Let’s start a new discussion here as we go through the Bible as literature, one that’s full of misunderstandings–how the Bible was put together. We’ll start with the Old Testament.

We aren’t sure when writing was first invented, but we do have some samples dating from around 3100 B.C. They come from Sumer, part of Mesopotamia. Egyptian writings from about the same time have also survived. The earliest copy of the Hebrew Scriptures, however, was written much later.

Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, the oldest copy we had for the entire Old Testament in Hebrew had been produced about 1000 A.D. These scrolls contained all of the books of the Old Testament (except Esther) as well as other documents.  They had been written in the first century A.D., and their value is that they take us back almost 1000 years closer than before to the originals, which are no longer in existence. So it’s good to know that over 95% of them matched the Hebrew Old Testament as we have it today.

Scholars can reasonably claim that if 1000 years (the time of Jesus for the Dead Sea Scrolls to our previous oldest copy in 1000 A.D.) showed such detailed accuracy and care in copying the manuscripts, then we must allow the same accuracy, for example,  for the previous 600 years from Isaiah’s original manuscript to the Dead Sea Scrolls copy. Other ancient writings are trusted, even with similar gaps between creation and our earliest copies.