How and Why Did the Old Testament Began

A scholar has pieced together artifacts, inscriptions, coins and other physical evidence to explain how the various pieces of writing that came to be known as the Old Testament came together. The review is interesting and no doubt the book itself is even better. I've ordered the book. 

We all know there are no original copies of the written work that makes up either the Old or New Testaments. As the decades go by, new bits of archeological evidence show up. 

The link author's case is that the Old Testament is not a piece of writing about a unified people who were united by one god. To the contrary the writing of the period was an effort to unify a fighting dysphoria in order to survive. Different groups had been raided, chased and defeated over and over were written about as if they were one people when they were several. This effort to be a "people" rather than a country was the point. 

The unknown writers took from available written texts or folklore stories about Kings like Saul, David and Solomon in one part of the country. They cleverly merged that history with the folk heroes like Issac, Jacob, Abraham and later Moses. Writers did this after Jew suffered defeat after defeat followed by occupation. The ultimate humiliation was destruction of the Temple. The message was that though army after army has defeated us, we are a people with a shared history of perseverance. That they were from different areas and different times was glossed over. 

The story of Moses itself seems like a tale written for propaganda purposes. The Bible traces the travel of Jews to the ultimate victory in the Battle of Jericho. That the timing of the journey and the battle itself remains unlikely from discovered artifacts does not cancel at great story.  

If we could put ourselves back a few hundred years before the Common Era as well as a few hundred afterwards, we know few would be literate. Written material had to be read aloud by the few who were literate. To hold people's attention stories needed to be colorful and packed with heroic characters and events. It was this writing that became what we now call the "Old Testament."