Dialoguing The Bible: FEELING How the Bible Came To Be

By Kevin Morgan

Designed for both the serious student and for the simply curious, this book will help the reader to gain a thorough understanding of how the Bible evolved from a collection of oral works and written works into the highly recognizable book of today. Dialoguing the Bible contains both fictional dialogues and historical facts that will allow the reader to not only grasp how the Bible developed, but also why. Don't just learn about the history of the Bible, FEEL it!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780981749488

Kevin Morgan

Kevin Morgan is an author and entrepreneur who is also very active with many auxiliaries in his home church, including the singles ministry, where he served as its president for three years.  He holds an MBA from Indiana University, a BS from Fisk University and owns an art and framing business.  From his interactions with people and through his experiences, he has come to appreciate the unique challenges that African-American singles must deal with regularly.   Kevin resides in SC where he is currently working on his next book tentatively entitled, Songs of Singleness and plans on authoring more Christian related books.  This dynamic writer is available for speaking engagements and he welcomes your comments.  For more information, email him at: [e-mail].

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Author’s Notes

Dialoguing the Bible combines a little fiction with a whole lot of non-fiction facts. The term that comes to my mind in describing this combination is "hybrid", but often that term refers to printed books that add online enhancements. Such enhancements may come in the form of pictures, graphs, additional textual content, character insights or author comments. In the case of Dialoguing the Bible, I have incorporated fictional dialogues or conversations with listings of non-fiction information. (Hence, that led to the title of this book, Dialoguing the Bible).

When I began the research for this project, my intention was to come up with a book that presented hundreds of interesting facts about the bible. However, as my collection of data steadily grew about how the bible developed over time, the notion that some interesting emotions and stories lay behind these facts became increasingly clear to me. As a writer, I could not ignore the echoes of the emotional ups and downs that served as the context behind the historical milestones in the evolution of the Holy Writ. Surrendering to my writer’s impulse, I decided to use fictional dialogues to capture at least a portion of the human drama that helped to bring the historical facts to life. The purpose of these imagined discussions is to help the reader not only learn more about how the bible came to be, but also FEEL how it grew into the book we recognize and treasure today.

Format of this Book - Dialoguing the Bible has two main sections, one for the Old Testament and another for the New Testament. Under each of these sections will be subsections or chapters such as the Pentateuch and the Masoretes (Old Testament) and the Gospels/Pauline Epistles and the Vulgate (New Testament). Each chapter will begin with a dialogue that will serve as a peek behind the curtain of what some people may have been thinking and saying relating to the subsection’s theme. Still relating to the current focus, each chapter will end with a list of facts and statements.

What’s In A Name? - This will be discussed later in this book, but the term "TANAK" will be used to refer to the body of work that many Christians call the Old Testament. In actuality, the TANAK and the Old Testament cannot be used interchangeably although they both refer to the same collection of books of the Bible. (Don’t worry, this will be explained in more detail in the summary portion just before the Old Testament section of this book.) Suffice it to say at this point, TANAK will be used to differentiate between the body of work that Jews see as their entire bible and the Old Testament which Christians view as the first part of their holy book.

Calendar Naming Era - Throughout this book, we will use "BCE" (Before Common Era) and "CE" (Common Era) instead of "BC" (Before Christ) and "AD" (Anno Domini) which is Latin for "in the year of our Lord". BCE is mostly associated with the Old Testament. CE refers to our current era which also includes the time of the New Testament. In cases where neither BCE nor CE is indicated after a year, it is safe to assume that CE is implied.

Footnotes - In the footnotes section of this book, I have decided to forego the usual practice of including one citation with each fact. When available, I have included up to four references per informational note. This was done for any research nerds (like me!) who are willing to take the time to verify the information presented in this book. For my purposes, as I uncovered various facts related to Dialoguing the Bible, I tried to cross check this information with several references. In some cases, this cross checking resulted in locating up to 10 different sources for the fact being documented.

Old Testament

Summary: Compared to the New Testament, the developmental journey of the Old Testament took a more complicated route. First of all, this senior testament of the Christian bible has been called by many names which at times can be confusing. The term "Old Testament was coined by early Christian leaders who wanted to distinguish their growing body of literature from the writings seen as sacred by their Jewish religious counterparts. Over time, Christians would come to view their bible as consisting of an old and a new testament. For Jews, they would not consider their bible as an old book, but rather as THE book, the inspired word of God. Instead of the name Old Testament, Jews used various terms such as the Hebrew or Jewish" bible or the TANAK to denote their sacred body of literature. (TANAK is the term we will use to refer to the Hebrew bible in subsequent chapters of this book.) It is important to note that this is more than just a word game. The name used to refer to this body of work brings with it drastically different religious assumptions and perspectives. As should be clear to any person familiar with the research on how the Bible came to be, the designation "TANAK or the Old Testament does matter as it relates to which collection of books is being discussed. So if one were to ask, Do the terms TANAK and Old Testament refer to the same body of work?", the most correct answer would not by "yes or no, but yes AND no". In other words, it’s complicated!

One such case when the name used does matter (either TANAK or Old Testament) is in the number of books in either version. For Jews, the TANAK consists of 24 books while for Christians; the Old Testament has 39 books. What accounts for the difference? Are there additional books in the Old Testament? In the TANAK, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah and the twelve "minor prophets are each one book. On the other hand in the Old Testament, most Christians will quickly recognize that Samuel, Kings and Chronicles come in 2 volumes each, Ezra and Nehemiah and the twelve minor" prophets are in separate books. Another difference between the TANAK and the Old Testament is the order of the books after the Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy) in each version.

A second "complication" related to the study of the development of the TANAK is determining when it began. Simply put, it is next to impossible to conclusively determine the starting point of the TANAK. Rather than offer a specific date, the best most scholars can do is point to a period of time in the long forgotten past as the likely incubation point of the Old Testament. This incubation point is related to the era when the raw materials of the Old Testament were created and sustained as part of the Hebrews longstanding oral tradition. This raw material included narratives, stories, epic tales, songs, poems and chants.

A third complication has to do with the fact that there were many people, operating independently of each other, who were creating various types of materials (songs, poems, narratives, etc.) over the span of 1,000 years. These unconnected works would later be collected, written down, redacted and organized into a massive volume of documents that we now call the TANAK. Additionally, there was no previous type of book that Jewish leaders could use as a model as they deliberated the components of their TANAK. Having no precedent meant there were no rules or guidelines to rely on in the sometimes intense debates and discussion on which books should or should not be added to the canon. What the Jewish religious leaders did have as their unifying and guiding principle was the covenant given by God to Abraham. Hence, the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt, their exodus from captivity, their Babylonian exile experiences and other occurrences in the lives of the Hebrew people were all interpreted in light of the Abrahamic covenant. Other covenants that helped with the formation of the TANAK were God’s covenant with Noah, Moses, and David. So while there was no previous book or theological archetype to base the evolving Jewish religious canon on, the Abrahamic and other covenants played a vital role in unifying the "raw materials" of the Old Testament that were created independently of each other.

Concerning the evolution of the written TANAK, the discussion is less complicated. Essentially, there are two major milestones important to the understanding of how the written Hebrew bible came into existence. The first milestone occurred during the reign of King David when a massive inscription program was begun that resulted in the first systematic compilation of the raw materials that were part of the Hebrews’ extensive oral tradition. While most of these written documents have either deteriorated or have been lost, the program started by King David initiated a process of collecting materials from the vast inventory of spoken lore and putting them into print manuscripts. These initial manuscripts did not bear much resemblance to today’s Old Testament because their contents were not accompanied with book titles like Genesis or Exdous. Nor were the words divided by spaces or the script separated into paragraphs and chapters. (Also, ancient Hebrew was written from right to left, the opposite direction of our current writing system.) Through the process of editing and redacting existing texts and adding new material, the first written documents would eventually mature into the Holy Scriptures with which we are now familiar.

As far as milestones go, the unthinkable destruction of the Temple and the dreadful imposition of the Babylonian exile served as the background for the greatest writing period of the Old Testament. During this deportment, most of the documents we now recognize took shape. The raw materials referred to above were redacted and added to contemporary writings to form the yet un-named TANAK. Prior to the writings produced during the exile, there were no recognizable five books of Moses, no identifiable collections of documents of the prophets or no hymnbook that contained 150 psalms as we now have. Some of the books in our current bibles may have been created prior to the exile, but it was either during or immediately after the exile that they were updated or modified into the individual books that we are familiar with currently.

In light of the complications discussed above, it is really nothing short of a miracle that we have a TANAK (or Old Testament). Generally, most editors or authors conceptualize the book they intend to create prior to commencing the actual development of that book. In the case of the Jewish religious leaders who decided on the final canon of the TANAK, they did not have the "luxury" of first conceptualizing and then gathering the materials for their book. Instead, they inherited an existing collection of written works created by unconnected persons over the span of 1,000 years from which they had to select books to be added to their bible. With several covenants to serve as their overall theological standard, (the Abrahamic covenant being chief among them), they somehow managed to sort through countless documents and settle on the components of the TANAK and the Old Testament as we know them today.

Oral Tradition

The Setting: Around 800 BCE, Aviel, a young boy in a story-telling clan rebels against his family’s profession. After storming off from a storytelling session being led by his father, Aviel encounters an elderly man from the village who shares some unknown and exciting information about Aviel’s father.

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Unable to sit silently while his father rambled on about