the formation of the bible 27
before a final editor redacted the texts to the form in which they are
now preserved. Much critical effort has been devoted to trying to estab-
lish the nature, date and purpose of these earlier components of the
biblical texts. That the Bible contains some material composed, in one
form or another, in the period before the Babylonian exile which began
in 586 bce is not disputed, but there is less agreement about its extent,
let alone how much can be traced back to original documents, local
hero- tales, story cycles, village proverbs or the traditions inherited from
their teachers by the disciples of individual prophets. Only occasionally
do the texts themselves give any direct hint. The Pentateuch, universally
believed in antiquity to have been composed by Moses, is actually told
by an anonymous, third- person narrator, with Moses appearing only as
a character in the story. In the book of Psalms, occasional references to
the Psalms of Asaph and the Psalms of the sons of Korach suggest that
the book as we now have it contains excerpts from earlier collections.
Conversely, the conclusion that the current form of the book of Isaiah
must contain the sayings of a prophet who lived long after Isaiah him-
self had been reached in the twelfth century by Abraham ibn Ezra, the
Spanish Bible commentator, who noted that references in chapters 40–
66 to the Persian king Cyrus II, who ruled in the sixth century bce,
must have been composed by someone other than the prophet Isaiah
son of Amoz whose career in Jerusalem in the eighth century bce is nar-
rated in II Kings.^2
For Josephus and other Jews in the first century ce the nature of the
raw materials out of which the biblical texts had been created was
irrelevant, since they took the final form of each text at face value as if
it had been composed from scratch. Different biblical books reached
their final forms at different times, but the great majority were redacted
at least by the fourth century bce. It is increasingly recognized by bib-
lical critics that this process of editing often involved a great deal of
literary skill and provided an opportunity to insert the theological mes-
sages which justified the inclusion of these works among the sacred
books of the Jews. Whatever the disparate prophecies found in the book
of Isaiah, the beautiful scroll of the full text of Isaiah found at Qumran
by the Dead Sea (see plate) demonstrates that the book was seen as a
single and precious religious text in the late second century bce when
it was copied. Indeed, the evidence for the Bible as a collection of
books of special sanctity comes less from the books themselves, whose
contents (especially when they are devoted to long genealogies) can
sometimes seem strikingly mundane, than in the attitudes to these books