Adapted from “The Holy Scriptures: God’s Word, Written in Human Words,” an updated version of Herman Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith, trans. Henry Zylstra (Eerdmans, 1956), chapter 7.
Have you ever imagined the Bible arriving all at once, bound and complete, dropped from heaven in a single moment? It didn’t happen that way. Once we see that God’s Spirit worked through the real minds and lives of the people who wrote Scripture, we can also do full justice to the human side of the Bible. And that human side has a fascinating story to tell.
Not Delivered in an Instant
The Bible did not come down to us complete and whole in an instant of time. It grew up gradually.
The Old Testament as we have it contains thirty-nine books. Five are books of law, twelve are historical (from Joshua to Esther), five are poetical (from Job to the Song of Solomon), and seventeen are prophetical.
That order isn’t chronological. Many historical books, such as Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther, are much later than many of the poetical and prophetical books. And among the prophets, many of the shorter books, like Joel, Obadiah, Amos and Hosea, are older than the longer books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. The order is based on the nature of the content, not on dates.
All of these books came into being gradually, over the course of many centuries, in very different circumstances, through the labour of very different men.
Good Study, Bad Reputation
There is a special branch of theology that investigates the circumstances in which each book of the Bible came about: who wrote it, to whom it was written, and so on. Because of the way this study has been abused, it has a bad name. We’ve probably all heard it said that “higher criticism” has systematically torn page after page out of the Bible.
But the abuse of a thing doesn’t make its proper use evil. If we want to understand the Scriptures as a whole and in their parts, it really matters to know how gradually the Bible came into being and in what circumstances each book arose. In the long run, that knowledge can only help us interpret God’s Word. It shows us that the inspiration of the Spirit of God reached deeply and broadly into the life and thought of the holy men of God.
The abuse of a thing does not make its use an evil.
Life Before Scripture
For centuries, right up to the time of Moses, there was no Scripture, no written record of the Word of God. At least, we know of none.
Of course, it’s by no means impossible that some written report of an important word or event existed before Moses, something significant in the history of special revelation that Moses later took up and preserved in his books.
Not so long ago, suggesting that would have been called folly, because people assumed writing wasn’t known in Moses’ day. But discoveries in Babylonia and Egypt have changed that picture. We now know that writing was known long before Moses and was widely used. We know of events and laws written down hundreds of years before him. So it’s not at all unreasonable to say that Moses may have used older written sources for his history and law. The account in Genesis 14, for example, might well rest on a written tradition.
God’s Word Passed Down the Generations
Still, we can’t be certain of that. So in general we can say that before Moses there was no written Word of God.
But there was a Word of God. Special revelation began immediately after the fall. God spoke to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. So, in that way, before we had God’s word in written form, there was already a canon, a rule of faith and life. Humanity has never been without God’s Word. From the very beginning, people had not only the general revelation of God in nature and conscience, but also special revelation in word and history.
That Word simply wasn’t written down straight away. It was handed on orally within families and generations, from parents to children. In those early days the earth’s population was small, people enjoyed long lives, and blood ties, family feeling and respect for the past meant far more than they do now. In that setting, oral handing-down was enough to preserve God’s Word in its purity and to spread it.
Moses Picks Up the Pen
Later, as people spread out over the earth and fell into all kinds of idolatry and superstition, oral tradition was no longer enough. It is Moses who begins the recording of the Word of God.
He may have included earlier written reports. We can’t be sure, though it becomes more likely when we notice that only a very few passages in the five books of Moses actually mention Moses himself writing.1Ex. 17:14; 24:4, 7; 34:27; Num. 33:2; and Deut. 31:9, 22.
So it’s quite possible that parts of the five books existed in some form before Moses; that Moses revised them himself or had others do so at his direction; or that, after his death, some portions were edited in his spirit and manner and added to what already existed. People have long accepted this about the account of Moses’ death (Deut. 34). It should also be extended to additional material such as Genesis 12:6b; 13:7; 36:31b, and similar passages. These give explanations of the historical circumstances, which some later readers were experiencing directly, like the existence and reign of Israel’s kings
Does that undermine the Bible’s authority? Not at all. It takes nothing away from the divine authority of the Word, and it fits perfectly well with Scripture’s repeated phrase “the law, or the book of Moses.”21 Kings 2:3; 2 Kings 14:6; Mal. 4:4; Mark 12:26; Luke 24:27, 44; and John. The five books remain Moses’ book even if some parts came from other sources, were written down by his officers at his direction, or were edited in his spirit by those who came after.
We see the same pattern elsewhere. Paul usually didn’t write his letters with his own hand but had them written by someone else (1 Cor. 16:21; cf. Rom. 16:22). And the whole book of Psalms is sometimes credited to David because he is the founder of psalmody, even though a number of the psalms were written by others.
The Bible grew, patiently and gradually, over centuries. And every step of that growth was part of God’s way of giving us his written Word.