Peter Enns, a renowned biblical scholar and professor, dives into the fascinating evolution of the Hebrew Bible. He argues that the Old Testament wasn't divine dictation but a product of centuries of writing, editing, and re-writing by various authors and teams. Enns discusses the impact of historical events like the Babylonian exile on Israelite identity and how cultural influences shaped theological concepts. He emphasizes the importance of flexible interpretations of scripture and the benefits of Jewish interpretive traditions for modern readers.
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insights INSIGHT
Bible Raises Its Own Origin Questions
The Old Testament shows internal questions that signal a complex origin rather than single-author dictation.
Historical analysis revealed these textual tensions and spurred modern study of the Bible's formation.
insights INSIGHT
Isaiah Is Multi-Layered Across Centuries
Isaiah contains layers from different centuries, with chapters 1–39 addressing the Assyrian crisis and chapter 40 onward reflecting the Babylonian exile.
These shifts show editors reused prophetic tradition across distinct historical contexts.
insights INSIGHT
Torah Grew Over Centuries, Not In A Day
The Torah shows internal signs that many parts were compiled and updated long after Moses' lifetime.
Scholars trace Deuteronomy and other Pentateuchal strands to a prolonged development across the first millennium BCE.
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Divine dictation of fully-formed books, or a gradual evolution of texts at the hands of authors, editors, interpreters, redactors, copyists, collectors, ……?
This will be the first of several episodes we’re hauling out of our Podcast Archive that are related to how we came to have this collection of books we call the Bible. This week, Dr. Peter Enns gets us started with a look at the origin … and evolution! …. of the Jewish Bible, our “Old Testament”. We’re guessing that many of our listeners will be hearing this perspective for the first time. But hearing this, from a world-class expert, might help you over some serious speedbumps in your faith journey. It certainly did that for me.
We’ll hear that the Bible was not dropped out of heaven or whispered into the ears of individual authors (you probably knew that already … but did you have a coherent alternative explanation of where/how it did come?). Instead, it was written, and re-written, and revised, and re-revised by teams of authors over the course of many, many centuries. Yes: re-written and re-revised. And not just by the individual authors, but by multiple teams of editors who worked on the texts centuries after the authors had died. Those later editorial teams took the liberty of not just changing words, but even deleting whole sections, and inserting entirely new ones. Sometimes in response to things they’d learned from other cultures. A perfect example of this would be their understanding of the human soul and the afterlife, which we talked about previously in episodes #6, #7, and #8. Those editors could be just as divinely inspired in what they did, as the authors writing the first drafts of the text. And the life experiences which shaped those authors and editors — as well as the cultural zeitgeists which informed their thinking — would also be part of that divine inspiration process.
Learning about these things over the past couple decades has given me a new understanding of the Bible. I no longer see it like the “User’s Manual” for a car, written by the Manufacturer [God] to the User [us] to help them [us] know how to use the Product [us]. Instead, I now see it more like a diary or a notebook, written by humans who captured their thoughts, experiences, the lessons they’d learned, and their personal growth on a subject that was incredibly important to them: God.
If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like our episode on the origin of the New Testament (episode #81), or on Divine Inspiration (episode #101), or a deep-dive into an Old Testament story of “a Divine command” given to the Israelites to slaughter their own brothers (episode #98).
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