The origin of the Bible
When we think of the Bible, we picture the sacred text revered by Jews and Christians, written under divine inspiration starting around 1200 BCE. For Christians, the Bible refers to the Old Testament, but it actually differs somewhat from the Hebrew text. The original version of the Bible, called the Tanakh, consists of 39 books written in Hebrew and Aramaic. The first historically verified "editor" was the prophet Ezra in 539 BCE, after the Jewish people's return from Babylonian exile. The authentic biblical text certainly dates back to the second millennium BCE, but it was lost in the burning of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem by the soldiers of King Nebuchadnezzar. However, Ezra's version does not seem to differ significantly from the one destroyed by the Babylonian army: among the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, which preserved the knowledge of the Essene community that survived various invasions, a copy of the Book of Isaiah was found to be identical to the version "remembered" by Ezra.
The Bible was definitively revised around the 2nd century BCE, resulting in the famous Masoretic version, which was disseminated among all Jewish communities. This version faced repeated burnings during various persecutions, so the oldest surviving Masoretic copy dates to 1008 CE (the Leningrad Codex). The first five books of the Bible, known as the Pentateuch for Christians and the Torah ("Truth") for Judaism, were traditionally written by Moses during the Exodus from Egypt around 1200 BCE. In the original story (or legend), Moses received the Tablets of the Law directly from God, which he broke in anger upon seeing the Israelites worshiping a golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. As a result, Moses drafted more primitive and crude rules for his tribe of shepherds, leaving it to his successors to ask God for new divine laws. The broken and illegible tablets ended up in the Ark of the Covenant, and the Israelites were left with the notorious Ten Commandments, with the typical roughness and violence of laws from 3,000 years ago. Thus, the Bible, particularly the Pentateuch, is a provisional text that should have been supplemented over the centuries. However, no one dared to make such a request, and even today, the Bible remains incomplete.
