Who Wrote the Bible?
And what was the source of their information?
Religion seems to always begin with a story about contact with an enlightened someone or something that appears divine and beyond the ordinary reality of human experience. And that divine someone or something offers enlightened teachings to the people on Earth.
And then, from that story, we get a larger, ever-expanding narrative that eventually gets written down and erupts into distorted religious dogma and traditions.
Click here for my previous article offering some additional insight regarding Religious Dogma.
For this article, let’s begin to explore…..
Who Wrote the Bible?
Religious ‘faith’ can guide one in life and/or strengthen one at the approach of death. But unless the teachings of a religion are believed to be true, it can do neither of these things. And so, a religion deemed untrue would amount to no more than an unreal exercise in comforting fantasy.
Over many centuries, millions of people have based their entire lives on the text of the Bible. This holy book has had a reading audience far beyond all works of literature throughout history.
But given the cultural influence and immense reach, it’s surprising how little we know about the origins of the Bible and its actual authors. In other words, who wrote the Bible, and what was the source of their information?
Both Jewish and Christian doctrines hold that ‘God’ himself is the author of — or at least the inspiration for — the entirety of the Bible. In either event, the holy book itself was ultimately transcribed by a series of mere mortals.
Setting aside what religious tradition says, here is some information about the evolution of the Bible according to the scholars who have examined the actual evidence.
The ancient civilization of Sumer.
Mesopotamia is an ancient region of southwestern Asia in present-day Iraq — lying between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. There were four main ancient kingdoms in Mesopotamia. Sumer was the first and the oldest. Sumer was followed by the Kingdom of Akkad — which was begun by Sargon I. After that, you have Babylonia and Assyria.
The Sumerian civilization predated Egypt, Greece, and Rome — and was already ancient when it ended in 2000 B.C. That’s twenty centuries before Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ, sixteen centuries before Socrates, and seven centuries before Tutankhamun.
The Sumerians invented the first known writing system in the Western world using cuneiform script on clay tablets. These tablets containing invaluable knowledge of ancient Sumer were kept in large libraries. About five hundred thousand of these clay tablets have now been found along with cylinders and steles that also contain inscriptions.
Through these clay tablets, cylinder seals, and steles, the Sumerians have provided us with a graphic and richly detailed story of humankind’s early history — including their version of creation, both of Earth and homo sapiens.
Sumer mysteriously and suddenly appeared out of roaming hunters and gatherers. It was a remarkable and fully evolved civilization that handed down the basics for all ensuing Western cultures — including law, mathematics, agriculture, astronomy, and religion.
Click here for more about the highly advanced ancient civilization of Sumer.
The religions of Mesopotamia
According to the Sumerian texts, the supreme deities were the Anunnaki. The Sumerians described them as stellar beings who could morph or phase into human form. They came to Earth on a special mission to bring wisdom and extract certain materials from the Earth.
The Anunnaki were described as having tremendous knowledge and power over the entire world. Click here for more about the fascinating story of the Anunnaki.
The religious system that developed in Mesopotamia was polytheistic, meaning they worshipped hundreds of gods. These gods were often depicted in human form, with personalities like people. These gods were arranged in a kind of political hierarchy that, in many ways, mimicked the political systems of Mesopotamia itself.
At the top of this polytheistic structure were the Anunnaki — the heavenly assembly of gods. Then, there were the lesser gods who inhabited Earth and the underworld.
Rather than deal directly with the burgeoning human population, the Anunnaki ordained an administrative body or ‘priesthood’ to pass along edicts and instruction and interpret policy.
With these earliest recorded human civilizations, first in Sumer and then in Assyria and Babylonia, religions became well-established and merged with the prevailing political structure.
The anointed priests who worshipped a certain God encouraged their followers to demonize the worshippers of the other gods. And anyone who failed to offer allegiance to their one true God was denounced as a blasphemer, heathen, or worse.
So, the concept of ‘God’ evolved from what was originally an ‘other world’ Anunnaki into an omnipresent — yet humanlike — supernatural entity. And religion soon developed into a rigid structure of dogmas, tenets, tithing, and obedience.
Many divine stories were borrowed from the Sumerians.
The thousands of cuneiform clay tablets that have survived ancient Sumer predate the Judeo-Christian Bible by more than three thousand years. Many of the clay tablets that have been translated present Sumerian stories, which were later repeated in the Judeo-Christian Bible.
Much of the Bible recasts narratives from ancient Sumer, including a nearly identical account of ‘Noah’ and the ‘Great Flood’ story. Sumerian culture was also the wellspring for much of ancient Middle Eastern mythology. For generations, myths, fallacies, and wrongful adaptations were passed down from the original Sumerian stories.
The first five books of the Bible
According to both Jewish and Christian Dogma, the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy (referred to as the first five Books of the Bible) and the entirety of the Torah were all written by Moses in about 1,300 B.C.
This assertion, however, has some serious issues — such as the lack of evidence that Moses ever existed and that the end of Deuteronomy describes the “author” dying and being buried. What’s important to understand is that Moses was not the author of the Bible.
Bible Scholars have established a different historical perspective on who wrote the first five books of the Bible. Part of their research involves the various writing styles and internal clues within the Bible itself.
The researchers have been able to contrast the styles of these early books to create profiles of the different authors. Interestingly, while these writers are talked about as if each one was a single person, each author could just as easily have been an entire school of people writing in a single style.
Scholars say that parts of the first five books of the Bible were almost certainly the product of a whole school of writers living in and around Jerusalem in the late sixth century B.C. — immediately after the Babylonian captivity of Jews ended.
The Book of Genesis
The ancient Hebrew writer(s) who compiled and edited the Book of Genesis utilized much earlier and considerably more detailed texts first written down in Sumer. For example, the story regarding the seven days of creation was derived from the older Sumerian creation epic — then overhauled to meet Hebrew theology.
One might speculate why the Hebrew author(s) borrowed the creation story from older Mesopotamian texts. Perhaps it was because they worshipped one or more of the same Mesopotamian deities.
Closer comparisons between Sumerian texts and the Hebrew Bible bring out many similarities — not only in their stories but also in their language. For example, in Hebrew, “Adam” was the ‘first man.’ The Sumerians referred to ‘first man’ as “Adamu,” who were the worker slaves of the Anunnaki.
In the Book of Genesis, God is referred to as “Elohim.” Interestingly, “Elohim” is plural. Chapter One of Genesis states, “Gods created the heavens and earth.” By the 900s B.C. — when the author(s) of Genesis would have most likely lived — Elohim was almost certainly interpreted as a singular “God” to accommodate the one-deity Judean religion.
One of the most puzzling verses in Genesis 1:26 states, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…”
This verse may reveal two things. First, using the plural ‘Elohim’ may have referred to the supreme Anunnaki Heavenly Assembly. The second idea from this verse is that making man “in our likeness” meant genetic manipulation of an existing human species (homo Erectus perhaps?), not actually creating a new race of humans.
The Nephilim
According to Sumerian stories, the Anunnaki Assembly was the god caste that genetically altered primeval humans — and then enslaved them. The Nephilim were the offspring of the Anunnaki who came down and intermingled with humans.
Almost all ancient writers translated ‘Nephilim’ as those who had “fallen.” In religious terms, they were considered angels who fell from the grace of God. But “fallen” can also be ‘those who came down.’
Some researchers point to the Bible, where the Nephilim are mentioned in the sixth chapter of Genesis as the sons of the gods who mated with the daughters of men — and produced superhumans.
The Nephilim are described in some translations as being giants. This could mean giant in stature — but we are also told that the Nephilim possessed extraordinary supernatural knowledge they shared with certain portions of humanity.
Nearly every story in Genesis — the flood story, the Elohim, the Adam and Eve story, the Nephilim — has roots in ancient Sumer. And since Sumerian stories predate the stories in the Bible by thousands of years, they should be considered the originating source for such information — and a more accurate explanation of what early people believed about their gods and creation.
Next up: More about who wrote the Bible.
