The Evolution of Language

Ancient Language

Prehistory

Prehistory means literally "before history", from the Latin word for "before," præ, and historia. Human prehistory is the period from the time that behaviorally and anatomically modern humans first appear until the appearance of recorded history following the invention ofwriting systems. Since both the time of settlement of modern humans, and the evolution of human civilisations, differ from region to region, prehistory starts and ends at different moments in time, depending on the region concerned. Sumer in Mesopotamia and ancient Egyptwere the first civilisations to develop their own scripts, and to keep historical records; this took place already during the early Bronze Age. The neighbouring civilisations of the Ancient Middle East were the first to follow. Most other civilisations reached the end of prehistory during the Iron Age.

Cave Paintings

Cave paintings (also known in archaeology as "parietal art") are paintings found on cave walls and ceilings, and especially those of prehistoric origin, which date back to some 40,000 years ago in both Asia and Europe. The exact purpose of the Paleolithic cave paintings is not known. Evidence suggests that they were not merely decorations of living areas since the caves in which they have been found do not have signs of ongoing habitation. They are also often located in areas of caves that are not easily accessible. Some theories hold that cave paintings may have been a way of communicating with others, while other theories ascribe a religious or ceremonial purpose to them. The paintings are remarkably similar around the world, with animals being common subjects that give the most impressive images. Humans mainly appear as images of hands, mostly hand stencils made by blowing pigment on a hand held to the wall.

Origins of Written Language

The smudged red disk below the hand stencils is one of the oldest cave art yet dated, at 40,800 years old. Located in El Castillo cave in the Cantabria region of northern Spain

The earliest known cave paintings/drawings of animals are at Maros on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, according to datings announced in 2014. Previously it was believed that the earliest paintings were in Europe. The earliest figurative paintings in Europe are found in the Chauvet Cave in France, and in the Coliboaia Cave in Romania. The earliest non-figurative rock art is in the El Castillo cave in Cantabria, Spain and is a hand stencil in Sulawesi. There are similar later paintings in Africa, Australia and South America, continuing until recent times in some places, though there is a worldwide tendency for open airrock art to succeed paintings deep in caves.

Papyrus

The word papyrus refers to a thick paper-like material made from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus. Papyruscan also refer to a document written on sheets of papyrus joined together side by side and rolled up into a scroll, an early form of a book. The plural for such documents is papyri. An official letter on a papyrus of thethird century B.C.

History of the Alphabet

Papyrus is first known to have been used in ancient Egypt (at least as far back as the First Dynasty), as the Cyperus papyrus plant was a wetland sedge that was once abundant in the Sudd of Southern Sudan along with the Nile Delta of Egypt. Papyrus was also used throughout the Mediterranean region and in Kingdom of Kush. The Ancient Egyptians used papyrus as a writing material, as well as employing it commonly in the construction of other artifacts such as reed boats, mats, rope, sandals, and baskets.

Mesopotamia The Development of Written Language

Hierogliphs

Egyptian hieroglyphs ("god's words") were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood. Hieroglyphics are related to two other Egyptian scripts, hieratic and demotic. Early hieroglyphics date back as far as 3,300 BCE, and continued to be used up until the end of the fourth century CE, when non-Christian temples were closed and their monumental use was no longer necessary.

After the loss of the knowledge of hieroglyphic writing, the decipherment of hieroglyphics remained an enduring puzzle which would only be solved, with the help of the Rosetta Stone, discovered by Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1799, by Jean-Francois Champollion in the 1820s.

Hieroglyphs emerged from the preliterate artistic traditions of Egypt. For example, symbols on Gerzean pottery from c. 4000 BCE resemble hieroglyphic writing. Hieroglyphs consist of three kinds of glyphs: phonetic glyphs, including single-consonant characters that function like an alphabet; logographs, representing morphemes; anddeterminatives, which narrow down the meaning of logographic or phonetic words.Hieroglyphs on a funerary stela in Manchester Museum. As writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in the hieratic (priestly) and demotic (popular) scripts. These variants were also more suited than hieroglyphs for use on papyrus.

Logogram

Logographic systems, or logographies, are writing systems in which each symbol represents a concept rather than a sound, as insyllabaric or phonographic systems.

Morpheme

A morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language. In other words, it is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.

Alphabet

An alphabet is a standard set of letters (basic written symbols or graphemes) which is used to write one or more languages based on the general principle that the letters represent phonemes (basic significant sounds) of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as syllabaries (in which each character represents a syllable) and logographies (in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit).

Phoenician Alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, is the oldest verified alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet contains 22 letters, all of which are consonants. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. The Phoenician alphabet is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics and became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it evolved and was assimilated by many other cultures.

A History of Hebrew Part 5: Old Hebrew and Phoenician

The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is similar to the Phoenician. Another derivative script is the Aramaic alphabet, which was the ancestor of the modern Arabic script. The Modern Hebrew script is a stylistic variant of the Aramaic script. The Greek alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Phoenician was usually written from right to left, although there are some texts written in boustrophedon.

The Difference in Biblical and Modern Hebrew by Bill Sanford

Paleo-Hebrew

The Paleo-Hebrew (picture) alphabet also spelt Palaeo-Hebrew alphabet, is a variant of the Phoenician alphabet. Like the Phoenician alphabet, the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet contains 22 letters, all of which are consonants, and is described as an abjad. The term was coined by Solomon Birnbaum in 1954 who wrote "To apply the term Phoenician to the script of the Hebrews is hardly suitable".

Even so, the script is nearly identical to the Phoenician script.Archeological evidence of the use of the script by the Israelites for writing the Hebrew language dates to around the 10th century BCE. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet began to fall out of use by the Jews in the 5th century BCE when the Aramaic alphabet was adopted as the predominant writing system for Hebrew, from which the present Jewish "square-script" Hebrew alphabet evolved. The Samaritans, who now number less than one thousand people, have continued to use a derivative of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, known as the Samaritan alphabet.

Mesopotamia The Development of Written Language

Samartian Writing

The Samaritan alphabet is used by the Samaritans for religious writings, including the Samaritan Pentateuch, writings inSamaritan Hebrew, and for commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic and occasionally

Arabic. Samaritan is a direct descendant of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which was a variety of the Phoenician alphabet in which large parts of the Hebrew Bible were originally penned.

All these scripts are believed to be descendants of the Proto-Sinaitic script. That script was used by the ancient Israelites, both Jews and Samaritans. The better-known "square script" Hebrew alphabet traditionally used by Jews is a stylized version of the Aramaic alphabet which they adopted from the Persian Empire (which in turn adopted it from the Arameans). After the fall of the Persian Empire, Judaism used both scripts before settling on the Aramaic form.

Samaritan Pentatuach

The Samaritan Pentateuch is a manuscript of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, written in the Samaritan alphabet and used as a scripture by the Samaritans. It constitutes their entire biblical canon.

The Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele (intrusive igneous rock similar to granite) inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt, in 196 BC on behalf of KingPtolemy V. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle portion Demotic script, and the lowest Ancient Greek. Because it presents essentially the same text in all three scripts (with some minor differences among them), it provided the key to the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The stone is believed to have originally been displayed within a temple, possibly at nearby Sais. It was probably moved during theearly Christian or medieval period, and was eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town ofRashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. It was rediscovered there in 1799 by a soldier named Pierre-François Bouchard of theNapoleonic expedition to Egypt. It was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times, and it aroused widespread public interest with its potential to decipher this previously untranslated ancient language.

Granodiorite Stele

An intrusive igneous rock similar to granite on a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected as a monument, very often for funerary or commemorative purposes.

Hammurabi's Code

Hammurabi (died c. 1750 BC) was the sixth Amorite king of Babylon (that is, of the First Babylonian Dynasty, the Amorite Dynasty) from 1792 BC to 1750 BC middle chronology (1728–1686 BC short chronology). He became the first king of the Babylonian Empire following the abdication of his father, Sin-Muballit, who had become very ill and died, extending Babylon's control over Mesopotamiaby winning a series of wars against neighboring kingdoms. Although his empire controlled all of Mesopotamia at the time of his death, his successors were unable to maintain his empire. Hammurabi is known for the set of laws called Hammurabi's Code, which constitute one of the earliest surviving codes of law in recorded history.

The Stone of Hammurabi, King of Bablyon with the written code of laws.

1792-1750 B.C.E.

Hammurabi's Code of Law

Chinese Writing System

The Chinese writing system is one of the oldest known written languages – some of the earliest examples of ancient Chinese writing date back to over 4,000 years ago. The Chinese writing systems uses a logographic system (a series of symbols that represent a complete word or a phrase). The system consists of large Chinese symbols known as characters.

The Chinese writing system is unique in many respects. First, China is an enormous country with two main languages: Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese. From these two languages sprouted many different dialects. The Chinese writing system was the one unifying element that brought all these languages into one standard written language. For instance, while the pronunciation of the word “one” may vary from Mandarin to Cantonese, the written character is the same. Spoken Chinese has changed remarkably over the centuries, while Chinese writing has changed little from the ancient Chinese.

The Chinese writing system has changed little, but there are four distinct periods of Chinese writing. The four phases of Chinese writing are:

Jia-gu wen (Oracle Bone). This is the earliest of Chinese symbols. Samples of writing using this method date back to (1500 – 1000 B.C.). These symbols were etched onto turtle shells and animals bones. These bones were maintained as historical documents to the reign of the Shang Dynasty.
Da zhuan (Greater Seal). This script appeared mostly on cast bronze vessels and appeared primarily between 1100 – 700 B.C.
Xiao zhuan (Lesser Seal). This is the elegant, flowing script we normally associate with Chinese writing. This version of Chinese calligraphy was the predecessor for the more streamlined version of modern writing. The lesser seal script was originally found on bamboo scrolls, but you can still find this beautiful Chinese calligraphy on silk writings and landscape paintings.
Lis shu (Clerkly Script). This is the modern Chinese writing system. This set of symbols became popular in part for its flowing script that was fast and efficient to write. Also, this writing system was much easier to use with pens, brushes and paper, which is part of the reason it was adapted as the main Chinese calligraphy method.

The Chinese symbols are beautifully drawn using calligraphy. Traditionally, the Chinese characters are written in columns. These columns are read from top to bottom and from right to left. Because this writing system uses a single character to represent a word or phrase, there are literally thousands of symbols. In fact, Hanzi (literally, Chinese for “Chinese characters”) numbers more than 50,000 symbols. This enormous amount of characters accounts, in part, for the high illiteracy rate in China. In an effort to circumvent this problem, the People’s Republic of China introduced a program to simplify the language into a set of commonly used characters. The current writing system uses approximately 6,000 of these characters. Of course, proper names are characters that only rarely appear.

Bamboo Chinese Writing Scroll

The Story of God Through Ancient Chinese Writing

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls, in the narrow sense of Qumran Caves Scrolls, are a collection of some 981 different texts discovered between 1946 and 1956 in eleven caves from the immediate vicinity of the ancient settlement at Khirbet Qumran in the West Bank. The caves are located about 2 kilometres inland from the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name. These documents contained Jewish Temple writings that included many of the books of the Testament of the Torah (Bible) and of the New Testament in the Bible. These writing had been uncovered for thousands of years until their discovery.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The consensus is that the Qumran Caves Scrolls date from the last three centuries BCE and the first century CE. Bronze coins found at the same sites form a series beginning with John Hyrcanus (135–104 BCE) and continuing until the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73 CE), supporting the radiocarbon and paleographic dating of the scrolls. Manuscripts from additional Judean desert sites go back as far as the eighth century BCE to as late as the 11th century CE.

The texts are of great historical, religious, and linguistic significance because they include the third oldest known surviving manuscripts of works later included in the Hebrew Bible canon, along with deuterocanonicaland extra-biblical manuscripts which preserve evidence of the diversity of religious thought in late Second Temple Judaism. Only in two silver scroll-shaped amulets containing portions of the Priestly Blessing from the Book of Numbers has biblical text so far been discovered that is older than the Dead Sea Scrolls; the silver scrolls were excavated in Jerusalem at Ketef Hinnom and date from around 600 BCE. A burnt piece ofLeviticus dating from the 6th century CE has recently been analyzed and is the fourth oldest piece of the Torah known to still exist.

Most of the texts are written in Hebrew, with some in Aramaic (in different regional dialects, including Nabataean), and a few in Greek. If discoveries from the Judean desert are included, Latin (from Masada) and Arabic (from Khirbet al-Mird) can be added. Most texts are written on parchment, some on papyrus and one on copper.

Nova's "The Bible's Buried Secrets" '-Vivid documentary on the early tribes and their ancient writings.

THE MAGICAL WRITING OF PRIESTS AND KINGS

In ancient Palestine, writing was a restricted and expensive technology. Writing was controlled by the government and manipulated by the priests. Writing was seen as a gift from the gods. It was not used to canonize religious practice, but rather to engender religious awe. Writing was magical. It was powerful. It was the guarded knowledge of political and religious elites.

We know from ancient inscriptions that writing did not require well-developed states like those of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia. For example, the tiny city-states in Canaan during the late 2nd millennium B.C. each had their own scribe. Excavations at Tel Amarna in Egypt uncovered correspondence from these petty rulers in Canaan to the great pharaohs of the New Kingdom during the 14th century B.C. Other evidence, documented in NOVA's "The Bible's Buried Secrets," turned up in 2005, when a proto-Hebrew abecedary (that is, an alphabet inscription) dated to the 10th century B.C. was excavated at Tel Zayit in Israel.

Many early inscriptions were used in religious rituals, reflecting the belief in the magical power of writing. The well-known Gezer Calendar, a series of notes about planting and harvesting that dates to the 10th century B.C., was probably written on soft limestone so that the writing could be scraped off in such a ritual, with the written words literally becoming a kind of magic fertilizer blessing the agricultural year. Other inscriptions such as an early-ninth-century royal inscription from the tiny chiefdom of Moab (in ancient Jordan) were display inscriptions—they were located in prominent places by kings and chiefs, not to be read but to be seen. An aspiring king projected power by his control and manipulation of writing. But eventually writing would break free from these restricted uses.

THE SPREAD OF LITERACY AND ORIGINS OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE

The invention of alphabetic writing was a pivotal development in the history of writing, but it alone did not encourage the spread of writing beyond the palace and the temple. Recent discoveries at Wadi el-Hol in Egypt date the invention of the alphabet back to 2000 B.C., and for centuries after, writing likely remained the province of the elite. So what allowed the alphabet to spread beyond religious and literary elites to be used by soldiers, merchants, and even common workmen? It was the urbanization and globalization of society. This process began in the eighth century B.C. with the rise of the Assyrian Empire, which encouraged urbanization as part of a plan for economically exploiting its growing territory.

Wisdom Literature

I believe that the formative period for the writing of biblical literature also began at this time and stretched roughly from the eighth through the sixth century B.C., when the social and political conditions for the expansion of writing in ancient Israel flourished. With the rise of the Assyrian Empire, ancient Palestine became more urban, and writing became critical to the increasingly complex economy. Writing was important to the bureaucracy of Jerusalem. It also continued to serve as an ideological tool projecting the power of kings. At the end of the eighth century in both Mesopotamia and Egypt, rulers were collecting the ancient books, and ancient Judeans followed their model—collecting the traditions, stories, and laws of their ancestors into written manuscripts.

The evidence of archeology and inscriptions suggests a spread of writing through all classes of society by the seventh century B.C. in Judah. This allowed for a momentous shift in the role of writing in society that is reflected in the reforms of King Josiah at the end of the seventh century; writing became a tool of religious reformers who first proclaimed the authority of the written word. This new role of the written word is particularly reflected in the Book of Deuteronomy, which commands the masses to write down the words of God, to read it and treasure it in their hearts, and to post the written word on the entrance to their homes.

To be sure, this shift in the role of writing encroached on groups with a vested interest in the authority of the oral tradition or the prophetic word. The rise of authoritative texts in the late Judean monarchy was accompanied by a critique of the written word.very creation of the world.

The Exile

DARK YEARS OF EXILE

The composition of biblical literature continued into the period of the Babylonian exile (586-539 B.C.), after the Babylonians overthrew the Assyrians in the north and invaded the Kingdom of Judah. However, it was hardly a time when biblical literature could flourish. The exile resulted in a massive depopulation of the land of Israel. Archeological surveys suggest the region was depopulated by as much as 80 percent, and in Babylon the situation was grim for the exiles—with the exception of the royal family.

It is hardly credible that Jewish exiles working on Babylonian canal projects wrote or even valued literature. However, the royal entourage of the last kings of Judah were living in the southern palace of the Babylonian kings, and they retained their claim to the throne in Jerusalem. They collected literature from the royal and temple library, as well as wrote and edited literature that advanced their claims and standing. But the high status of the royal family and its role in the formation of biblical literature seems to disappear by the end of the sixth century B.C.

The region of Palestine, especially in the hills around Jerusalem, continued to be sparsely populated and impoverished in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. These were dark times for Jerusalem and the Persian province of Yehud. In past scholarship, it was "dark" simply because we knew so little about this period of history. Increasingly, archeology has filled in the void but painted a bleak picture.

Most biblical literature was written long before this dark age. However, the priests who took over the leadership of the Jewish community during this period preserved and edited biblical literature.

THE TEXT BECOMES THE TEACHER

By the time of the fall of Babylon in 539 B.C., and the return of the Jewish exiles to Palestine, the core of the Hebrew Bible was completed. The very language of Scripture changed as society became more textualized. Most tellingly, the Hebrew word torah, which originally meant "teaching, instruction," increasingly began to refer to a written text, "theTorah of Moses," (also known as the Pentateuch) in the Second Temple period (530 B.C.–A.D. 130).

The tension between the authority of the oral tradition and the written word, the teacher and the text, continued in the Second Temple period among the various Jewish groups. The priestly aristocracy controlled the temple library and the sacred texts. They were literate elites whose authority was threatened by the oral tradition. Groups like the Pharisees, in contrast, were largely composed of the lay classes. They invested authority in the teacher and the oral tradition.

Both early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, which grew out of the lay classes, struggled with the tension between the sacred text and the authority of the oral tradition in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70. Although they acknowledged the authority of the written Scriptures, they also asserted the authority of the living voice of the teacher.

Christianity, however, quickly adopted the codex—the precursor of the modern book. Codices, with bound leaves of pages, appeared in the first century A.D. and became common by the fourth century. The codex could encompass a much more extensive series of texts than a single scroll could contain. In bringing together a collection of scrolls, the codex also defined a set and order of books and made possible a more defined canon. It was with the technological invention of the codex that the "Bible" as a book, that is, the Bible as we know it, first got its physical form.

Judaism, in contrast, was quite slow in adopting the codex and even today it is a Torah scroll that we find in a synagogue ark. Still, a fierce ideology of orality would persist in rabbinic Judaism even as the oral Torah and the written tablets were merged into what, according to doctrine, is one pre-existent Torah that was with God at the very creation of the world.

Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible is not a single book but rather a collection of texts, most of them anonymous, and most of them the product of more or less extensive editing prior to reaching their modern form. These texts are in many different genres, but three distinct blocks approximating modern narrative history can be made out.

Torah: Genesis to Deuteronomy

God creates the world; the world God creates is good, but it becomes thoroughly corrupted by man's decision to sin. God destroys all but the eight remaining righteous people in a deluge and shortens man's lifespan significantly. God selects Abraham to inherit the land of Canaan. The children of Israel, Abraham's grandson, go into Egypt, where their descendants are enslaved. The Israelites are led out of Egypt by Moses (Exodus) and receive the laws of God, who renews the promise of the land of Canaan.

Authorship of the Torah

A central pillar of the Bible's historical authority was the tradition that it had been composed by the principal actors or eyewitnesses to the events described – the Pentateuch was the work of Moses, Joshua was by Joshua, and so on. But the Protestant Reformation had brought the actual texts to a much wider audience, which combined with the growing climate of intellectual ferment in the 17th century that was the start of the Age of Enlightenment threw a harsh sceptical spotlight on these traditional claims.

Torah

Torah ("Instruction, Teaching"), or the Pentateuch, is the central reference of the religious Judaic tradition. It has a range of meanings. It can most specifically mean the first five books of the twenty-four books of the Tanakh, and it usually includes the rabbinic commentaries. The term Torah means instruction and offers a way of life for those who follow it; it can mean the continued narrative from Genesis to the end of the Tanakh, and it can even mean the totality of Jewish teaching, culture and practice. Common to all these meanings, Torah consists of the foundational narrative of the Jews: their call into being by God, their trials and tribulations, and their covenant with their God, which involves following a way of life embodied in a set of moral and religious obligations and civil laws (halakha).

Judaism: scriptures, Father Abraham - Tanakh, Torah, Mishnah, Talmud

In rabbinic literature the word "Torah" denotes both the five books, Torah Shebichtav, "Torah that is written", and an Oral Torah, Torah Shebe'al Peh ("Torah that is spoken"). The Oral Torah consists of interpretations and amplifications which according to rabbinic tradition have been handed down from generation to generation and are now embodied in the Talmud and Midrash.

According to rabbinic tradition, all of the teachings found in the Torah, both written and oral, were given by God through Moses, a prophet, some of them at Mount Sinai and others at the Tabernacle, and all the teachings were written down by Moses, which resulted in the Torah we have today. According to a Midrash, the Torah was created prior to the creation of the world, and was used as the blueprint for Creation. The majority of Biblical scholars believe that the written books were a product of the Babylonian exilic period (c. 600 BCE) and that it was completed by the Persian period (c. 400 BCE). However, it is worth noting that the 2004 discovery of fragments of the Hebrew Bible at Ketef Hinnom dating to the 7th century BCE, and thus to before the Babylonian captivity, suggests that at least some elements of the Torah were current before the Babylonian exile.

Traditionally, the words of the Torah are written on a scroll by a sofer on parchment in Hebrew. A Torah portion is read publicly at least once every three days, in the halachically prescribed tune, in the presence of a congregation. Reading the Torah publicly is one of the bases for Jewish communal life.

Talmud

The Talmud ("instruction, learning") is a central text ofRabbinic Judaism. It is also traditionally referred to as Shas (ש״ס), a Hebrew abbreviation of shisha sedarim, the "six orders". The term "Talmud" normally refers to the collection of writings named specifically the Babylonian Talmud, although there is also an earlier collection known as the Jerusalem Talmud, or Palestinian Talmud. When referring to post-biblical periods, namely those of the creation of the Talmud, the Talmudic academies and the Babylonian exilarchate, Jewish sources use the term "Babylonia" from a strictly Jewish point of view, still using this name after it had become obsolete in geopolitical terms.

The Talmud has two components: the Mishnah (c. 200 CE), a written compendium of Rabbinic Judaism's Oral Torah (Talmud translates literally as "instruction" in Hebrew); and the Gemara (c. 500 CE), an elucidation of the Mishnah and related Tannaitic writings that often ventures onto other subjects and expounds broadly on the Hebrew Bible. The term "Talmud" may refer to either the Gemara alone, or the Mishnah and Gemara together.

The entire Talmud consists of 63 tractates, and in standard print is over 6,200 pages long. It is written in Tannaitic Hebrew and Aramaic, and contains the teachings and opinions of thousands of pre-Christian Era rabbis on a variety of subjects, including Halakha (law), Jewish ethics, philosophy, customs, history, lore and many other topics. The Talmud is the basis for all codes of Jewish law, and is widely quoted in rabbinic literature.

Deuteronomic history: Joshua to 2 Kings

The Israelites conquer the land of Canaan under Joshua, successor to Moses. Under the Judges they live in a state of constant conflict and insecurity, until the prophet Samuelanoints Saul as king over them. Saul proves unworthy, and God selects David as his successor. Under David the Israelites are united and conquer their enemies, and underSolomon his son they live in peace and prosperity. But the kingdom is divided under Solomon's successors, Israel in the north and Judah in the south, and the kings of Israel fall away from God and eventually the people of the north are taken into captivity by outsiders. Judah, unlike Israel, has some kings who follow God, but many do not, and eventually it too is taken into captivity, and the Temple of God built by Solomon is destroyed.

Chronicler's history: Chronicles and Ezra/Nehemiah

(Chronicles begins by reprising the history of the Torah and the Deuteronomistic history, with some differences over details. It introduces new material following its account of the fall of Jerusalem, the event which concludes the Deuteronomic history. The Babylonians, who had destroyed the Temple and taken the people into captivity, are themselves defeated by the Persians under their king Cyrus. Cyrus permits the exiles to return to Jerusalem. The Temple is rebuilt, and the Laws of Moses are read to the people.

Other

(Several other books of the Hebrew Bible are set in a historical context or otherwise give information which can be regarded as historical, although these books do not present themselves as histories.

The prophets Amos and Hosea write of events during the 8th century kingdom of Israel; the prophet Jeremiah writes of events preceding and following the fall of Judah; Ezekiel writes of events during and preceding the exile in Babylon; and other prophets similarly touch on various periods, usually those in which they write.

Several books are included in some canons but not in others. Among these, Maccabees is a purely historical work of events in the 2nd century BCE. Others are not historical in orientation but are set in historical contexts or reprise earlier histories, such as Enoch, an apocalyptic work of the 2nd century BCE.

The Bible and How it came to us

A CULTURAL SHIFT

Why did the Bible become a book at all? Scholars agree that early Israel was an oral society of pastoralism and subsistence farming. So how and why did such a pastoral-agrarian society come to write down and give authority to the written word? How and why did writing spread from the closed circles of royal and priestly scribes to the lay classes? It was this spread of Hebrew writing in ancient Palestine that democratized the written word and allowed it to gain religious authority in the book we now call "the Bible."

When the Bible became a book, the written word supplanted the living voice of the teacher. Ancient Israelite society was textualized. This textualization marked one of the great turning points in human history, namely the movement from an oral culture towards a written culture.

We tend to read the Bible from our own viewpoint—that is, we tend to think of the Bible as if it came from a world of texts, books, and authors. But the Bible was written before there were books. As the great French scholar Henri-Jean Martin has observed, the role of writing in society has changed dramatically through history, yet modern analyses of biblical literature often depend on the perspective of the text in modern society. Using the most recent advances in the archeology of Palestine and relying on insights from linguistic anthropology, I came to new conclusions about why and when the Bible began to be written down.

New Testament

While the authorship of some of the Pauline epistles is largely undisputed, there is no scholarly consensus on the authors of the other books of the New Testament.

Biblical Cannon

A biblical canon, or canon of scripture, is a list of books considered to be authoritative scripture by a particular religious community. The word "canon" comes from the Greek κανών, meaning "rule" or "measuring stick". The term was first coined in reference to scripture by Christians, but the idea is said to be Jewish.

The Bible: A Brief History

Most of the canons listed below are considered "closed" (i.e., books cannot be added or removed), reflecting a belief that public revelation has ended and thus the inspired texts may be gathered into a complete and authoritative canon, which scholar Bruce Metzger defines as "an authoritative collection of books." In contrast, an "open canon", which permits the addition of books through the process of continuous revelation, Metzger defines as "a collection of authoritative books."

The historicity of the Bible is the question of its "acceptability as a history," in the phrase of Thomas L. Thompson, a scholar who has written widely on this topic as it relates to the Old Testament. This can be extended to the question of the Christian New Testament as an accurate record of the historical Jesus and the Apostolic Age. Many fields of study compare the Bible and history, ranging from archeology and astronomy to linguistics and comparative literature. Scholars also examine the historical context of Bible passages, the importance ascribed to events by the authors, and the contrast between the descriptions of these events and historical evidence. Archaeological discoveries in the nineteenth and twentieth century have supported some of the Old Testament's historical narratives.

Manuscripts and canons

The Bible exists in multiple manuscripts, none of them autographs, and multiple canons, none of which completely agree on which books have sufficient authority to be included or their order.

To determine the accuracy of a copied manuscript, textual critics scrutinize the way the transcripts have passed through history to their extant forms. The higher the volume of the earliest texts (and their parallels to each other), the greater the textual reliability and the less chance that the transcript's content has been changed over the years. Multiple copies may also be grouped into text types (see New Testament text types), with some types judged closer to the hypothetical original than others. Differences often extend beyond minor variations and may involve, for instance, interpolation of material central to issues of historicity and doctrine, such as the ending of Mark 16.

The books comprising the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament (the two are almost, but not exactly, the same) were written largely in Biblical Hebrew, with a few exceptions in Biblical Aramaic. Today it exists in several traditions, including the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint 47 books (a Greek translation widely used in the period from the 3rd century BCE to roughly the 5th century CE, and still regarded as authoritative by the Orthodox Christian churches), the Samaritan Torah, the Westminster containing the modern 39 books, and others. Variations between these traditions are useful for reconstructing the most likely original text, and for tracing the intellectual histories of various Jewish and Christian communities. The very oldest fragment resembling part of the text of the Hebrew Bible so far discovered is a small silver amulet, dating from approximately 600 BCE, and containing a version of the Priestly Blessing ("May God make his face to shine upon you").

According to the dominant theory called Greek primacy, the New Testament was originally written in Greek, of which 5,650 handwritten copies have survived in Greek, over 10,000 in Latin. When other languages are included, the total of ancient copies approaches 25,000. The next ancient text to come close to rivaling that number is Homer's Iliad, which is thought to have survived in 643 ancient copies. Recognizing this, F. E. Peters remarked that "on the basis of manuscript tradition alone, the works that make up the Christians' New Testament texts were the most frequently copied and widely circulated [surviving] books of antiquity". (This may be due to their preservation, popularity, and distribution brought about by the ease of seaborne travel and the many roads constructed during the time of the Roman Empire).

A four gospel canon (the Tetramorph) was first asserted by Irenaeus, c. 180. In his Easter letter of 367, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, gave a list of exactly the same books as what would become the New Testament canon, and he used the phrase "being canonized" (kanonizomena) in regards to them. The Council of Rome in 382 under the authority of Pope Damasus I issued an identical canon, and his decision to commission the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible, c. 383, was instrumental in the fixation of the canon in the West.

Gospels/Acts

Jesus is born to Joseph and Mary; he is baptised by John the Baptist and begins a preaching and healing mission in Galilee; he comes up to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover, is arrested, tried, condemned, and crucified. He is raised from the dead by God, appears before his followers, issuing the Great Commission, and ascends to Heaven, to sit at the Right Hand of God, with a promise to return. The followers of Jesus, who had been fearful following the Crucifixion, are encouraged by Jesus' resurrection and continue to practice and to preach his teachings. The Apostle Paul, whom only met Jesus after his ressurection, preaches throughout the eastern Mediterranean, is arrested, and appeals. He is sent to Rome for trial, and the narrative breaks off.

The Gospel in 4 minutes

Epistles/Revelation

The epistles (literally "letters") are largely concerned with theology, but the theological arguments they present form a "history of theology". Revelation deals with the last judgement and the end of the world.

Historicity of Jesus (Part 1 of 4)

Historicity of Jesus

Main article: Historicity of Jesus

The historicity of some NT teachings of Jesus is also currently debated among biblical scholars. The "quest for the historical Jesus" began as early as the 18th century, and has continued to this day. The earliest New Testament texts which refer to Jesus, Paul's letters, are usually dated in the 50s CE. Since Paul records very little of Jesus' life and activities, these are of little help in determining facts about the life of Jesus, although they may contain references to information given to Paul from the eyewitnesses of Jesus.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has shed light into the context of 1st century Judea, noting the diversity of Jewish belief as well as shared expectations and teachings. For example, the expectation of the coming messiah, the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount and much else of the early Christian movement are found to have existed within apocalyptic Judaism of the period. This has had the effect of centering Early Christianity much more within its Jewish roots than was previously the case. It is now recognised that Rabbinical Judaism and Early Christianity are only two of the many strands which survived until the Jewish revolt of 66 to 70 CE. Almost all historical critics agree that a historical figure named Jesus taught throughout the Galilean countryside c. 30 CE, was believed by his followers to have performed supernatural acts, and was sentenced to death by the Romans, possibly for insurrection.

Latin is a member of the broad family of Italic languages. Its alphabet, the Latin alphabet, emerged from the Old Italic alphabets, which in turn were derived from the Greek and Phoenician scripts. Historical Latin came from the prehistoric language of the Latium region, specifically around the River Tiber, where Roman civilization first developed. How and when Latin came to be spoken by the Romans are questions that have long been debated. Various influences on Latin of Celtic dialects in northern Italy, the non-Indo-European Etruscan language in Central Italy, and the Greek of southern Italy have been detected, but when these influences entered the native Latin is not known for certain.

Surviving Latin literature consists almost entirely of Classical Latin in its broadest definition. It includes a polished and sometimes highly stylized literary language sometimes termed Golden Latin, which spans the 1st century BC and the early years of the 1st century AD. However, throughout the history of ancient Rome the spoken language differed in both grammar and vocabulary from that of literature, and is referred to as Vulgar Latin. In addition to Latin, Greek was often spoken by the well-educated elite, who studied it in school and acquired Greek tutors from among the influx of enslaved educated Greek prisoners of war. In the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which became the Byzantine Empire, the Greek Koine of Hellenism remained current and was never replaced by Latin.

The name Latin derives from the Italic tribal group named Latini that settled at some time in Latium, and the dialect spoken by these people.

The Italic languages form a centum subfamily of the Indo-European language family. These include the Romance, Germanic, Celtic, and Hellenic languages, and a number of extinct ones.