NARRATOR: The Holy Bible, a
compilation of 66 books divided into two separate testaments. In its standard English
version, almost 800,000 words-- words of enduring
value, the cornerstone of our laws, ethics, moral
code, and the fountainhead of faith for nearly half
the population of the world. WOMAN: Now these are the
commandments, the statutes, and the judgments, which
the Lord, your God, commanded to teach you,
that ye might do them in the land whither ye go. Deuteronomy 6:1. NARRATOR: Said to
contain the word of God, the Bible is a book of
inspiration, of immense beauty, wisdom, and compassion. It has been translated into
almost every language on Earth. Yet, its origins are
shrouded in obscurity. We know little of
its compilation. Are the words of God undiluted? Have they come down to us
in their original form, as first uttered by the divine? And who was it
who first set down the eternal words in writing? Some people tend to have
the idea that the King James version of the Bible dropped
down from heaven one day and oh, there's the Bible. The Bible is a library. And libraries get built
only over long, long years and centuries. It's the product of a
whole community of people, of men and women. And they're spread apart
by about 1,000 years, from the earliest word
in the Hebrew Bible to the last word in
the Hebrew Bible. Now that's extraordinary. I would agree with many of
the Jewish rabbis who believe that the Old
Testament scriptures, particularly the law of Moses
and so on, are so spiritually unabridged that no human mind
can ever comprehend everything that God has written in it. NARRATOR: The Bible
embodies a detailed record of human history, bridging two
of the world's greatest faiths. The New Testament enshrines the
story of the one called Jesus. Yet even that telling
is cloaked in mystery. We do not know where any
of the gospels were written or when they were written or
by whom they were written. Those are all things that
we have to conjecture. How do we have this document,
this group of texts really, that have been written
at different places at different times
by different people? Why were they drawn together? Because as we study them and
understand them historically, we see that they come from
the most disparate groups who cannot possibly have agreed
with each other on things. So why were they ever
gathered all together? NARRATOR: Is the
origin of the Bible as indefinable as the
emergence of religion itself, as old as humankind's
earliest quest for the divine? Are we able to identify those
who handed the book of books down to us? The clues to
unlocking the riddle may be hidden within
these ancient texts. But for each discovery made,
for every answer found, a new question arises, forever
compelling scholars to probe the mystery of who
wrote the Bible. [music playing] The people who once walked this
ancient land bequeathed to us a timeless legacy-- the Holy Bible. The book we know today may have
been the result of a fusion of stories, ideas,
traditions, and chronologies, woven together over a span
of 1,000 years or more, encompassing the period
between the exodus from Egypt and the life of Christ. The Bible is the world's
perennial bestseller, with close on 100 million
new copies printed each year. To trace its
lineage is to embark on an extraordinary journey. But understandably, it is a
quest not without controversy, for some of our deepest and
most passionate convictions are intertwined with this book,
held to be sacred by so many. What proportion of the Bible
contains the sacred word of God, and how much of it
is the work of mortal mind? Do the stories cross the
boundaries separating legend from history? Are all the original books
still within the Bible? Or have any of the
ancient texts been lost? These are questions that
have puzzled the scholar. But the heroic deeds of ordinary
men and women, a pageantry of prophets, priests,
villains, heroes, and kings, who played a role in
creating the Bible, are separated from us by an
immeasurable period of time. Only their ghosts
and echoes linger. To trace their path, our journey
of discovery into the origins of both the Old and
the New Testaments begins here in the Middle East. The region still
holds many secrets of those long gone days. But the landscape
is frustratingly silent on the mystery of
how the most revered book in human history
came to be written. Occasionally, the sands
yield a tiny piece of a puzzle that
sheds some light on the biblical narrative. But it is to the
texts themselves that the scholar must turn to
learn how and when the Bible came to be. Locked within these
words are the answers to the origin of the holy book. The task is a difficult one. Centuries of
translation and editing may have left us
with little semblance of the original writings,
especially regarding the oldest of the Bible's
books, the Pentateuch, known as the Hebrew Torah or
the five books of Moses. Moses is said to have received
the holy words from God here on Mount Sinai, during
the exodus from Egypt. The Bible tells us that
Moses himself wrote them down and passed them
on to the people. WOMAN: And Moses wrote this
law and delivered it unto the priests, the
sons of Levi, which bear the Ark of the Covenant
of the Lord and unto all the elders of Israel. Deuteronomy 31:9. LAWRENCE SCHIFFMAN:
Religious tradition has taught us that God
revealed it to Moses at Sinai. And yet, no matter how much
we grapple with the problem, it's very hard not to see some
aspect of human interference or intervention or
perhaps literary activity in this massive set of texts
that we call the Torah. The Torah itself
never exactly claims that Moses wrote all of it. There's a section that says
Moses wrote down these words, but it never says, and all
the other words in this book. The belief originated in
pre-rabbinic and rabbinic times, the first couple
of centuries BCE, for lots of reasons, not
the least of which was you can't establish the authority
of a book any better than saying God wrote it. NARRATOR: The question of
who wrote the Bible has often prompted a defensive response
from church and synagogue. From a traditional
viewpoint, the holy texts are sacrosanct words imparted
or inspired by the divine. Understandably,
even now, to many, the authorship of the
Bible remains beyond doubt. We believe that the Torah was
written by the hand of Moses, but dictated to him by God
himself in a totally divine manner, no different than
you would dictate a letter to a secretary. JERRY FALWELL: God
could have used angels. God could have
written it himself. God could have spoken
it into a written form. He chose, being the omnivident,
omniscient, omnipresent one, to use human beings since
his message is to man. Therefore, whether Moses writing
the Pentateuch, or Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
writing the gospels, or any of the 40 men and
women who were instrumental, each of them, under divine
inspiration, wrote verbatim-- totally verbatim,
as God instructed-- but through their
own personality. NARRATOR: It is believed that
the communal campfire was the stage around which the
first biblical stories were transmitted. Histories and genealogies were
passed down by word of mouth, told and retold many times. Epic sagas of conflict,
deliverance, and redemption were reenacted, with
accounts of ancestral contact with the divine conveyed
verbally from generation to generation. The Bible is divided into
two distinct sections. The first is the so-called Old
Testament or the Hebrew Bible. In it are the five
Books of Moses from Genesis
through Deuteronomy, also known as the Law. Next are the history
books or the prophets, including Joshua, Judges,
Samuel, and Kings. Finally, there are
the writings which include the Book of Psalms,
Proverbs, Lamentations, and Chronicles-- 39 works in all. The New Testament,
the texts that deal with the life and
teachings of Jesus Christ, comprise 27 books, divided
into the four gospels-- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John-- and the acts of the
Apostles and the Letters, and finally, the
Book of Revelation. But these are not the
only religious texts. They are merely those that were
canonized or accepted as worthy of inclusion in the Bible
by various ecclesiastical authorities throughout
the centuries. A volume of books
known as the Apocrypha is sometimes included as
an addendum to the Bible. These books, encompassing
prophecies, poems, and histories, were at one time
included in the Hebrew Bible, but were dropped from
the official canon just before the Christian era. Any quest for
original authorship should begin with the foundation
of the entire structure. So the focus has invariably
been on the earliest texts on the Pentateuch, the
first five books of Moses. As scholars began to
plumb the rich depth of the biblical narrative,
astonishing patterns began to emerge. Clearly, the text seemed
to contain a multitude of different writing styles. Could they be the work of
many minds, many authors, many contributors? If so, who were they? And is it possible
that the word of God is being revealed in
all of their versions, a gradual revelation
still going on. NARRATOR: When Muhammad
edh-Dhib, a young Arab boy in search of a lost goat,
stumbles across a dusty cache of pottery jars in a
cave near Qumran in 1947, he stuns the world. This is the oldest and most
fabulous biblical treasure ever found-- the Dead Sea Scrolls. The discovery of the
library on the Dead Sea, of all of this material which we
call Dead Sea Scrolls, has been crucial to our understanding of
the Bible and the nature of it and who wrote it and when
and how and why and what. Because this library revealed
a piece at least of every book in the Bible, except Esther,
in a manuscript which was 1,000 years older than
the oldest Hebrew manuscript we ever had. NARRATOR: Now housed in
Jerusalem Shrine of the Book, the scrolls were written
during an era that spanned the last 300 years of Judaism
before the destruction of its holiest place,
the Great Temple. They speak of a coming schism
that would splinter the faith into opposing factions. Compelling and
evocative, the scrolls were written at the time that a
new religion, Christianity, was being born. Much of the literature
contained within the scrolls may well have been
known to Jesus himself. WOMAN: Do not take riches
from a man you do not know, lest it only add
to your poverty. If God has ordained that you
should die in your poverty, so he has appointed it. But do not corrupt your
spirit because of it. Dead Sea Scroll number 4Q416. NARRATOR: Between 1947
and 1960, 11 caves yielded a total of 800 scrolls
and an abundance of manuscript fragments from where
they had lain undisturbed for 2,000 years. Written on parchment
and papyrus, a diverse range of text
appears among the scrolls. Most are written in Hebrew,
but there is a smattering of Greek and Aramaic. 127 of the documents
represent canonized texts, the same as those
appearing in modern bibles. But many of the scrolls
contain passages that are new and unfamiliar to scholars. A few of the documents
appear as many as 19 times, written by different scribes,
indicating that the collection may have been assembled
from a variety of sources. We have discovered
that there were in circulation different
manuscripts of the same book. The Book of Samuel is
better than the book which we have--
longer, more detailed. The Book of Jeremiah is worse-- shorter and more confused. So the general rule is
that the Dead Sea Scrolls have encouraged us to accept
the validity of the text-- the Hebrew text which we have,
but to acknowledge the fact that there were other
texts in circulation. NARRATOR: Were the scrolls
based on even earlier, more ancient writings? And who collected them in this
remote and barren wilderness, and why? The answer may lie here in the
nearby settlement of Qumran. It was once occupied by a
reclusive Jewish sect known as the Essenes. The word "Essene"
comes from Aramaic, meaning pious or healer. The sect had broken away from
the mainstream of Judaism about a century and a half
before the Jews' fateful war with the Romans. Choosing to live an
isolated life in the desert, they dedicated themselves
to religious worship in anticipation of a
long awaited messiah, even as Jesus was about to
make his entrance into history. Deeply pacifistic, the Essenes
were most likely responsible for hiding the scrolls. But why? Scholars have searched the
ruins in vain for answers. Did the sect believed that the
Romans would destroy the temple in Jerusalem and therefore
brought its holy documents to Qumran for safekeeping? Perhaps not. For as the texts
were translated, it became clear that the Essenes
and the Jerusalem priests were not in agreement
with one another on fundamental religious issues. WOMAN: Mixing is forbidden
because the people are holy and the sons of Aaron
are the holy of holies. Nevertheless, as you know, some
of the priests and the people are mixing. They are into marrying
and thereby polluting the holy seed. Dead Sea Scroll number 4Q398. NARRATOR: The most unusual
manuscript in the collection is a copper scroll
found in cave number 3. It lists 64 locations of
buried treasure in the area. But nothing has ever been found. MICHAEL WISE: It appears that
the copper scroll was written on copper, rather than
on leather like all the other scrolls or papyrus,
for the reason that it was a treasure list, a
document from the temple. And documents from the temple--
that is, official documents-- often were written on copper
to judge from parallels in other temples. NARRATOR: Since the scrolls were
buried at the time the Romans finally destroyed the
temple, some scholars have speculated that
the people who hid them may also have been responsible
for hiding the temple treasures and religious artifacts. But this, too, is unlikely
due to the deep division between the Essenes and
the Jerusalem priests. While providing tantalizing
insight into the politics of the time, the
scrolls say surprisingly little about who wrote them or
who hid them in these soaring cliffs. MICHAEL WISE: I think
the scrolls were probably put in the caves by a group of
people who expected to return and get them at the
time of the great war with Iran, which
went from '66 to '70. It's probably the case
that only a few people knew where they were. There are hundreds
and hundreds of caves to be seen in the area where
the scrolls were found. And it cannot have been a common
knowledge which ones contained these great treasures. So that once you had the
keys perished probably at the hands of the Romans. NARRATOR: Buried when Jesus
walked the holy land, preaching a new view of the world, just
before a war in which Rome almost annihilated
the people of Israel, the scrolls preserved
in the caves of Qumran offer a few clues
about their authors. But they have provided dramatic
insight into the diverse range of texts that existed long
before the holy scriptures were compiled into the single work
we now know as the Bible. Almost 1,000 years
ago, it was first noticed that there were
seemingly contradictory passages in the text of the
first five books of Moses. Many words were ascribed to
Moses, but unlikely to have been written by him. WOMAN: So Moses, the
servant of the Lord, died there in the land
of Moab, according to the word of the Lord. And he buried him in a
valley in the land of Moab. Deuteronomy 34:5. NARRATOR: Scholars have argued
that if Moses was the author of the book of
Deuteronomy, how could it have been possible
for him to have written about his own death? LAWRENCE SCHIFFMAN: The problem
of how Moses could have been the one who recorded
and passed on the Torah and then it turns out to
describe his own death was already raised by the sages. And they simply answered by
giving two possibilities-- one, that Moses did indeed
write of his own death while crying as he
wrote, and second of all, that those versus of
the Torah were written by his faithful servant
and his successor, Joshua. NARRATOR: But there were
even more puzzling sections in the texts, some of them as
early as the Book of Genesis. WOMAN: And of every living thing
of all flesh, two of every sort shout thou bring into the ark
to keep them alive with thee. They shall be male and female. Genesis 6:19. NARRATOR: That excerpt
is from the story of Noah and the flood. Just a few sentences
father, there is this surprising discrepancy,
quoting a different number of animals to be
taken into the ark. WOMAN: Of every clean
beast thou shall take to thee by sevens,
the male and his female, and of beasts that
are not clean by two, the male and his female. Genesis 7:2. NARRATOR: Was it two
of each kind of animal or seven of each clean animal? The texts contain
other oddities. There are numerous examples
of the same story told twice, sometimes with
conflicting details. Scholars have long referred
to these as doublets. There are two separate accounts
of the creation of the world, two versions of the
covenant made between God and the patriarch Abraham,
and even two distinct versions of Moses obtaining water
from a rock at a place called Meribah
during the exodus. In most instances of
these so-called doublets, the two versions of the
story each referred to God by a different name. In the Hebrew text,
sometimes the deity is referred to as Elohim, the
usual Hebrew reference to God. But in the alternative
version, the term used is often Yahweh, or Lord. For centuries, scholars have
puzzled over the appearance of these distinct differences. The key piece of
evidence in this is that different kinds of
clues converged with each other so that you have
doublets of stories. That proves nothing. You have different names of God. That proves nothing. But when all the
doublets of stories line up into two groups, one
of which uses one name of God and one uses the other
name of God consistently, then that's strong evidence
that something is going on. NARRATOR: By the early
half of the 19th century, many scholars were convinced
that the five books of Moses were written by three
separate authors. The writer of the version
which referred to God as Yahweh was named J, because early
European translators were ignorant of the correct
pronunciation of Hebrew names. Many inadvertently
referred to the name of God as Jehovah, instead of Yahweh. And ironically,
the name has stuck. The author of those texts
referring to God as Elohim was named E. A third writer
was identified as P. This author was
thought to be a priest and wrote in a different
style to J and E. His passages seemed to
be especially concerned with stories of the
establishment of the priesthood after the people of
Israel left Egypt. All these texts are
written in Hebrew, but in a different stage of
Hebrew that we can identify. And each has its
own favorite terms, words that occur 50 times in
P, but never occur in E or J, that sort of thing. And each has its own style. NARRATOR: The differences are
immediately obvious in Hebrew, the language in which the
text was originally written. The disparities
virtually disappear in their English translation. But this example comes
from the Book of Exodus. The text relates how God appears
to Moses in a burning bush. The passage was written by J,
who, in Hebrew, refers to God as Yahweh or Lord. WOMAN: And the angel
of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire
out of the midst of a bush. And he looked and, behold,
the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. Exodus 3:2. NARRATOR: When the E writer
discusses Moses confronting the burning bush, the name
used for the deity is now only Elohim-- God. WOMAN: Moreover, he said,
I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face, for he
was afraid to look upon God. Exodus 3:6. NARRATOR: Subtle
though the differences may be, the text clearly
seemed to reflect a compilation of sources. In 1807, the German
theologian Wilhelm [inaudible] announced the discovery of
a possible fourth author. His examination of the texts
indicated that the language, tone, and content of the
entire book of Deuteronomy were the work of a different
person to J, E, or P. Scholars have
since come to refer to this writer by the
name D for Deuteronomist. Over the years, the
authorship theory has come to be known as
the documentary hypothesis. Once you've identified
a text and said, well, I think this is
J, or I think this is E, I think this is P,
I think this is D, then you place it up against
other texts in the Bible where we have some
idea of the date, and see if there's any
development in the language. It's not just that you can tell
the difference between the way I speak English and the
way Shakespeare did. It's that if you heard somebody
who lived in the 18th century, you could tell that that
person was somewhere halfway between Shakespeare and me. So you can see the stages of
biblical Hebrew in growth. NARRATOR: In a stunning
retraction of early church intolerance toward
the hypothesis and the issue of biblical
authorship, in 1943, Pope Pius XII surprises
religious leaders and academics alike by issuing a new edict. He encourages scholars to
fully investigate the question, who wrote the Bible? The directive was heralded as a
magna carta for biblical study, initiating unprecedented
research into the origins of the holy book. The quest would open
up a fascinating window on how the sacred
words of the divine have traversed the centuries. NARRATOR: The Bible is the
central pillar upon which much of Western
civilization has been built. For untold centuries, it has
served as one of humanity's principal guiding beacons. Yet its very origins are now
being called into question. The search for answers
concerning its authorship may seem circuitous, but it will
bring us into direct contact with the signature of a man who
may have written at least one of the five books of Moses. Our quest must go back some
35 centuries to the time when the people of Israel
approached the borders of the promised land. After decades of wandering,
the Hebrews eventually cross the river Jordan
and settle in Canaan. While the Ten Commandments were
constantly in the possession of the people, there may have
been no other religious texts at the time. Though the Bible indicates
that the scrolls of Moses may have accompanied
the Israelites, many scholars believe that the
first five books of the Bible had not yet been written. After the advent of the
monarchy in about 1,000 before the common era, King
David eventually becomes ruler and establishes his new
capital at Jerusalem. It is then that the matter of
authorship re-enters the story. The king breaks with tradition
by appointing two high priests in charge of religious
affairs, instead of one. It's not so strange to
have two high priests. In Israel today, there
are two chief rabbis. The problem is when you have two
chief priests instead of one, each one spends most of his
day sitting there thinking about how to get rid
of the other one. NARRATOR: Not only are
there two high priests, but towards the end of his
reign, two of King David's sons are vying for the throne. It is uncertain which of
them will be appointed the royal successor. A struggle for power ensues, and
this embroils the high priests. Each one supports a
different royal candidate. When David dies,
it is Solomon who is chosen to wear the crown. Now the question
is, will Solomon retain the services
of both priests or return to the traditional
practice of having only one man in charge of the
nation's religious affairs? Not surprisingly, the priest
who was loyal to Solomon during his candidacy is chosen. At the same time, the second
priest is removed from power and banished from the kingdom. WOMAN: And unto
Abiathar the priest said the king, get thee to
Anathoth unto thine own fields, for thou art worthy of death. So Solomon thrust out
Abiathar from being priest under the Lord. 1 Kings 2:26. NARRATOR: Thus the priest
retained by Solomon assumes an exclusive role. He and his assistants would soon
take on new responsibilities as the king begins constructing
the first great temple in Jerusalem. The deposed priest
and his followers enviously watch from
their place of banishment. They are now cut off from
any possible future duties in the new temple. They had no place in the
royal kingdom in Jerusalem. And so a priest of that
priestly house, we think, initiated the rebellion that
ultimately led to the formation of the kingdom of Israel in the
north and the kingdom of Judah in the south. They wanted their own
place where they could get to be the priests as well. NARRATOR: Thus, in 922 BCE,
the 10 northerly tribes sever their allegiance to Jerusalem. And secession splinters
the nation in two-- Israel in the north
and Judah in the south. So two kingdoms born
of a single nation oppose one another
in an uneasy truce. Each had its own king. Each had its own traditions, its
own sacred places of worship. At the same time, we're
talking about a region that's the size of a large
American county. So people were
close to each other. People had relatives
north and south. They both spoke
the same language. And they both had the
same old traditions of ancestors Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, and events in Egypt with Moses,
and events at Mount Sinai. And so it is thought that
each kingdom produced its sacred text, or at
least, that one person living in each kingdom produced
his version of the sacred text. NARRATOR: If this is
so, is it possible that separate
versions of the Bible were taking shape
at the same time? We think that the J material
was first gathered together under King Solomon. It represents Solomon's
attempt to gather up the stories of a people,
to knit them together into a coherent narrative
to tell the story about how the people of Israel
came to be a people. And so it became a
kind of national epic. NARRATOR: In answer to Solomon
and his history of the people of Judah, the people of the
northern kingdom of Israel now begin to amass
their own collection of historical stories. What they want
to do is they want to add to this material that is
more northern in orientation. And so they add material. And we think that this
material is what we call E, because they tend to use
the word Elohim for God. Now we have more somewhat
more sophisticated theological stories. But interestingly
enough, we also have stories that tend to
emphasize the significance of the second son. Many people who read Genesis
notice, how come it's always the second son
that comes out better? Isaac was after Ishmael. You know, Jacob, Cain and Abel. I mean, all of
these stories seem to emphasize the second
son as the important one or the preferred son. It could very well be
that the northern kingdom, after their break, wanted
to emphasize the second son. Because in a sense, they
were the second son. They were the breakaway kingdom. So they wanted to
portray themselves as the preferred of the two. NARRATOR: Unlike the Bible's
favorite second son, however, the kingdom of Israel slips
into the grip of paganism. As time passes, the people
begin to worship Canaanite gods. They would suffer a long
and difficult history under 19 kings, eight of
whom would die violently. Despite the warnings
of prophets, moral decay and corruption
continue to enslave the people. Then, 7 and 1/2 centuries
before the birth of Christ, the prophecies come true. An invading Assyrian army sweeps
in from the north and conquers Israel, forever scattering
the 10 tribes to the winds, never to be seen nor
heard from again. They become the so-called
lost tribes of Israel. WOMAN: Therefore, the Lord
was very angry with Israel and removed them from
out of his sight. There was none left but
the tribe of Judah only. 2 Kings 17:18. NARRATOR: Together with the
small tribe of Benjamin, the southern kingdom
of Judah remains all that is left in the
nation that had once settled the promised land. But an unremitting
spiritual downfall has now gripped Judah, too. Without any consolidated
religious precepts, no laws, no sacred
texts, paganism becomes rife
throughout the land, until King Josiah
takes the throne. He tries to usher in change
by outlawing idol worship and by a return to the holy
covenant made with God at Mount Sinai. Josiah was the young king
who, as soon as he comes to the throne, decides that he
wants to reform the religion of the people towards a
more spiritual attachment to Yahweh, the national god. And so Josiah starts
this campaign of he even cleans up
the temple, and he wants to re-employ the people
in reconstructing the temple, and making it more glorious
and making it more spiritual. Well, along the way,
they discover a book. NARRATOR: While cleaning
out the buildings, the king's high priests
find a scroll somewhere deep within the temple vaults. WOMAN: And Hilkiah
the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe,
I have found a book of the law in the house of the Lord. And Hilkiah gave the book to
the scribe, and he read it. 2 Kings 22:8. RICHARD ELLIOT
FRIEDMAN: The document that Hilkiah is understood
to have read to Josiah on that date is
thought by many of us to be the laws of the
Book of Deuteronomy. They are laws that say you
should worship God in only one place. So Josiah destroys
all the other places. These are laws that say that you
should not have pagan worship, so he destroys idols and removes
pagan worship from his country. He is the king who
follows that law code. It's an extraordinary group of
laws from ritual matters of how to sacrifice to moral matters
of how you should treat one another, that you should
be just, that you shouldn't oppress a widow or
an orphan, that you should take care of the poor. It's an extraordinary
body of laws. NARRATOR: The laws reveal
that the people had deviated from their faith. The author of the book
was clearly writing from that perspective and was
perhaps concerned about where society may be heading. He writes in a very
definite observable style that you can see in
Deuteronomy and see in 2 Kings. And you see it in one
other place in the Bible. It's in the prose of the
Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. And so I have suggested the
likelihood that the same person is the author of the prose
parts of the Book of Jeremiah and the history that runs
from Deuteronomy to 2 Kings. NARRATOR: The Bible
tells us that the person responsible for writing
down much of Jeremiah's work was his trusty scribe, Baruch. WOMAN: Then took
Jeremiah another scroll and gave it to Baruch the
scribe, the son of Neriah. Jeremiah 36:32. NARRATOR: But could
Baruch, the son of Neriah, have been more
than a mere scribe? Could he also have written
the Book of Deuteronomy? His work probably
speaks for itself. Many passages of text
that he wrote for Jeremiah are strikingly similar to
words used in Deuteronomy. Perhaps the same author
may have had a hand in the writing of both books. If so, archaeology has
uncovered an artifact that may have finally brought
us into direct contact with one of the earliest
authors of the Bible. We, in recent years, recovered
a clay seal that is now in the Israel museum in
Jerusalem, which is stamped in a script that we do identify
as seventh century Hebrew script, late seventh, early
sixth century Hebrew script. And the name in that seal
is Baruch, son of Neriah, the scribe. If it's true that Baruch is our
Deuteronimistic historian, what that means is when
you look at that seal, you are looking at nothing
less than the autograph of one of the authors of the Bible. [music playing]
