The Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, is a collection of 24 scrolls.

These scrolls were passed down for generations, and they tell the long, complicated story of Israel.

So who wrote these scrolls, and how did they all come together in a final collection?

So let's turn to the literary origins of... Who wrote these scrolls? And how did they all come together in a final collection?

So let's turn to the literary origins of the collection of books that Jewish tradition calls the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible.

At the heart of the Hebrew Bible is the first five scrolls called Torah.

And the central character in these scrolls is Moses, who is credited for writing

much of it down. On one level, we are meant to see the five scroll work in its complete form

like you and I would have as being in continuity with and stamped with the authority of Moses.

But Moses didn't write all of the Torah, nor was he the one bringing the Torah to its final shape.

There are other bits and pieces in the Torah that are not hiding themselves coming from a post-Moses perspective.

So what we're looking at in these five books we call Torah is like a mosaic composition that actually has material in it from different periods

of Israel's history. When later scrolls talk about who wrote Torah, it talks about a group called

the prophets responsible for the shaping not just of Torah but the rest of the Bible as well,

like in Second King 17.

Obey my commands and decrees in accordance with the whole Torah that I commanded your ancestors to obey

and that I delivered to you through my servants the prophets.

So it's attributing the Torah to this crew called the prophets.

Today, we'll explore this literary prophetic crew who stewarded the stories and poems and law code of their ancestors and formed them into a highly designed literary work.

The Bible's not trying to pass itself off as the work of one or two inspired figures alone.

It doesn't hide the fact that it has a more multi-generational, multi-stage compositional history.

And we'll look at the claim that what they're doing is channeling the very voice of God.

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