The books of the Bible represent the culmination of intricate literary processes spanning multiple generations, with numerous unnamed scribes, compilers, and revisers contributing layers of material over extended periods, contrasting sharply with traditional attributions to singular prophetic or apostolic figures.
Contemporary biblical studies reveals how these texts evolved from communal oral performance through sophisticated scribal workshops of the Second Temple era, subsequently transmitted via manuscript copying networks, transformed by print technology, and refined through modern scholarly editions.
Archaeological discoveries including the Dead Sea Scrolls together with extensive evidence of textual variation across manuscript collections worldwide, provide insight into the complex history of biblical composition and transmission. This evidence suggests that the biblical texts developed through processes of compilation, revision, and transmission, with diverse literary traditions and textual forms contributing to the formation of the biblical books as they were preserved.
Divine authorship
The rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud state in a midrash (homiletical interpretation) that God wrote the Torah in heaven in letters of black fire on parchment of white fire before the world was created, and that Moses received it by divine dictation. The early Church Fathers agreed that the scriptures were inspired or dictated by God, but not on which writings were scriptural: as a result, the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches treat some books (the Deuterocanonical books or Apocrypha) as inspired, but the Protestant tradition does not.
In the 20th century, the vast majority of Catholic and Protestant theologians moved away from the divine dictation model and emphasized the role of the human authors. Many conservative scholars now accept, for example, that the Book of Isaiah has multiple authors and that 2 Corinthians is two letters joined. Nevertheless, both Dei Filius, the First Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, and Dei verbum, the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, retain the form of wording which states that the scriptures "have God as their author",First Vatican Council, Decrees of the First Vatican Council: Session 3: Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, 2:7, papalencyclicals.net, accessed on 2 September 2025Holy See, Dei verbum: Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation', paragraph 11, published on 18 November 1965, accessed on 2 September 2025 with the latter text adding that
Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, is the collection of scriptures making up the Bible used by Judaism. The same books, in a slightly different order, also make up the Protestant version of the Old Testament. The order used here follows the divisions used in Jewish Bibles.
Most of the Hebrew Bible was written between the late 8th century BCE and early 6th century BCE. Biblical texts were written by scribes (Hebrew: ), the literate class of bureaucrats in a mostly non-literate, oral culture. The question of biblical authorship was not important until Hellenization in the 4th century BCE, long after most biblical books had been written. Ancient Greeks believed that a text's authority depended on its author, and Jewish tradition was pressured to identify authors for its writings.
Torah
The first division of the Jewish Bible is the Torah, meaning or . In scholarly literature, it is frequently called by its Greek name, the Pentateuch (). It is the group of five books made up of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy and stands first in all versions of the Christian Old Testament.
In Jewish and Christian tradition authorship of the Torah is attributed to Moses. The Torah itself attributes certain sections to Mosaic authorship. In later biblical texts, such as Daniel 9:11 and Ezra 3:2, it is called the "Torah of Moses". According to Rabbinic tradition, the five books of the Torah were written by Moses, with the exception of the last eight verses of Deuteronomy which describe his death.
Moses would have lived in the 2nd millennium BCE, before the development of Hebrew writing. Scholars date the Torah to the 1st millennium BCE. The Torah may, however, incorporate older oral traditions, such as proverbs, stories, and songs. Most Jews and Christians believed in Mosaic authorship until the 17th century. Today, the majority of scholars agree that the Pentateuch does not have a single author and that its composition took place over centuries.
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers The rise of historical criticism in the 19th century led scholars to conclude that multiple authors wrote the Pentateuch over a long period. By the mid-20th century, the documentary hypothesis had gained nearly universal consensus among scholars. According to the documentary hypothesis, the Pentateuch was created by combining four originally independent documents. The Jahwist source () and the Elohist source () were the first to be combined into one document. In the 7th century BCE, the Deuteronomist produced Deuteronomy, which was later added to the combined document. In the post-exilic period, the Pentateuch reached its final form with the addition of the Priestly source ().
The consensus around the documentary hypothesis began to break down in the 1970s, and this approach has since seen various revisions. While the identification of distinctive Deuteronomistic and Priestly theologies and vocabularies remains widespread, they are used to form new approaches suggesting that the books were combined gradually over time by the slow accumulation of "fragments" of text, or that a basic text was "supplemented" by later authors/editors. At the same time there has been a tendency to bring the origins of the Pentateuch further forward in time, and the most recent proposals place it in 5th century BCE Judah under the Persian empire.
Deuteronomy
Deuteronomy is treated separately from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. Its place in the documentary hypothesis is anomalous, as it, unlike the other four, consists of a single "source". The process of its formation probably took several hundred years, from the 8th century to the 6th, and its authors have been variously identified as prophetic circles (because the concerns of Deuteronomy mirror those of the prophets, especially Hosea), Levitical priestly circles (because it stresses the role of the Levites), and wisdom and scribal circles (because it esteems wisdom, and because the treaty-form in which it is written would be best known to scribes). Deuteronomy was later used as the introduction to the comprehensive history of Israel written in the early part of the 6th century, and later still it was detached from the history and used to round off the Pentateuch.
Prophets
Former prophets
The Former Prophets (נביאים ראשונים, Nevi'im Rishonim), make up the first part of the second division of the Hebrew Bible, the Nevi'im, which translates as "Prophets". In Christian Bibles the Book of Ruth, which belongs in the final section of the Hebrew Bible, is inserted between Judges and Samuel.
According to Jewish tradition dating from at least the 2nd century CE, the Book of Joshua was by Joshua, the Book of Judges and the Books of Samuel were by the prophet Samuel (with some passages by the prophets Gad and Nathan), while the two Books of Kings were by Jeremiah. Since 1943 most scholars have accepted Martin Noth's argument that Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings make up a single work, the so-called "Deuteronomistic history". Noth believed that the history was the work of a single author writing in the time of the Babylonian exile (586–539 BCE). This author/editor took as his starting point an early version of the book of Deuteronomy, which had already been composed during the reign of Josiah (last quarter of the 7th century), selecting, editing and composing it to produce a coherent work. Frank Moore Cross later proposed that an earlier version of the history was composed in Jerusalem in Josiah's time; this first version, Dtr1, was then revised and expanded to create Noth's second edition, or Dtr2. Still later scholars have discovered further layers and further author-editors. In the 1990s some scholars began to question the existence of a Deuteronomistic history and the question of the origin of these books continues to be debated.
Latter prophets
Isaiah
Modern scholars divide the Book of Isaiah into three parts, each with a different origin: "First Isaiah", chapters 1–39, containing the words of the historical 8th century BCE prophet Isaiah and later expansions by his disciples; "Deutero-Isaiah" (chapters 40–55), by an anonymous Jewish author in Babylon near the end of the Babylonian captivity; and "Trito-Isaiah" (chapters 56–66), by anonymous disciples of Deutero-Isaiah in Jerusalem immediately after the return from Babylon (although some scholars suggest that chapters 55–66 were written by Deutero-Isaiah after the fall of Babylon).Kugel, p. 561 This orderly sequence of pre-exilic, exilic and post-exilic material is somewhat misleading, as some scholars note that significant editing appears to have taken place in all three parts.
Jeremiah
Jeremiah lived in the late 7th and early 6th centuries BCE. The Book of Jeremiah presents Baruch ben Neriah as the prophet's companion who writes his words on several occasions, and there has accordingly been much speculation that Baruch could have composed an early edition of the book. In the early 20th century Sigmund Mowinckel identified three types of material in the book, Jeremiah 1–25 (Type A) being the words of Jeremiah himself, the biographic prose material (Type B) by an admirer writing c. 580–480 BCE, and the remainder (Type C) from later periods. There has been considerable debate over Mowinckel's ideas, notably the extent of the Jeremiah material and the role of Baruch, who may have been the author of the Type B material. It is generally agreed that the book has strong connections with the Deuteronomistic layers from the Former Prophets, recapitulating in modern terms the traditional idea that Jeremiah wrote both his own book and the Books of Kings.
Ezekiel
The Book of Ezekiel describes itself as the words of Ezekiel ben-Buzi, a priest living in exile in the city of Babylon between 593 and 571 BCE. The various manuscripts, however, differ markedly from each other, and it is clear that the book has been subjected to extensive editing. While Ezekiel himself may have been responsible for some of this revision, there is general agreement that the book as we have it today is the product of a highly educated priestly circle that owed allegiance to the historical Ezekiel and was closely associated with the Temple.
Minor Prophets or Book of the Twelve
The Minor Prophets are one book in the Hebrew Bible, and many (though not all) modern scholars agree that the Book of the Twelve underwent a process of editing which resulted in a coherent collection. This process is believed to have reached its final form in the Persian period (538–332 BCE), although there is disagreement over whether this was early or late. For the individual books, scholars usually assume that there exists an original core of prophetic tradition which can be attributed to the figure after whom the book is named. The noteworthy exception is the Book of Jonah, an anonymous work containing no prophetic oracles, probably composed in the Hellenistic period (332–167 BCE).
Writings
Psalms
While a number of the Psalms bear headings which seem to identify their authors, these are probably the result of the need to find a significant identification in tradition. The individual psalms come from widely different periods: "some ... presuppose a reigning king and an established cult in the Temple; others clearly presuppose and mention the events of the Exile."
Job