Paul Poulton considers how the Bible was written

Paul Poulton

The area in England that I grew up in is called the Black Country. It has a tradition of giving children names that are found in the Bible. Enoch and Eli were popular names, (known locally as Aynuk and Ayli because of the strong accent). This tradition has largely died out now, but one of my friends was called Ezra. The Bible was regarded as special in the Black Country, as well as many other places on the earth, however my friend Ezra did not think it was special at all, I remember one conversation we had where he told me, "It's just a book, you might as well read a book about Micky Mouse". And I guess it was the previous generations in the Black Country that valued the Bible and not their children, who were stuck with odd sounding names from a book they may not hold in any esteem.

It was Moses who first started talking about a 'book'; it crops up in the first few books of the Old Testament, as if there was something special about this particular book. Many of the stories contained in the 'book' have their beginnings in Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamian people were good writers and we still have many of their documents and stories even though they were written thousands of years ago. We know that there is a correlation of writings about creation and a flood plus other well known biblical subjects that were written by the Mesopotamians and not Moses. In fact Moses wrote many years after the Mesopotamian writers, which leads some people to say that Moses plagiarised earlier stories when he wrote parts of the Bible. And it's true that stories about how one man built a boat and saved some people and animals from drowning in a flood existed long before Moses talked about them. In fact there are said to be well over 200 ancient stories about a flood. In the Sumerian Kings List the people who lived before the great deluge lived a lot longer than those who lived after it. In the Epic Of Gilgamish the man who built the boat released a dove and a raven from the boat to see if the waters had receded. We read the same things in the Bible, although they don't agree with the Bible at all points, maybe partly because it's the nature of journalists to report events from their point of view. What the Bible claims to do is tell us things from God's point of view.

What seems certain is that the people of Mesopotamia talked about what had happened to previous generations because they had heard it from their parents who heard it from their parents etc. We all know that stories can get twisted by human forgetfulness or exaggeration or worse deliberate lying. The area I live in now is having a friendly debate about a local landmark that got its name in the late 1800s, there are three distinct stories of how the landmark got its name and no-one is quite sure which one is correct although there is a common theme that runs through all of them. It goes to show how a story can get altered in only 140 years.

Abraham first met God in Mesopotamia, he then journeyed west to what is now southern Turkey, then turned south to Canaan and Egypt. It was a common trade route in those days. Abraham would have known all these stories of what had happened to previous generations and would have passed them on to his family. Abraham may have begun to record these events himself; he was a business man and we know that traders found writing useful because we still have many records of trade from that area written on clay tablets. But even if he used word of mouth or what is known as 'oral tradition', he took the job seriously. He passed on to his family all he knew about his family's history and all he knew about what God had told him. A few hundred years later Moses formalised the 'book' because the Lord was interested that his side of the story should be told and gave Moses that task. The assignment of preserving these words was a full-time job for many of the subsequent generations; the scribes were an important part of Jewish culture. God had chosen Abraham and his family for a number of reasons and one of them was to preserve the record.

In the book of Romans in the New Testament Paul asks, "What advantage then, is there in being a Jew?" He answers his own question by saying, "Much in every way! First of all, they have been entrusted with the very words of God." So that's how Paul saw it, he put the preservation of God's words at the top of the list of special advantages for the family of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, words which go back to early Mesopotamia where God first planted a garden. God took men whom he trusted and spoke with them. They used their own knowledge of history and anything they didn't know but needed to, was told them by God who was able to correct any errors that may have crept in. Because as well as human fallibility in recalling something that has happened, there was also someone who made it his business to actually cast doubt on the words that God spoke. He spoke to Eve in the garden saying, "Did God really say?" calling into question the words that were spoken by God. It's no wonder that all the early records of what happened in the garden, the flood and other stories from Mesopotamia differ from the Bible and differ even from each other, because it was someone's work to confuse the issue. But God is not the author of confusion. God gave Abraham and his children a job to do and they rose to the task. We have preserved for us a body of writings that are sometimes called the 'holy scriptures', in fact Paul himself referred to them in that way. Holy comes from the same root word as 'whole', the dictionary puts it like this, "that must be preserved whole or intact". And these writings have been kept intact and whole by the family of Abraham, because that was a job that was given to them to do. The scriptures are like no other book we've ever known, they are a direct connection with the past, and they affect the present and project into the future.