When we interact with a Bible, we're interacting with a single book, bound together nicely.

You can grab it with one hand. You can carry it with you to church under your arm.

Now, this can hide the fact that what we have is really an assortment of literary works,

all bound together in a final collection.

And so, how did this collection come to be? How is the Bible formed?

We can start to tell ourselves a simplified story of the making of the Bible.

Perhaps God zapped a series of prophets who transcribed what God said,

and once that was all written down, it was never changed.

We'll call this the Golden Tablets story of the Bible.

My first couple years as a Christian,

I had been given a golden tablets falling from heaven view of the Bible,

and that view didn't match what I was

seeing in the manuscript history. What Christians call the Old Testament, what the Jewish people

call the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, went through an iterative process of development by scribes

and prophets over the long history of Israel. And it came to its final shape

in the late 400s, BC, and perhaps into the time of Jesus. The Bible didn't drop out of heaven.

It was formed over generations by a prophetic literary crew. This is the crew that gives us the Hebrew

Bible in the late post-exilic phase. And it's a museum

exhibit. And the material in the exhibit comes from all the different phases and periods of

Israelite history. To believe the Bible was formed this way, doesn't negate that it can also

be God's word to us. When key authors or prophets at the end of the process, like Daniel or Zechariah, reflect back on the whole treasure of these texts,

they refer to it as a gift of God's spirit as being not just connected to individuals that are named,

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