traditions, priestly manuals, ancient law codes, ancient poems, all these stories, and then put them together into the form we have today. The final form of Hebrew Bible is a lot like a museum exhibit where all these diverse materials have been brought together in a very curated, designed experience.

But didn't Moses write the first books of the Bible and a scroll like Jeremiah? That was simply written by Jeremiah, right? So we don't encounter the Hebrew Bible in the form of what Moses was writing in the wilderness, or what Isaiah was like, right, or Jeremiah were writing. What we have is a highly polished, interconnected museum exhibit

created by a set of hands at the very end of the process that have created a polish or a glaze or the whole thing to make it unified. Today on the show, the scribes who created the unified set of scrolls that tell the unified story that leads to Jesus. Thanks for joining us. Here we go. Okay, we are in the beginnings of a new series on the paradigm that we use at Bible project. The paradigm for how we view the Bible. And so this is very kind of foundational stuff that we're talking about. And so I'm here with Tim McEy, hey Tim.

Hey there. And Kyrissa Quinn is joining us. Kyrissa, you are in the first two conversations. The first conversation we just talked about, what is a paradigm and what are three kind of unhelpful paradigms that have good intuitions, but ultimately kind of leave the Bible flatter than it should

be. Or I'm trying to make it do things that it wasn't quite designed to do in that way. Yeah. And then in the second episode, we talked about the first attribute of the paradigm. We've broken down the paradigm into seven attributes. Yeah, or aspects or... Or aspects or... Axioms or whatever.

Yeah, whatever word we want to use. The first one is that it is both human and divine. That was a great conversation about God using humans and Bible not being made in spite of humans, but in collaboration with humans. Importantly and necessarily through humans. Very intelligent ones too. Yeah.

The bit of glossars I mean, highly intelligent ones too. Yeah, the bit of authors I mean like highly intelligent human beings Yes, and we'll talk about that more yeah in this episode It's probably a good kind of way to lay some tracks to kind of then talk about yeah, then How was this collection of literature how to come together? Why was it designed the way it was? reflection of literature, how to come together, why was it designed the way it was and this whole group of brilliant Jewish scribes and scholars who formed this stuff.

I'm excited to talk about it. So that's what we'll talk about today that the Bible is a unified piece of literature. You know, it's just occurring to me. Another way to intro this, and I'm remembering this from our conversations. And the first one is the, in many ways, the series on the paradigm we use to explore the Bible.

It's an unpacking of our shorthand kind of tagline, which is our mission statement as an organization. We exist to help people experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus. And that little end phrase, a unified story leads to Jesus. There's a paradigm built into that little phrase. What do we mean by that? That we're unpacking? Yeah, it's not just our mission statement.

It's also the approach and the methodology for how we're reading scripture. Yep. Which is pretty cool because I know for ourselves and also our audience who are finding that they resonate with the work that we're putting out there. This is bringing a lot of clarity, I think, in definition to how we're reading. And it's not our paradigm, it's what we think the

biblical author's paradigm is and how the Bible wants us if I can personify it to read itself, how Jesus read the Bible, how the apostles read the Bible. Yeah, in that way, it's like a recovery project. We're trying to recover a paradigm that tends to be obscured, given our modern habits of using the Bible and so on. Okay, that was kind of in the side where we're going to read and throw on top of your intro. Yeah, because we say, Unified Swetlies of Jesus, that has some zing to it. But then when you really think about it, you're like, okay, what do you really mean? And I've heard a lot of other phrases being used. Like it's Jewish meditation literature,

it's wisdom literature. Like all of this stuff, it's easy for me to just my brain to start getting kind of mushy and be like, what are we talking about? What are we really talking about? So this is the next step that it's unified literature. Yeah, unified is a word used in our short tagline. Unified story leads to Jesus.

What do we mean by unified John and Chris? Yeah. Yeah. Well, because the Bible isn't just like a normal book, a normal book. Books that I've used to, you know, one author, one of authors or Cool, but they're really working together contemporaneously the same time. Yeah, right

There's a beginning the middle and end or a thesis and what the Bible is is actually a collection of a bunch of different authors or collaboration of a bunch of authors a bunch of different authors or a collaboration of a bunch of authors, then bringing it into this big anthology of scrolls. And so if that's the case, then is there any rhyme or reason through how this is all put together? And the conviction is that there is a lot of unification.

Yeah. That's why I understand so far. What we mean, yeah. When I hear's why I understand so far about what we mean. Yeah. When I hear unified, I think of the word coherence. It's a coherent story. So there's one story. There's even maybe a narrative thread through that entire story.

But that is really hard to fathom when we're talking about so many different authors over a long, long period of time. Over thousand years, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. long, long period of time. Over thousand years, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's a training continent.

Yeah, that's right. So we did craft a sentence to try and summarize. Oh, yes. Oh, good. Here's the sentence that we crafted. The Bible has many authors, many literary styles, and many themes. But it is telling one story about God's rescue of humanity to be his partners in ruling the world.

So there's kind of two implications there that it's a diverse collection with lots of minis. Different authors, many different books or scrolls. Each scroll contains a variety of literary styles and topics or themes. And by literary styles you mean? Poetry, narrative, discourse, proverbs, like that stuff. So that's emphasizing that it's a collection that's diverse, but it has been unified in a couple of important ways. One is what you could say is the editorial or compositional unity. In the same way that an author could bring to create an anthology, author's often do this, especially different fields,

like a professor of philosophy will collect some of the key essays of important philosophers to that history and then bring them together, selections, and then write introductions and conclusions and essays that bring it all together. It's anthology. So that's a diverse work with diverse authors and origins, but it's been brought together under one unified whole. And what's interesting about that example is that all the literary styles are going to be very similar.

They're all just like philosophical, like, um, didactic, probably, yeah, sure. Discussions. And what makes the Bible even more interesting is not only is it an anthology of sorts, but it's such an eclectic anthology, which makes a few more like an art project, you know, to me. Yeah, so maybe the coherence is a little bit harder for us to identify because we're not really used to seeing that kind of an anthology. Okay, so I think there's two ways to talk about the unity of the Bible.

One is this anthological, there's the editorial, anthological unity to it, on one level, and we can talk about that. But then it's also unified in terms of its content that there is a governing narrative Yes. From beginning to end, there isn't like an organizing principle. And that's where like if you went to some sort of art show that had an overall like theme. Yeah, that's right. But there's projections on the wall and there's paintings and there's someone doing spoken word.

And so it's like feels very eclectic, but there's like a common motif and ideas that are recurring. So when you're done, there is a sense of coherence. The Bible kind of does that as well. Yeah. Yeah. I may think of a museum exhibit of like, you know, ancient Egypt, which is like many millennia of history and culture and artifacts, but in one building, you can be taken on a tour that it's itself an anthology of artifacts from different times and parts of that people's history and so on. And so the Bible's like that. It's anthology of literature from a particular people group, ancient Israel, but it has been brought together editorially and it's unified in terms of its content and theme. literature from a particular people group, ancient Israel, but it has been brought together editorially and it's unified in terms of its content and theme.

It just struck me though that when we say the Bible is unified literature what we're taking for granted is that it is an eclectic anthology. I think a lot of people don't maybe realize that when they open the Bible that they're actually coming to a library of many different scrolls written different literary styles by different authors. Yeah, so maybe let's start there. Let's make that a marker post right now. So let's just say you open a Bible and you look at the table contents, you'll see there's two major collections in a Christian Bible, Protestant Catholic or Orthodox Bible.

There's two main sections, one called the Old Testament, that we call usually the Hebrew Bible in our conversations and then the Old Testament, that we call usually the Hebrew Bible in our conversations, and then the New Testament. And it's helpful to understand the unity of the Bible. It's helpful in my mind to separate those two collections, because they each have a unique formation history that is a little bit different. So it's helpful in my mind to separate them out and to talk a little bit about the editorial unity and history of the Hebrew Bible.

One Bible, two collections. One Bible, two collections. One Bible, two collections, each with a different formation history, but one governing narrative that spans both collections. Yeah. And why would you say it's important to understand the formation history to understand the unity? Yeah. How do those things relate?

Yeah. Well, how you imagine a thing came into being will affect how you interact with it, especially with a collection. So if I think of the Hebrew Bible, just for example, because it's the bigger one, the bigger collection, as an anthology, but anthologies can be really, it can be unified in the fact that they're just brought together under one collection or cover, but they can still be super diverse and unrelated. Like an anthology of philosophers only has in common that... They're all philosophers.

All philosophers, yeah. So, the Hebrew Bible is unified in a much more thorough, invasive way. Yes. And it's unified even in ways that I never... I am still like coming to reckon with, though I've been you know reading this thing Obsessibly for the last 20 plus years and it's more unified than I ever realized and that many people feel When they first read it and the way it came together can help us see that

I don't understand. Yeah, okay, and also help us understand It's not this like divine document that dropped out of heaven as this Yeah, yeah, it kind of spans both these attributes human and divine and unified Yeah, let's take a quick kind of survey tour of the formation of the Hebrew Bible as a way to talk about how it's been brought into a unity in the form We have it and then we can talk about formation and unity of the New Testament And then I think the third step after that is to talk about the governing narrative that unifies both collections even into one meta collection. Yeah. Great. Okay, so the Hebrew Bible. So depending on the form in which you encounter the Old Testament, whether it's in a Protestant Bible, a Catholic Bible, an Orthodox Bible, or a Jewish Bible, there's going to be a different number of books in your table of contents for the Old Testament.

Actually, at the moment I'm saying this, I'm opening a camp for a whole other podcast series that we need to do and should do at some point. But that I don't think. But we actually kind of explain a little bit of it in the how to read the Bible episode two. Oh, that's right. Episode one, what is the Bible? What is the Bible?

Yeah, that's right. Quick little overview of why there's some books in other traditions. That's right. So even in the Hebrew Bible, there's right. Quick little overview of why there's some books and other traditions. That's right. But even in the Hebrew Bible, there's two things going on. One is that some traditions have what's called the Deuterokanon. Right? Well, here, let's reverse the timeline.

Let's go back and do it from oldest to the Lord. Okay, oldest would be the Jewish Hebrew Bible. Yep, so this is come centuries before Jesus, yes, to not. To not. Which is an acronym for Torah Which means law instruction? Nebi aim, which means prophets and then Ketu Vim which is the writings So same books as a Protestant Bible different order and different groupings. Yeah different groupings So yeah, that would for shorthand just called the Jewish Bible or the Hebrew Bible

has 24 separate scrolls that have been organized together into those three parts you disnamed. If you look at a Protestant Old Testament, it's the same. It's the same books. Same books, but that have been divided up differently so that you get a total of 39. And like for example, and I guess I didn't even really, really realize this until recently, the 12 minor profits. Yeah. Yeah. They're all separate books in the Protestant Old Testament. Correct. They're one scroll. They're one scroll in the Hebrew Bible. And importantly so. In the Tenakian. Yeah. Because they belong to a section called the latter profits, which is three big, prophetic scrolls, Isaiah, Jameezicule plus 12.

And that three plus 12 is itself an imitation of the three plus 12 nature of the story, the patriarchs and Genesis. Oh my gosh. Yeah, you're right. So many. Holy cow. Yeah.

So many significant structures. Yes. Oh, yeah. These guys were like geeky to the max. Yeah. Oh, it's insane. That's an example of how depending on the ordering and... And then the other discrepancies is like, first and second Samuel.

Yeah, it's just for Sam Kings. In the Hebrew Bible. Yes. That's right. Okay. So 24 rolls. 24 scrolls in the Tenak. In the three part shape is the design of the Hebrew Bible in its original form.

And that's the form that Jesus refers to it in. He calls it the Torah and the prophets and the Psalms. I thought the collection was referred to in the Dead Sea Scroll community, but the exact same. Torah, Psalms, Moses, the prophets, and David Josephus refers to this three-part organization. Yeah, and the Psalms is representing all of the writings, but it's just the book that the writings start with. Yeah, that's right, yeah. That third part. Okay, so there's 24 scrolls.

And each of those scrolls, the material within it has a distinct origin in the history of the people of Israel, like a museum exhibit on the Egypt. Each room will come from a different, maybe period or focus on different characters. And so the literature was growing and accumulating all throughout over like over. Yeah, these were the only scrolls that they were like writing and reading and reading. That's right. Yeah. They're meant that in fact the sources of the material that we find in the

biblical scrolls is often referred to. In the Bible itself. Correct. Yeah, so there will be a poem and numbers and it'll say, Hey, dear reader, this poem comes from the scroll of Yashar or the author of Chronicles is constantly quoting all these sources that are found nowhere in the Hebrew Bible itself. Yeah.

I got this from the scroll of the Chronicles in King's Judah or something like that. So yeah, okay, so Eber Bible is a selection of a much larger literary tradition of ancient Israel. Yes, Jewish literature. That's right. And actually, I guess some Psalms are not even non-Jewish literature, right? Isn't there like a few things that come from the neighboring? There could be.

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know. Dependence-wise. I thought there was some parts of Proverbs or something. These are the Proverbs of, it's a subdued. Oh, I understand. It wasn't Jewish. You're talking about Aguora. Yeah, Aguora.

King and King Lemuel at the end of Proverbs. Yeah, okay. You're like, who are these kings, but they're. Sorry, not important. They're worth, no, actually it is important. It's in the same way that Nantology can collect but they're... Sorry, not important. They're worth... No, actually, it actually is important. Yeah. It's in the same way that nontology can collect related things that are important, but that maybe began or had a origin point outside the national boundaries of Israel, but that's

been incorporated in. Psalm 29 actually is often cited as a well-known example, because it has so much overlap with a handful of canineite poems, we've found in the ugritic materials, which are canineite literature. Yeah, so it's still, wherever its origination is, it still becomes part of this unified anthology. That's right.

And it becomes part of this stream of Jewish literature. I was thinking that there's a Jewish tradition of writing and how they crafted narratives and poems and it was very specific. Correct. And that's what I was about to say. It's like, this is all Jewish literature. And then I just remembered like, oh yeah, there's a few things that came from me. Right.

Yeah, I got it. And there'll be a fourth point of the paradigm we'll get to later is about that unique style of writing that biblical literature has. But for here we're just saying it's a collection that's over a thousand years in the making. And each scroll, the material, and it began in different points in people and institutions

in Israel's history. So Leviticus is clearly has has some priestly tech manual. Or, you know, whereas the writings of Isaiah come from Isaiah and his disciples in Jerusalem, in particular, the moment Moses starts writing, we're told in the wilderness journey, so all these different comes together. But the final form in which we encounter these texts is actually all, it's very much like a final form of the Tenocht.

The final form of the Hebrew Bible is a lot like a museum exhibit where all these diverse materials have been brought together in a very curated, designed, experienced, highly designed, highly designed. And so we don't encounter the Hebrew Bible in the form of what Moses was writing in the wilderness, or what Isaiah was like, right, or Jeremiah were writing. What we have is a highly polished, interconnected museum exhibit. Yeah, editorialized. Created by a set of hands that at the very end of the process that have like created a polish or a glaze or the whole thing to make it unified. And that's going to feel scandalous to some people.

Oh wait, Deuteronomy just wasn't what Moses handed over to after it was written down. But you mean the idea of like an editor or a doctor after? But even then, you can go throughout the history of interpretation and Jewish and early Christian scholars throughout history just read the last paragraph of Deuteronomy. Yes, right. Something will really stick out to you. Moses died. Yes. And then someone, a later editor, says, Hey, dear reader, yeah, you know, a prophet like Moses has never, ever come along since him.

Yeah. It's clearly somebody's voice, who's not only other than Moses, putting the final touch on the Torah But it's somebody like long after Moses. Yeah, the comment only makes a sense It does if that's the case. Yeah, I think it helps to think about these editors and or redactors as also filled with the spirit and So it's not just the original authors, but it's the authors and editors that shaped the story later too that are all of this material. It's all important as part of their national identity as part of their understanding of God and humanity But there's something happening at a certain time in their history where this is all coming together in a form that kind of gets Finalized to what Jesus would have called the tonk correct and tell me about like what period of time was this?

Yeah, like set the stage for me. Yeah, well, as best as we can tell, we're talking somewhere in the early, the middle phase of the second temple period. Second temple meaning. So after the Babylonian exile. The first temple would have been Solomon's temple. First temple, Solomon's temple.

Destroy. Awesome temple. By the Babylonians. So I hear. In 586 BC. That's Temple. It's destroyed. Awesome temple by the Babylonians. So I hear. In 586 BC. That's right. Then a small number of the Jewish exiles returned from Babylon to rebuild their life there. That story is told in the scroll of Ezra Nehemiah, which is one scroll in the revival.

There's another example. There's another example. The revival, but it's one scroll in the revival. And so in the 520s, five 20s BC, the temple gets rebuilt. And then that temple endured, even though it was remodeled heavily for over another 500 years, but it was ultimately destroyed by the Romans. That's the temple Jesus hung up. It's the temple Jesus hung out in, heavily remodeled by Herod. And then the the temple of Jesus hung out. It's the temple Jesus hung out in, heavily remodeled by Herod. Yeah. And then the second temple period went from the 520s B.C. to 70 A.D. when

the temple was destroyed by the Romans. The Romans? The Romans? The Romans? The Rhine and the Middle, somewhere in the early period in the 300s to 200s, the Hebrew Bible in the final form that we encounter it was being brought into its final. Yeah, so Jewish people come back out of exile. They're taking out of their land. Yep. The temple's destroyed. It's right. There's a few that remain there, right? Yep, that's right. There is a number of Israelites that remain behind. And then Ezra Nehemiah tells a story of coming back. Coming back. Well, they took their library with them. Yeah.

They took the materials that would become the Hebrew Bible. Yeah. With them. There's like this seed form of the books as we know them. Oh, cool. But probably not in the shape that we encountered them. Right. It would have been an earlier shape.

So I guess it's to me, I like to think about the culture that developed. Yeah. Of like, okay, we're reestablishing our identity. Yeah. We're coming back and we're trying to make sense of why did we go into exile? And what is the opportunity now in front of us? What is God doing? And we have all this material, and there's this history

of being these brilliant readers and writers of literature that's connected to not only are we just doing this, but this is actually sacred this is sacred stuff, this is stuff that God is explaining. God's working through us, even in this literature, and that kind of all coalesces to like, I imagine pretty elite squad of just brilliant scribes, just like obsessing over this stuff.

You could make analogies to current populations that end up becoming a gay or something. Yeah, expats in another country, you know? Or let's say like there's a group of people that migrate from one country to another. Sure. And then all of a sudden, for that community, their traditions, their traditional literature, the stories of their family history, become super important here. And they study it and they want to know it even more because they're in a foreign land.

And it's what's going to keep their identity alive as a community. Something certainly is happening like that. And you can even see it in the book of Ezekiel, which is one of the first authors from the early exile, and dude, Ezekiel was like a nerd of his relied literature, because he's quoting Leviticus

like no, but he's business. He knows the Eden stories. So he's a good example. Ezekiel's a good example of a later biblical author whose mind is saturated with the earlier literature of their people, but also he's writing in a time when all that literature is itself still taking new shape and form among the animals.

So that's interesting. Some of this literature is old and just kind of being like copied and maybe studied and studied. And then some of it's brand new, like Ezekiel. Like Ezekiel, that's right. Like it's just like, here's a whole new scroll. That's right. Yeah.

So ancient literature in general, and then biblical literature as an example, has a different kind of authorial history than how we imagine it today. It's traditional literature. It's community traditional literature. Which doesn't mean it was written by anybody and everybody. But it was literature that was studied,

edited, compiled, reshaped over the course of many generations. And that's a part of its origins that's, I think, different than how we think a book's a disay. It took me a long time, right? I'm like a Wikipedia page. I'm like a Wikipedia page.

Yeah, except with a very clear criteria of who can write and add to the page. Which Wikipedia does have. Oh, okay. That's true. I guess I don't know very much about that. I don't know, maybe in the early history of Wikipedia, you could like anyone could change anything, but it's pretty gated now.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm trying to think about what this means for readers as we approach the Bible as a unified story. as we approach the Bible as a unified story, the fact that there's this earlier collection that is studied and maybe edited or redacted into the overall storyline, but then there are these later works. At least one thing that makes me think of is that as we read the later work, so like the prophets and the writings, that we should be looking for how they're reflecting on the Torah, the earlier parts. They've studied them and they're weaving together those themes. So reading the Bible is a unified story.

It'll look for developments from the Torah through the prophets, through the writings. Yeah, that's right. So here's a metaphor that I got from two Hebrew Bible scholars. Let's go look it up real quick. Timothy Stone. It comes from two Hebrew Bible scholars, Julius Steinberg and Timothy Stone, in the book they have called The Shape of the Ritings, and it's all about the formation history of the Ketuvim, that's their part of it. And they talk about how the Hebrew Bible is much more like what it's not like is a collection of potted trees that you would come across like at your nursery down the

street. You know, you go to like a garden store and you go, I want to get some backyard trees. And so, oh, let's go out to the back a lot. And they've like put together, you know, like the Japanese maples and the fig trees or whatever. But each one is in its own little pot and they've been grouped together. That's an analogy for how many people think about the books of the Bible. Each one is kind of like a self-contained entity. And you put that one there and that one there. And at some point the like the lot is closed and the gates locked and like no more. These are the trees we've got. These are the trees we've got. So their analogy that's really illuminating is to liken the origin and Hebrew Bible much more like the growth of an Aspen grove. So Aspen trees are like, well, first of all, when you see a Aspen forest, you're most likely looking at not hundreds of separate trees, but actually at one biological organism.

So Aspen groves can be huge, but they're all interconnected and share identical DNA through their underground root system. And so what you can do, and I mean, I'm not a botanist, but I guess with an aspen grove, is isolate what's the oldest and original root ball out of which everything else is great. But there's an identity to them, and then this is what's most helpful, is that at some point when the original rootball spawned a new one, but then they began interacting mutually so that what happens in one section of the forest

will affect the older rootball and vice versa. And so that's their analogy for the Hebrew Bible. So in other words, the Torah, for example, of Moses. Is the rootball? He is like a rootball. But the form that it's in was also influenced by how the prophets emerged and grew into the shape that they did.

And so the book of Isaiah, or Jeremiah, for example, very much was growing and taking shape along with important developments in how the book of Deuteronomy took shape. And they were growing simultaneously. As opposed to the Torah was finished, it's an apodid tree and then Isaiah wrote his thing and then it was scooted alongside. The whole collection grew in this deeply interconnected way, which is why it's so there's so many cross references and it's hard to tell the often the direction of which part is citing which and which part assumes what other part because it was a massively complex story of growth.

Or how long? So like, you've got a group of scribes, is it just all scribes? And they are bringing this all together. The tourism probably in more shape than other things, but there's still kind of like, oh, let's add this ending to Deuteronomy, or like let's whatever. Yeah, totallyuteronomy or like, let's whatever.

Yeah, totally. And it's taking shape with the profits. Like, how long the time period is this happening? Yeah, over the course of a millennia, over the course of a thousand years. Okay, but even before the X-Oceiling. We're talking about, yeah, we're talking about. But was there like a specific time

where it's like it got really intense and they're like, it became like the... Yeah, we don't know. Everything that we're talking about right now is inference from actual little detail. The book of Psalms is actually a great example as a little microcosm, like the conclusion at the end of Psalm 72, but it's like the emergence of the book of Psalms you can see happened in stages, and it's collections of collections, but it was together and then given, yeah, introductions, conclusions,

yeah, maybe parts even redacted added to certain Psalms later, like a line added later. What do we mean by the word redacted? Yeah, edited or added. It's a fancy word for edited. It's a German word for edit. Yeah. A redacted.

Is it a better word? Yeah, why do I use that word instead of editor? I think. I don't know. Yeah. Okay, I'll go back to editor. Is there have a new one? Does it have a certain new one?

I think it does. I think that's, some people, I guess. To readak. I still hear the word used in some news vocabulary. We talk about like government documents. I think, so I'm used to hearing it in studies of the Psalter, the Book of Psalms, that there was a redaction or an edit that went on later.

But I think redaction, it's a harder word to use in understand. So in the book of Psalms, there's, you know, whatever 60, 70 plus Psalms that are connected to David in some way. Yeah. But then there's other from the sons of Korah, the sons of Asaf. Psalm 72 ends by saying, the prayers of David, son of Jesse, are finished. And then not 20 Psalms later, you get another Psalm of David. So clearly, it's a multi-step process over the course of centuries.

Yeah, so you can see it by that sort of thing, these literary cues. You can see it by the language, if, you know, it's older Hebrew or yeah, Hebrew language, new Hebrew. Yeah. So you can tell older Hebrew from later Hebrew. Yeah, within the Hebrew Bible yeah. So you can tell older Hebrew from later Hebrew. Yeah. Within the Hebrew Bible itself. I just looked it up in modern terminology. Redaction refers to when there is a countable edit. So like, you can see the edit history. So when you redact something, the whole edit history is cast. Oh, okay. Well, that makes sense. If only that were the case. I mean, well, I actually think I hear that word mostly in terms of trying to figure out the

edit history. I know. So yeah, a lot of people when they look at the Bible and they see the different layers, they're trying to figure out how this happened. Yeah, in what order did this happen exactly and what does that mean? And so maybe if we're not trying to understand that exactly, but looking at the final shape, then editing is a more appropriate term to use. Yeah, starting in the late 1700s,

all up through even now today, but especially so in the mid 1900s, there was a big wave of Hebrew Bible scholarship that was trying to reverse engineer the collection of Hebrew Bible to break it back into its previous parts and stages. And with the earliest being the most authentic. In theory.

Yeah, in theory. And so I get this is important to talk about because we're saying that these are different layers, but they actually form one unified story, which is a specific way of viewing the text of the Hebrew Bible. Yeah. And to combine it with our conversation last time about human and divine and the word inspiration, meaning people guided by the spirit.

What some traditions of Christianity have tended to do is to limit the God-breathed nature of these documents to the activity of the handful of people named Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah. And not the guy who wrote the last paragraph. And when you limited it to the named people, we're ignoring the historical reality that it was generations of prophets and scribes and disciples of Isaiah that are talked about in the book of Isaiah as the people who inherited the first version of the book of Isaiah or Baruch, who's mentioned in Jeremiah as the author of the

school of Jeremiah, not Jeremiah himself, but a guy named Baruch, who's mentioned in the book. So we have to, I think, adjust our view of inspiration to the way it's actually talked about in the Bible itself, which is that it's a community of prophets and people who saw themselves as part of the composition history of this collection. It's marvelous. So was there one day where they all just came out of the temple courts and they're like we did it! Here it is! The finished compiled version of our scriptures. Let it never be changed again. Yeah, it seems like it was,

if there was like a release event that happened in the temple courts, we don't have any record of it. What's actually tricky is that- By the time of Jesus, it was pretty well, like it wasn't being changed. It was there. So here has this. Redacted is this is where we have to like open the can of worms because we haven't talked about the New Testament. Oh, maybe we'll just do that in a second

episode. I think we need to. We'll need to. So here's the thing is that the composition of new scrolls that we're picking up and developing the themes of the core Aspen Forest so to speak, the Hebrew Bible. The production of new material didn't stop. The Hebrew Bible itself was created out of a bunch of pre-existing ancient Israelite literature and through time. But it also came into existence during a period of great literary frupleness of the Jewish people. And so there's lots of other second temple Jewish literature that even some Jewish communities also treated

with the same status as the books of the Hebrew Bible. And so you have to kind of think of a Venn diagram. You've got like Sadducees, the Run in the Temple, you've got Pharisees, they wish they were running the Temple. You've got the Dead Sea School community and they tried to run the temple but they got kicked out and so they went out to the desert and hate everybody else. And then you've got the Messianic Jewish community and all and all the other writings they take for granted that

there's this kind of core to the Aspen Grove. But there's also a lot of other literature that was accorded different status in different communities. So this is where the books that became the Dudro Canon or the apocrypha. There's nothing Catholic or Orthodox about these texts. They're just second-templature. They are Jewish, second-templature, so these are the Macbees, these are Enoch, Enoch, Jubiles, the wisdom of Ben Cera, And some of it involves second or third editions of Tenak books. Oh right, like Daniel has an upgrade. There's a Daniel 2.0, there's an Esther 2.0,

and dude, it's so awesome. Because the 2.0 of Esther, for example, takes the book of Esther and situates it with all of this new material that hyperlinks it through design patterns into the stories of the Exodus and the stories of Genesis. And it's awesome. So which Esther is God breathed? Esther 1.0 or Esther 2.0? Or when we talk about like the unified literature, what are we talking about or does that matter? We do put a stake in the ground by our project a little bit. And here's why. The

whole question is, when you talk about the history of the literature the development of Jewish literature didn't stop magically one day right when the Hebrewbibles finished pens down. We did it Jewish literature kept growing and it all kept growing like a snowball though Just like the way the book of Chronicles is rifting off of Genesis through kings and developing it but in light of different things. So the wisdom of Ben Sirra is rifting off of proverbs, anaclesiastes and Job and Genesis altogether. It's doing biblical theology. And so that process never stopped, like it kept on going.

And so the question is, is the line where you say, okay, we're gonna take this part of the tradition and this section of it as coming from God, but this part not. And so traditionally where Christians have done this is to say, well, what was Jesus' Bible? The only reason I read this literature in the first place is because I follow the Jewish Messiah. I'm like a third generation from Scottish immigrants to the United States.

Like I don't have any Jewish blood in me. You do, John. Yeah, surprisingly. Do you, Chris? No, I don't. Not that I know of anyway. But here we are. We've like staked our adult lives on trying to understand this literature and help other people understand it. Like it's weird. Why is that? I'm a follower of Jesus. Yeah. And you guys are too. And so that's why we care about this. So what was the literature that Jesus referred to as the scriptures that he said were about him? Yeah. And he refers to the three-part shape of this literature

that corresponds as far as we can tell to the Hebrew Bible or the Tnach. The Tnach. While Jesus and the apostles allude to and use language from other Jewish literature of the time, they don't as a general pattern refer to it with the same type of status as coming from a divine origin. But they value it. It's useful to read.

It's true, but different status. And the text you're referring to where Jesus talks about the three-part tonnoc. Are you thinking of the Luke 24 passage just to people? Luke 24. But you know, when Jesus quotes from the Torah or from the prophets, he'll say, as the scriptures say, sometimes you'll even say, as God says. But for example, the famous saying where Jesus is like, come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, I'll give you rest, he's riffing off of the little line out of the wisdom of Ben Sarah.

Oh, really? Which is where Lady Wisdom says, come to me, all who are heavy laden and I will give you rest. And Ben Sarah is riffing off of Proverbs. Ben Sarah is riffing off of Proverbs. But Jesus doesn't say, as it says in the Scriptures, or as it says in the wisdom of Benzera, he just adopts it.

And that's a pattern whenever Jesus and the Apostles quote Fumma or allude to other second-taple literature, they don't market with the same types of little markers as when they say, as the Scriptures say. There's one very important exception, and that's the letter from Jesus' brother, Jude, where he quotes from the scroll of Enoch, and seems to record it, you know,

with divine authority, like you would quote from, Isaiah or Jeremiah. Interesting. But that is the what he quotes and why is so fascinating in the lab, because the book of Enoch is itself just riffing off of design patterns In Genesis and Deuteronomy and Isaiah and so these to be a little humility. Yeah, but May have this seems really important right? Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The boundaries of the collection

I think if we go back in interview second-temple Jews in these different communities. Yeah, and we could say like what's in and what's out I'm not sure that's even how they would conceive of this collection Because think about it that where would you even encounter the collection? Oh, yeah, it's not bound up in one book Not in one volume the collection of scrolls and not every tabernacle would they come? Sorry, no, synagogue is to have the whole collection. That's right. But these are the texts that they're consistently going to be talking about.

Yeah, that's right. It exists in their mind as a collection. Correct. Yep, that's right. And I think there's also something to what John pointed out before we started talking about how there are 24 books in the Jewish tonneye. Oh, yeah.

That feels very complete. Yeah, it's two times 12, which is like the number forneau. Oh, yeah, that's right. That feels very complete. Yeah, it's two times 12, which is like the number for completeness. Yeah, the design of the 24 scrolls of the tonneau, I think give us the clues that there was a bounded collection, that is that. And it also corresponds to the Protestant Old Testament. And those are the books that do, for the most part,

when they get quoted by Jesus in the Apostles, they ascribe them a divine authority. That's different. But again, if we could just go interview your average Jew in the second temple period, they didn't ever see it in one volume the way we do, and they wouldn't have conceived of it as a book. There might have been a hierarchy in their minds of like, oh yeah, well that's a scroll from the Tanakh.

That's a scroll that I take very seriously over here, but it's not part of the Tanakh. Correct. Yeah, that's a scroll from the Tanakh. That's a scroll that I take very seriously over here, but it's not part of the Tanakh. Correct. Yeah, that's right. I think those are more of the comments we would get, is about how they viewed the relative authority with the divine origins of each scroll, not whether it's in the collection or out.

Even though the Tanakh did seem like a very complete collection that you're either interested in. Yeah, that's right. But there were also other scrolls that were treated as having divine authority in different communities that are not a part of the tonnoc. And thus, there is the Catholic tradition. That's right. Includes them. These sorts of docks tradition includes more. Yeah, whatever the church community Jude was a part of, very clearly, Enoch

was a part of their Old Testament collection. That's why he quotes from Enoch. You know what he did. He's a genius, a brother. In Augustine, not think James was part of the New Testament collection. Oh, Martin Luther. But that wasn't because he didn't think it was part of the Bible. It was because he struggled with it, see that it was a bit later than his system. But that's getting into the New Testament collection.

Yeah, that's right. So all that to say is, this all took me a very long time to come to terms with. But if this is a question that bothers you, or it keeps you up at night, you need to wrestle with it because it's a reality that the boundaries of the scriptural collection differed in Jewish, different Jewish communities. And so we just need to be a lot more humble in how dogmatic we are about. Yeah. These questions. So let's learn the plane with unified though because we'll be talking a lot about, okay,

so this collection was brought together as a collection. But the purpose of it was to do something very specific, which was to tell one very specific story about what's going on in the world. Correct. Yeah, the tonk is we encounter it. The whole collection is spun out of the first few literary units of the Genesis scroll. So the creation and the Eden stories,

and the stories of the flood and the scattering of Babylon and the choosing of Abraham, that of the flood and the scattering of Babylon and the choosing of Abraham. That sequence right there sets the vocabulary, literary themes that are just going to be on recycle. Right. Every part, every scroll and that's not collection is riffing off of stuff going on in those early chapters. And what are those themes? Yeah, God is the great creator and provider of life. Giver of life. Giver of life. He's installed humanity as an image through whom to rule the world and to stew our

its fruitfulness. Humans do a really poor job. Violence and... Yeah, we take God's gifts and we use them to aggrandize ourselves and our agendas and a lot of people get hurt in the process. So God has two choices. He can either scrap the whole thing, like the flood. But then that means no more humans

through whom to rule the world. And God's not satisfied with that, apparently, because he likes the humans too much or wants to rule the world through them. So out of the de-creation, he saves a remnant, chooses a remnant, and gives them a chance of becoming humanity 2.0. And that happens with Noah, and then with Abraham, and then with Isaac, and then with Jacob, and then so on.

This is the cycle of God creating, establishing a human, and at the first all humanity, but then picking humans, like, okay, let's try again, failing some sort of de-creation, and then selecting then a human again. Yep, it's like a melody. It's like a melody. That's repeating, it's very clear in Genesis, and that just continues on to evolve in revival.

Just continues what's all the Torah and the prophets are about, and the Babylonian exile is portrayed as the ultimate catastrophic flood that happened to the chosen people of the family of Abraham a Remnant returned and the Hebrew Bible comes from that remnant Which is taken the whole collection and oriented around a future hope about God raising up collection and oriented around a future hope about God raising up someone from among the remnant who will do for Israel and for the world what none of us seem to be able to do for ourselves. The seed of the woman, the snake crusher, the Messiah. And so that's where the Hebrew Bible is organized in terms of content and theme about the hope for a future human who will reverse the failure at Eden and reverse Israel's failure and release God's blessing to all of the world.

Every book in the TNOC is about that. About that in some way. If I can't see how it's about that, the problem is probably more to do with my assumptions. How are you reading it? Yeah, no, I like that. When we approach the Bible, I like to think of it as reading sympathetically with the authors. So trying on that viewpoint of this is a unified and coherent story, even if I can't see it, that's where the evidence points because that's how design patterns seem to be working

and intertextuality and this overarching storyline. And so, yeah, when you can't see it, it's helpful to read sympathetically and ask, okay, curiously and with wonder, what could the author be doing here? And I don't understand this, but there must be a reason. And I think that's also where it's helpful to study ancient Jewish convention. Like, how do the, how do these texts work? You know, how do they write them? How is it different than how we would write or read a story today? How is it similar?

That's where I think all that stuff comes into play and is super fascinating. Yeah. And we'll get to that more in the principle. Are we calling principles, axioms, attributes of this paradigm that is Jewish meditation literature? Correct. We'll really unpack this idea even more.

That's right. Yeah, here maybe it's more that there's an acknowledgement that this ancient Jewish literature could tolerate diversity or something that seems disjunctive or contradictory, maybe more than we could. So when we read something that seems like a contradiction or seems out of place in this overall storyline. Where would you experience that, do you think? Yeah, I think there are a lot of different ways we could experience that.

One would be where we have Samuel and King's material and then Chronicles material and they are telling the same story in a different way. So why is that? Is that a contradiction? Like why? Yeah. And often with different details. Yeah, totally different details.

And in the same recounting the same event, but the retail details really different. Yeah, so for me, if I'm approaching that text with this assumption, if I'm trying on that lens sympathetically, I would say, I wonder why this is. And let me see if I can figure out what the author's point is in Samuel King's and how that point differs in Chronicles. What's the author trying to do differently, and why might that be?

That's a great example because, for many people, divergent details in accounts of the same event happen all over the Hebrew Bible. And so if your assumption is, well, this is a historical record of the history of ancient Israel, those are gonna be problems or contradictions. But a contradiction in a collection of texts is in the eye of the beholder.

The fact that a recipe book, like you turned a one page and the recipe is really different than the recipe 20 pages later, oh it's a contradiction. What? No. The contradiction is only in your assumptions that a recipe book should have all the same recipes like that's a wrong assumption. Yes. So in the same way, if my assumptions about what the Bible is, lead me to see contradictions and it may be my assumption is the problem, not the Bible. So again, we are getting into Jewish meditation literature versus what is Jewish meditation literature as opposed to history? Sure.

Sure. And I love to get into that more. But point is just saying in a diverse collection, there's gonna be diversity. Yes. And if I can see, oh, it was brought together in this particular way, as an anthology, but has been given a unified shape in its final form.

We're here, we're talking about the unified, highly designed, editorialized, unified shape, that the Hebrew Bible came into be. Yeah. Very specific and beautifully designed. That's right. Yeah, designed as a editorial unity and unified in terms of its themes and stories and governing storyline and concepts. And I like how you put that Chris. It's a collection that tolerates enormous diversity in terms of content and literary style, but it's unified

and really clear and obvious ways if you have eyes to see it. So this whole topic about the formation of the Hebrew Bible, this is like the ultimate rabbit hole. I've been going down it for a couple decades now. So helpful guide the long the way. I'll just recommend a couple books that I've found helpful. One is a more general introduction by Hebrew Bible scholar Paul Wagner, called the journey from text to translation, the origin and development of the Bible. It's

actually about both old and new testaments, but he really zeroes in a lot of these things we're talking about. That compositional history. Yeah, for the Hebrew Bible. And then if you want to take the ultimate dive into Hebrew Bible stuff, you gotta read Lee Martin McDonald's work. And it's hard to know which of his 15 books on the formation of the Bible to read, because as he learns more, he derites a new book. He's written 15 books.

He's written so many books on the formation of the Bible, but it's sort of like, he'll do a few more years of research, learn a whole bunch more, and then publish a new book on it. So he just has one called the biblical canon. He had just released this year like a much bigger two-volume work on the origins of the canon. But anyway, if you just search for him and on Amazon and look for the biblical canon, that's a really great definitive treatment of a distillation of all the key things you got to think about

when it comes to the origin history of the Bible. So those are two scholars that have been helpful. What if it's not canon formation, but somebody who's interested in the unified story? Oh, the unified story. Well, it's hard to know where to start with. It depends on what feature of the story somebody sees as unifying. And so some helpful places to start are like Stephen Dempster, Dominion and Dynasty. Yeah. Yeah. So it's tracing the theme of the Royal Messianic hope throughout the Hebrew Bible. And there's a place to go to be Christopher Wright's The Mission of God. Yeah. Unlike the Bible's Grand Narrative, I think. So there you go. Yeah,

those are good places to start. All right, and so that's the Hebrew Bible, and all our questions are answered. Thank you for that. And we'll jump in next to the formation of the New Testament, and how that's part of the unified story as a separate collection. Yep. part of the unified story as a separate collection. Yep. Thanks for listening to this episode of Bible Project Podcast. In the next episode, we're going to look at our next pillar of the paradigm, which is that the Bible is messianic literature. All the New Testament documents present to Jesus,

who's in continuity with the storyline of the Hebrew Bible. And that's actually really important, because they're emerged offshoots of the Jesus movement that were down for Jesus, but that were not down for anything Jewish. They disconnected Jesus from his Jewish heritage. We'd love to hear your questions and have them for an upcoming question and response episode.

So if you find yourself wondering about things that we're talking about and want us to engage more, you can send us your question. Send it to info at bibleproject.com. Try to keep it to 20 or 30 seconds. Let us know who you are and where you're from. And if you're able to transcribe your question when you send it over, that would be immensely helpful to us. Today's episode was produced by Cooper Peltz, Zach McKinley as editor, Dan Gummel as Senior Editor, and the show notes by Lindsay Ponder. Bible

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