The Old Testament is nowhere near as old as most Jews and Christians believe it to be. With the exception of a few fragments, the Old Testament was written in a form of Hebrew that dates no earlier than the Iron Age II period (900 – 586 BCE). The earliest parts were originally written during the Judean monarchy (931 – 586 BCE), with the majority written during the Babylonian exile (586 – 539 BCE) and Persian period (539 – 332 BCE). At least a few books of the Old Testament were written during the Hellenistic period (332 – 63 BCE) – Ecclesiastes, Daniel and Esther.
For most of the Bible’s existence, Christians and Jews seriously believed that Moses had physically written the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch) – including the account of creation and the events occurring after his death! As late as 1906, the Vatican decreed that the subject of Moses’ authorship of the Pentateuch wasn’t open to question. This proscription lasted until the 1940s.
This is a long time after the events described in the Pentateuch, and the figures of the Patriarchs, Moses and Joshua are wholly mythical. The first time the Old Testament remotely correlates with historical reality is the kingdoms of Israel and Judah described in Kings and Chronicles, although the descriptions of the kings’ rules in those books is wholly biased and not an accurate history of the kingdoms.
The earliest archaeological evidence of the Bible is two small sheets of silver dating to the seventh century BCE. They have passages on them mentioning Yahweh that are similar to verses in the Book of Numbers. The books of the Old Testament originally existed as individual scrolls. It was only sometime after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Romans in 70 CE that a specific canon was decided on and the Jewish Bible was created.
There are clear errors and omissions in the biblical stories that show that they are not as old as they events they claim to portray. The writers of the Old Testament were completely ignorant of the fact that ancient Egypt used to control the lands of Canaan, including the area covered by the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The books of Joshua and Exodus supposedly cover this era, but are clearly later inventions as they are unaware of the fact.
The stories of the patriarchs mention plenty of camels, but camels weren’t used widely in the Near East until well after 1000 BCE. The Bible also states that the Israelite patriarch Abraham originally came from ‘Ur of the Chaldeans’ (Genesis 11.31). Chaldea was a kingdom in southern Mesopotamia that existed between the 9th and 6th centuries BCE. There is also several mentions of the patriarchs’ interaction with the Philistines (eg Genesis 26.1). The Philistines were a group of people from the Aegean / Eastern Mediterranean who first settled in Canaan sometime after 1170 BCE.
There were two kingdoms that worshipped the biblical god Yahweh as their patron national / royal god. These were the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Israel became a state sometime in the 9th century BCE, and Judah sometime in the 8th century BCE. Israel was by far the more advanced and important of the two kingdoms, but is often denigrated in the Old Testament for worshipping gods other than Yahweh.
Both Israel and Judah became vassal states of the Assyrian empire in the 8th century BCE. Israel rebelled and was invaded and destroyed by the Assyrian king Sargon II in 722 BCE. When Sargon II died, Judah also rebelled and was invaded and devastated by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 701 BCE. Sennacherib boasted in his annals that he penned in king Hezekiah of Judah ‘like a bird in its cage’. He utterly destroyed the Judean city of Lachish and had a memorial of the destruction carved on the walls of his throne room.
The kingdom of Judah survived for another 135 years after the destruction of Israel. It probably received an influx of refugees from its neighbour, who brought their religion and sacred texts with them. The power of the Assyrians waned in the late 7th century BCE, Babylon and Egypt becoming the two main powers in the region. The court at Judah split into factions, each supporting one of the two powers. Babylon gained a decisive victory over Egypt at the battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE. In 597 BCE, Judah revolted against Babylon that triggered three invasions. In 586 BCE, the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem, destroying the temple of Yahweh, the royal palace, and deported many Judahites to Babylon.
In ancient times, Jewish and early Christian writers claimed that the Bible was truly ancient and historical fact. Christian apologists were constantly stating how much older Judaism was than Greek religion and philosophy, and how any similarity between the two was due to Greeks plagiarising Moses and the prophets. Origen wrote that Moses and the prophets were ‘older not only than Plato, but even than Homer and the invention of letters among the Greeks’ (Against Celsus 6.7). He also claimed that ‘the writings of Moses and the prophets [are] the most ancient of all books’ (Against Celsus 7.31).
Tatian (120 – 180 CE) made the same claim, ‘Our doctrines are not only older than those of the Greeks, but also the invention of letters’ (Address to the Greeks chapter 31). Clement of Alexandria (150 – 215 CE) described ‘the philosophy of the Hebrews’ as ‘the most ancient of all wisdom,’ and claimed that ‘the philosophers plagiarised their dogmas from the Hebrews’ (Stromata, 1.21). We now know this to be false, much of the Biblical narrative is contemporaneous to Greek mythology and philosophy. It was also influenced by Persian and Babylonian religion from this period.
Some learned pagans knew that the Bible was nowhere near as old as Jews claimed it to be. Porphyry (234 – 305 CE) wrote, ‘All the things attributed to Moses were really written 1180 years later by Ezra and his contemporaries’ (Macarius – Apocriticus III.3). Ezra was a legendary fifth century BCE Jewish priest who according to Jewish tradition reintroduced the Bible into Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. The Bible may actually corroborate Porphyry’s claim, the first clear mention of the ‘Book of the Law of Moses’ in the Bible is in Nehemiah, where Ezra is described reading it to an assembly (Nehemiah 7.73 – 8.12).
Quite when Jews became fully monotheistic and the Torah and Hebrew Bible became the central texts of Judaism is seriously open to debate. There is evidence of a population of Jews in Elephantine in Egypt dating to as late as 400 BCE. They weren’t monotheistic and didn’t know or use the Bible, not a single biblical text has been found there among their papyri. They worshipped Yahweh alongside other gods in their own temple, hundreds of miles away from Jerusalem. These Elephantine Jews weren’t outcasts or heretics, they were in contact with the temple in Jerusalem.
The Greek historian Herodotus travelled through Palestine in the mid-fifth century BCE. He never mentions Judaism, again suggesting it may not have been in existence in his time, or certainly not a notable religion in the region.
Much of the Old Testament as we know it was compiled in the post-exilic Persian period (539- 332 BCE). This is when the temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem became the central focus of worship, which the Bible projected back into a mythical past. The only fully monotheistic lines of the Old Testament date from the period of Persian rule.
We find similar monotheistic / henotheistic tendencies appearing in Greek philosophy at around the same time. Xenophanes (c.535-435 BCE) wrote of,
‘One God, greatest amongst gods and men, similar to mortals neither in body nor in thought.’ (Fragment 1).
The philosopher Heraclitus (c.535 – 475 BCE) similarly wrote that ‘the wise is one alone, unwilling and willing to be spoken of by the name of Zeus’ (Fragment 118).
For the past 200 years, most biblical scholars have seen four main sources as being responsible for writing the Pentateuch – the first five books of the Bible traditionally ascribed to Moses. This is called the Documentary Hypothesis. The four sources are called J(Jehovahist / Yahwist – who referred to its god as Yahweh), E(lohist – who referred to its god as Elohim – the Hebrew word for ‘god’), P(riestly wrote the laws and concentrated on things to do with priests), and D(euteronomic – wrote the Book of Deuteronomy).
The J source focuses on the southern kingdom of Judah and sees Yahweh in anthropomorphic terms, similar to the other gods of the ancient world. Yahweh walks in the garden of Eden and talks to and interacts with humans. The E source focuses on the northern kingdom of Israel, and frequently features angels in its stories. The Deuteronomic source includes the seven books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, 1 and 2 Judges, Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings, as well as probably Jeremiah. These books demand strict monotheistic worship of Yahweh and are fiercely intolerant of the worship of other gods.
The Priestly source consists of additions made after the return to Judah (539 BCE onwards). It carried on the Deuteronomic theme of blaming the Judahites’ defeat to the Babylonians and exile on their worship of other gods and unfaithfulness to Yahweh. The important additions to the Bible by the P source were Numbers and Leviticus, as well as the six day creation story in Genesis. The earliest biblical texts, like some of the books of the prophets, never mention the ten commandments or laws of Moses. These bedrocks of Judaism and Christianity were later additions, added by the D and P sources.
The Bible and Mythology 