I said it was more challenging to visualize dynamic forces effecting written history. Why? Because systems of writing developed after systems of speech. Speech is invisible. Thoughts are invisible. When two or three people are sharing their thoughts with each other, they inadvertently have formed a dynamic situation which has an invisible, though a felt. force about it. That’s the dynamic force I’m takling about. Speech is a shared activity. Ideas are shared. Writing systems are shared too. Why would a person care about writing something down, if it were not to be shared?
But the earliest writing system, cuniform, was developed about 6,000 years ago more or less in Mesopotamia. Cuneiform was replaced by alphabetic writing sometime after the first century A.D. I looked it up. Languages evolved and over time many have disappeared. Modern languages are either adapting or they are dying out. I remember a manmade language called Esperanto back in the day. It never got a wide acceptance and nothing came of it.
But speech came before writing. Why? Google answers this way: “Humans used the spoken word to express their complex thoughts long before they developed writing systems. Support for this comes from the fact that many languages still exist today without a system of writing, yet no writing system exists without a connection to a spoken language.”
Here’s another question: When was the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament written? “The answer is complicated because the OT is not a single book—it’s a library. In addition, even within that library, the books themselves are not ‘books’ in the modern sense, but composite texts which themselves weave together both oral and written traditions—sometimes gathered together over centuries.”
Can you imagine yourself as a Hebrew priest in exile in Babylon in 586 B.C.? The priests back then wanted to tell their story. Their history. And they wanted the pieces of their who’s-who-puzzle – The Prophets, The Law, and such – in writing. The accomplishment of their masterpiece is not to be dismissed nor discarded. Not at all. But it’s complicated because their story, like the stories of others who wrote down their religious/religion story, with all good intensions to convey their best understandings of themselves, their people, their worldview, their beliefs and their values, could have erred somewhere in the telling. Would they actually and intentionally distort their story to suit their own purposes?
The destruction of the Hebrew nation and their captivity in Mesopotamia would have proved of great benefit to their expanding theology had it not been for the determined action of their priesthood. Their nation had fallen before the armies of Babylon, and their nationalistic Yahweh had suffered from the international preachments of the spiritual leaders. It was resentment of the loss of their national god that led the Jewish priests to go to such lengths in the invention of fables and the multiplication of miraculous appearing events in Hebrew history in an effort to restore the Jews as the chosen people of even the new and expanded idea of an internationalized God of all nations.
