Summary: Most people believe that Moses wrote the first five books of the Old Testament, and that prophets of God wrote the other thirty-four books. However, that is not entirely true. This article examines the history of how we came to have the books of the Old Testament as found in our Bible, and it is not what most people have come to believe.

Most people know where the books of the New Testament came from, but how did we get the books of the Old Testament? That’s a story most people are not familiar with..

In the year 640 B.C. a man named Josiah became the king of Judah at the age of eight. He was a righteous man but his father, Amon, and his grandfather, Mannassah were evil kings. In the book of 2 Chronicles we read that in the eighth year of his reign, Josiah “began to seek the God of his father, [King] David.” What led him to do this, we’re not told, but in his twelfth year as king, he began to rid his kingdom of anything associated with the worship of Baal. This included getting rid of their priests, soothsayers, mediums, and magicians, as well as tearing down their shrines, altars, and statues throughout his kingdom (2 Chronicles 34:1-3). At the same time, he began a restoration of Solomon’s temple that had not only fallen into disrepair but was also being used as a place to worship false gods.

He ordered Hilkiah, the High Priest, to renovate and restore Solomon’s Temple to its former beauty and glory, and it was while he was clearing the treasure room of the Temple that Hilkiah discovered a scroll described in 2 Kings 22:8 as “a scroll of the Teaching” and in 2 Chronicles 34:14 as “the book of the Law of the LORD that had been given (written) by Moses.”

The scroll was taken to the king and “when the king had heard the words of the book of the law, that he rent his clothes.” The reason why is because he discovered that the words contained in this book told how great the wrath of God was towards those who do not do according to all that is written therein (2 Kings 22:11,13).

This book is not identified in our Bible but the consensus among biblical scholars is that this was a copy of the Book of Deuteronomy. This book is considered to be the farewell address that Moses gave to his people shortly before he died, and in it, he reviews the law that God gave to him on Mount Sinai, which contains much more than just the Ten Commandments. This book also contains blessings from God for keeping his law, and it contains curses upon those who don’t.

Despite all the religious reforms Josiah had already implemented, after hearing what was in this newly discovered scroll, he realized how much more needed to be done to restore his people to following the law of God if they were to avoid the curses the law outlined. By now, Josiah had been king over Judah for eighteen years (he was now 26 years old), when he began to radically change the way his people worshipped God, and those changes were based on what was contained in the Book of Deuteronomy.

One of the criticisms of the Book of Mormon is that when Lehi first left Jerusalem to live in the wilderness, we read that he built an altar and offered a sacrifice to God (1 Nephi 2:7). Critics claim this proves that the Book of Mormon is false because sacrifices were only allowed to be made at the temple in Jerusalem.

However, one of the changes Josiah made was to decree that all sacrifices were to be made only at the temple in Jerusalem. What made this decree particularly interesting is that throughout the historical books of the Old Testament we read of sacrifices that were made by prophets or holy men of God in places other than in Jerusalem, which is what Lehi did.

Then why did Josiah make this rule? Scholars feel that many of Josiah’s changes were not only for religious reasons but for political as well. In his effort to unify his country under his rule, and insure that pagan worship was abolished, Josiah passed a law stating that sacrifices could only be offered in the temple at Jerusalem. This was not a law contained in the law of Moses but was a law instituted by King Josiah.

Lehi was living in Jerusalem during this time and was an eyewitness to all these changes, and he was there when Josiah died and his son, Jehoiachin, became king in 608 BC. The prophet Jeremiah was one of the king’s counselors and from the scriptures we’re told that King Jehoiachin “did evil in the sight of the Lord” (2 Kings 24:19-20; Jeremiah 52:2-3). Worse, he undid many of the reforms his father had instituted and reintroduced the worship of Baal.

Eleven years later, in 597 B/C. King Nebuchadnezzar attacked the city of Jerusalem and had King Jehoiachin put to death. He then selected Jehoiachin’s uncle, Mattaniah, whose name he changed to Zedekiah, and made him king over the Jews (2 Kings 24:17). But three years before any of this happened, Lehi had already fled Jerusalem with his family and wasn’t there when the Babylonian army first came.

Zedekiah was a puppet king, who could do only what Nebuchadnezzar allowed him, and that included paying a very large tribute or tax to Babylon each year. However, in time Zedekiah decided to stop paying the tribute. This angered Nebuchadnezzar, who attacked Jerusalem again in 587 B.C., except this time he destroyed the entire city. He killed the entire royal family of King Zedikiah, then after he had put the king’s eyes out, he took him to the city of Babylon in chains, paraded him through the streets in a victory celebration, and kept him in prison until he died.

Nebuchadnezzar also killed tens of thousands of Jews and took tens of thousands more back to Babylon as slaves, leaving Jerusalem in complete ruins and desolate. He then sent other people to live in this area, who later became known as Samaritans.

Seventy years later, a small group of devout Jews who had continued living the law of Moses as best they could, longed to return to their homeland, and under the new kings, Cyrus and Darius, they were able to go back to Jerusalem. The first thing they did when they arrived under the direction of a man named Zerubbabel was to rebuild the temple, which later became known as Zerubbabel’s Temple. Later they built the walls around the city,

The priests who came back were those who were dedicated to following Yahweh, and that included following the law as described in the Book of Deuteronomy. For this reason, they are known as Deuteronomists. Since their city had been destroyed, and since they wanted to have something their people could read and study about God’s law and how it pertained to their history, they took the records that had been kept and made an abridged version for their people to read. This included the books from Genesis through Daniel, with the exceptions of the prophets Nehemiah, Isaiah, Jeremiah (including his Lamentations), and Ezekiel

We know this happened for three reasons. The first is that the books we have in our Bible are written in the third person, meaning they tell us the story about Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and the kings of Israel rather than us reading what these people wrote about themselves.

Secondly, these stories take us up to and including the Babylonian captivity which indicates they had to have been written after that time. Thirdly, and most importantly, as we read stories in these books, we then read, “And the rest of what they did are written in…” and then they would give the name of another book that contains more of the story we just read.

For example, we read, “Now the acts of David the king, first and last, behold, they are written in the book of Samuel the seer, and in the book of Nathan the prophet, and in the book of Gad the seer” (1 Chronicles 29:29). ‘And the rest of the acts of Abijah, and his ways, and his sayings, are written in the story of the prophet Iddo. (2 Chronicles 13:22). What this shows is that whoever wrote the books of Genesis through Daniel were getting their information from other sources that they then rewrote in their own words. This is why what we have in our Bible is actually an abridgment of the original records.

The other sources they mention include the Book of the Wars of the Lord (Numbers 21:14), the Book of the prophet Nathan, the Book of the prophet Gad (1 Chronicles 29:29), the Book of the prophet Iddo , the Acts of the prophet Abijah (2 Chronicles 13:22), and the Book of Jehu the son of Hanani (2 Chronicles 24:34).

In addition to these, they also had access to the actual writings that Moses, Joshua, and Samuel wrote, as well as the fuller accounts of the reign of all their kings. For example, in 1 Samuel 10:24-25 we read that after Samuel presented Saul to the Israelites as their king, “Then Samuel told the people the manner of the kingdom, and wrote it in a book, and laid it up before the LORD.”

Samuel not only showed the people who God had appointed to be their king, but he wrote down in a book the manner in which the kingdom should operate. Here is a prophet of God who wrote a book about the proper way to govern a kingdom yet this book is not in our Bible. Considering that all Christians accept the words of Samuel as coming from God, it should be extremely important to know what God had to say about this subject, but that knowledge that God once gave to man is now missing.

These are the books we know about that the ancient scribes had access to and from which they wrote their abridged version of Israelite history. It is safe to say that they had other books available to them that are not mentioned in our Bible, but today all these original sources are completely lost to us.

In our Western culture, we try to write history as objectively as possible (although that is technically impossible because the bias of the writer is always present). But in ancient times, their telling of history could be classified as being more like propaganda. We see this in the way the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans wrote their histories, where they viewed everything from their own biased perspective.

The Deuteronomists who wrote what we have in our current Bible did the same thing, mostly because this is how history was always written back then. Since they believed in following the law as taught by Moses as contained in the Book of Deuteronomy, this is the perspective through which they viewed everything. Therefore, when they made an abridged record of their history, they wrote it through the eyes of their own bias. We also have to remember that the purpose of them making this history was to persuade their people to follow the Lord their God. This was the same reason Nephi gave for writing his small plates (1 Nephi 19:18).

As a result, they were the ones who decided what to put in their historical narrative and what to leave out. One of the criticisms made against the Book of Mormon is that it talks about the prophets Lehi, Zenock, and Zenos, yet these prophets are not mentioned in the Bible. Therefore, it is claimed that these prophets must not have existed. However, as we just saw, the Deuteronomists chose not to include books that had been written by prophets such as Nathan, Gad, Iddo, Abijah, Ahijah, and Jehu. It seems perfectly reasonable to assume there were other prophets besides these who were not mentioned in the historical record the Deuteronomists made.

The question this raises is, if there were prophets of God who wrote books, then why were some included in the writings of the Deuteronomists and why were some left out? We will never know the answer to that question with certainty, but there are clues that give us a strong indication.

There is archaeological evidence to suggest that before Jerusaem fell, that the Israelites believed in a plurality of gods. For example, there is Elohim, who is the head god, and there was Yahweh his Son. They also believed in a mother in heaven, who they referred to as the Queen of Heaven. From what scholars have been able to determine, one of the changes that Josiah made, and which was strictly enforced was the idea that his people were to worship one God, who was known as Yahweh (or Jehovah as we would say today).

The reason is because the law of Moses said there is only one God, therefore, the Deuteronomists combined Elohim and Yahweh together, saying they were the same being, and in their version of Israelite history, they eliminated any reference to the Queen of Heaven, claiming this was a false belief.

When the resurrected Jesus was talking with two of his disciples as they traveled to the village of Emmaus, they told him they didn’t understand how Jesus could die if he was the Messiah, “Then he (Jesus) said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:25-27).

The Jews were looking forward to the coming of their Messiah because their scriptures said he was coming, but as much as they studied the writings of the prophets, they didn’t find anything about him suffering and dying. Was this because this didn’t fit with what the Deuteronomists believed about the Messiah and so they either eliminated those prophecies, thinking they had to be false, or made subtle changes to the text to make it fit with what they believed?

In the Book of Mormon, we see prophecies made by Zenock and Zenos that speak more clearly about the coming of the Messiah. What we know is that the Old Testament writings that Lehi had, as contained on the brass plates, had been written before the fall of Jerusalem and therefore had not been altered by the Deuteronomists.

Critics of this theory argue that scholars have a considerable amount of ancient Hebrew scripture available to prove that nothing has been removed or left out from the original writings, however this is a gross misstating of the facts. First, any writings we have that date back to before the birth of Jesus are only very small fragments that contain very little writing on them. This is hardly “evidence” that nothing has been left out. Most of the fuller texts we have date back to no earlier than the fifth century A.D.

However, we do have scriptures found among the Dead Sea Scrolls that have complete texts of many of the Old Testament books, and some of them do indeed contain more information than what is found in our Bible. But more than this, these books have been dated to have been written around 200 B.C. The Deuteronomists wrote their books before 500 B.C., more than 300 years earlier. Without any Hebrew scriptures available to us dating that far back, we cannot verify how much the original texts differed from the version written by the Deuteronomists.

But there is evidence that shows that these two texts are not exactly the same. One such evidence is where the Book of Mormon records Old Testament scripture that is worded slightly different from what is in our Bible, or the Joseph Smith translation differs from what is in our Bible.
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One such example is found in the Book of Genesis. In our Bible we read, “And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart” (Genesis 6:6), but in Joseph Smith’s inspired translation it reads, “And it repented Noah, and his heart was pained that the LORD made man on the earth, and it grieved him at the heart” (Genesis 8:13). And there are many other examples like this that could be cited.

Critics say that such changes found in the Book of Mormon or made by Joseph Smith are proof they are false because they contradict what the Bible says, but the history of the Deuteronomists undermines that objection.

It’s true that not all biblical scholars agree with this understanding of how we got the Bible, but those who disagree with it the most are those who consider themselves to be Evangelical Protestants because they believe that the Bible we have today is the inerrant word of God. To them, every word in our current Bible is the exact word God intended to be written and believe that God’s Spirit was watching over every translation into every language to make sure that they all contained the exact words God wanted used.

To support this theory, they cite the words of Jesus who said that not even one jot or title of God’s word will be lost or altered. Therefore, they reject the idea that the Deuteronomists altered the Bible. However, the evidence for the Deuteronomistic reforms is compelling, and has become the accepted consensus among most biblical scholars.

From the very beginning of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they have maintained that the Book of Mormon is the word of God, that the Bible is also the word of God but only as far as it has been correctly translated, and that many plain and precious parts of the gospel of Jesus Christ have been taken out of the original record. These claims have been mocked by traditional Christianity, but they now seem much more believable in light of the history of the Deuteronomists.

 

Related articles can be found at The Nature of Mormonism