The Story of How the Old Testament Came to Be

[MineralMan]

It all began as stories told around campfires to nomadic wanderers and in early settlements. Tribal stories told by people who remembered them to new people capable of remembering them. Many generations of storytellers.

Eventually, they got written down by those storytellers, when a stable and common writing method was available. They were the stories of tribal people with a common genealogy. As they were told again and again, they changed in small ways, no doubt. By the time they were written down, they had changed a good deal from the first storyteller's version long, long ago. None of the storytellers, almost certainly, were witnesses to those stories, so they were probably inaccurate from the first telling.

Once written down, they were less likely to change, of course. Instead of being memorized by talented storytellers, they were copied, over and over again, by scribes, who were probably less imaginative. Their wording and sequence became fixed with the writing, and care was taken to make sure each transcription was accurate and didn't change the stories.

Once they were reduced to writing, they could be studied by scholars, who more or less replaced the storytellers. Storytelling had become obsolete by then. Instead, those who could read became the wise elders, priests and rabbis who read the stories to the faithful who could not read. Since they were in writing, the stories could be told in the same way every time, seeming more and more true and authentic with each reading. Each generation now heard exactly the same story, and they were studied carefully and discussed by those who received educations - usually priests and rabbis in training.

But, they all began as stories told around the campfire. Stories about ancestors. Stories about travels. Stories about battles fought and won or lost. Stories about prophets who predicted things and were correct. The prophets who predicted incorrectly, of course, were forgotten. Love stories. Stories about kings and princes. Campfire tales to while away the evening hours and teach the youngsters what was important to know.

That is how the Old Testament came to be. Testament comes from the same root as Testimony. Oral Storytelling. We know the stories that were preserved in writing. No doubt there were many other stories that were not preserved. Those are not part of scripture. And Scripture comes from the same root as Script - writing.

And that's my only lesson for today. It's almost time for me to leave the computer. I originally posted this as a reply in another thread.

[guillaumeb]

1. A simplistic version, but suitable for a beginning level.

This:

Their wording and sequence became fixed with the writing, and care was taken to make sure each transcription was accurate and didn't change the stories.

is totally refuted by the actual history, when translations from one language to another often resulted in meaning being lost. And as some of us know, translation depends on the ability of the translator to capture the meaning.

And when copyists were themselves illiterate, and were literally copyists, sometimes words were misread and miscopied, with the subsequent copies from the changed version being recopied by others with no access to the original.

But this is a start.

[MineralMan]

2. Please find someone else to bother, Guillaume.

I do not have the patience for it today. I was not writing a thesis.

Goodbye.

[guillaumeb]

5. A response that I have made to numerous non-theists here.

And if you are not interested in dialogue, why post numerous things in this group today?

[MineralMan]

9. My dear Guillaume: You are not the only other person

in the Religion Group. Truly. I'm not solely engaged in a dialog with you. If I were, I would not be here at all.

[guillaumeb]

10. I understand.

So were you posting this for the edification of DU in general?

If so, as I, and another, have pointed out, it simplifies far too much. But it is a small beginning.

[Sneederbunk]

11. Good point. Religion is complex, atheism is not.

[50 Shades Of Blue]

3. K & R

[shraby]

4. More problems arose even after writing came to be and that's in the translation

from one language to another. Many errors were inadvertently (or purposefully) made when translating text.

I give as an example I run across in my genealogy website for this county. I can tell which families knew how to read and write when they came here. Their surname stayed the same throughout the years.
If they didn't know, their name was spelled differently from record to record, depending on the nationality and spelling ability of the clerk in charge at the time the record was written down.

A German clerk would hear and spell phonetically different than an Irish clerk or a French clerk.
This various spellings settled down around the 1900s because children started going to school and the teacher taught them how to spell their name. That's why related families ended up with names spelled differently from one cousin to the next. The teacher taught it as she heard it.

[MineralMan]

7. Really, I'm thinking of the Torah or Tanach and its copying in Hebrew.

It's still being done and extreme care is taken that nothing should be changed.

Translation is another matter entirely. I'm talking only about the copying done by scribes in the original language.

Translations are always incorrect. That's by definition. That's also why the Qu'ran is not supposed to be translated. It has been, but it's not supposed to be.

[guillaumeb]

8. Read reply #2. eom

[dhol82]

6. And the New Testament was written by a council of old men who

picked and chose which gospels best fit with their agenda and just threw away those that did not.

It is amazing that any of the throw always survived.