The Reliability of the Bible - Part 5 - The Old Testament - Period Written

I encourage you to research the individual propositions within this entry yourself. In your research, please be aware of the bias of your source material (e.g. religious sites versus sceptic's sites versus material meant for pure scientific/philosophical knowledge).

Before I get started on the analysis of the third question with respect to the Old Testament, let's remind ourselves once again of the 5 key questions to be considered:

1. What period in history are these manuscripts meant to cover? (already covered)
2. Who wrote the original manuscripts on which the books are based? (already covered)
3. When were these manuscripts written? (covered in this entry)
4. When were the manuscripts assembled into established books?
5. Who assembled the books?

When were the manuscripts written?

This question can divided into three primary sub-questions.

Question #1 – Were any of the manuscripts written before the events which they seek to describe?

This is tantamount to prophesy. As can be clearly seen from the table, at least at the level of a biblical book, this is absolutely not the case. People may seek to point out that there were several individual prophesies that were later fulfilled. Without getting into the contents, and based on the general research I have done, these seemingly miraculous predictions may well be because both the manuscript containing the prediction and the manuscript demonstrating its fulfillment were written in the same period, and perhaps even by the same author. Quite often, the prophesy and its subsequent manifestation are even contained in the same book/manuscript as part of a single cohesive story. Prophesies may have even been backdated; they were written after the relevant events occurred and then inserted at some earlier point in the story. This may be an interesting angle to pursue on a prophesy-by-prophesy basis, but like I said several times before, the purpose of these entries is to argue based on factors of compilation and not on factors of content.

Question #2 – Were any of the manuscripts written while the events they describe unfolded?

Keep in mind that 60% of the historical portions of the bible were written during the 400 year period that the Kingdom of Judea was known to exist and for about a century thereafter, its exiled people strongly holding on to their identities. Of course, then, some of these manuscripts were written during salient events occurring within the Kingdom of Judea. From the table, it can be seen that of the 39 books, 36 cover a historical period. Of these 36, 17 were written during the period to which it relates, or within 50 years of the end of the period. I thought I was particularly generous to allow the 50 year grace period, particularly as in a couple cases, the period that the books cover can be several decades, so it may be a matter of somebody trying to reconstruct the events of a period that ended 50 years ago, but started 50 years before that, surely a daunting feat.

Of course writing about events while they occur, though far more reliable than other methods, does not necessarily mean that what was written about the events were not deliberately understated, exaggerated, with pieces omitted or whole-sale fabrications weaved in. This seemed to precisely be the cases for some manuscripts which were written to achieve narrow socio-political purposes through religious incentives. But, let's not get too carried away with arguments of content.

Question #3 – Were any manuscripts written long after the events which they describe?

Well, I already told you how many somewhat historical books were written within 50 years of their subjects, with a grand total of nil written before. One calculator and a couple minutes later, you can safely say that 19 books of the bible were formulated from manuscripts written long after the events they attempt to describe. In fact, these 19 books were written, on average, 500 years after. That's right. Half a millennium.

Now, what could have possibly been happening during those 5 centuries that seemed to be more pressing than recording religious events of great import? At least for the Old Testament, we cannot say that the events were preserved by oral tradition. That's because the Jews' oral tradition related only to the events of the Torah (the Pentateuch) and do not simply repeat these 5 books, but are meant to be ancillary interpretations of the written Torah.

Even if you want to convince yourself that they were preserved in some sort of oral tradition, then you will have to assume that:

• When the events were first told, the speaker attempted to be extremely careful with the facts (leaving nothing out, putting nothing in, changing no details) and frame them in the appropriate religious context (as opposed to putting his/her own slant for whatever reason)
• The speaker succeeded in the above
• All subsequent speakers during the 500 year-or-so period, attempted to keep the story consistent with its original telling
• All subsequent speakers were successful in the above
• Changes in language over the 500 year period were appropriately considered (or not considered at all)
• When the story was finally written, the authors attempted to keep the story consistent with the oral version
• The author succeeded in the above

I suppose every single person involved here needed to be divinely guided to some extent to pull off such an amazing feat, but a more appropriate supposition is that this entire idea is absurd, and throw it it out altogether. Perhaps instead, the theist might believe that all oral tradition was skipped and that God “revealed” the truths of the events hundreds of years later to the author him/herself.

Or maybe we can take it at face value – that the authors of these manuscripts wrote them with primarily current socio-political events and/or a narrower personal agenda in mind, the historicity of the events largely taking a back seat and divine inspiration likely absent altogether. In fact, for one of the books of the bible (I can't quite remember which – getting the name would mean going through all of the books of the bible again, a task I certainly am not up to doing anytime soon), one of the confirming factors of its dating was that while the backdrop of events were anchored in a particular time period, the cultural overtones and therefore ultimate purpose seemed firmly rooted in the period almost 200 years later.

There is no doubt that the evidence seems to be accumulating in the corner against the reliability of the Old Testament.