As the great philsopher Dr. Thomas Lehrer once observed, life is like a sewer, what you get out of it depends upon what you put into it.

Similarly what you get out of reviewing a document depends upon the assumptions you bring to the document.

If you assume the bible is what religious tradition says it is then that is almost certainly what you will find in it. Even if you are an atheist and  look at it only with an eye to demolishing it what you bring to the study will influence what you find.                

Given all the religious tradition that surrounds it in our culture it requires much serious thinking to realize what you are bringing to the bible no matter what your purpose is.

About a century ago something new appeared. It was called higher criticism of the bible. It changed what people brought to the bible. When people brought something new to it they got something new out of it.

But still they brought many things to it both spoken and unspoken. A thing brought universally to the bible even with this higher criticism was a stated reverence and respect for it. This may have been feigned but from what they got out of higher criticism it appears to be genuine.

Reverence and respect are among the things found only in religious tradition. It is not immediately obvious how many things about the bible exist only in religious tradition. A tradition is something for which we cannot identify a credible source for its origin.

Most people have no problem with being told the names of the authors of the gospels are traditions and that there is no evidenciary basis for the names. I know some may raise a quibble here and there and a bishop may warn against doubt but it does not cause anyone to try to reactivate the Inquisition.

There are other traditions which are a bit more profound. But before giving a few examples there is an important distinction between belief and knowledge. One may believe anything. Knowledge is based solely upon known evidence and experience. I believe John is telling the truth is much different from I know John is telling the truth because I was there and saw the same thing.

While there are traditions, traditional answers, and perhaps pious beliefs contrary to this short list of examples nothing is known in evidence to contradict them.

Also it is necessary to adopt the view of an atheist here. Beyond its general utility it helps prevent accepting, for example, an unfounded Protestant position simply because the Catholic position appears to be less founded or vice versa. It is about religion therefore no believer is correct. For a believer, any answer has to be of a religious, reverential nature. In fact no answer need be correct.

Any answer you were told about any of the following is nothing more than a traditional belief. This is not a complete list.
  * No one knows why the books of the bible were written.
  * No one knows who wrote them.
  * No one knows when they were written.
  * No one knows the original language in which they were written.
  * No one knows when the idea they were religious works started.
  * No one knows when they became a component of a religion.
  * No one knows why any particular selection of books was made.

While there is some knowledge for a few things found in the New Testament it is not much. In fact the most imporant fact known is that they epistles do indeed appear to at one time have been letters. The authorship of all of them is unknown or can be contested including those of Paul. For the Gospels even less is known.

When it comes to the books of the Old Testament incomparably less is known from the evidence. There is precious little evidence available in favor of any traditional belief. And for the old testament there is a tidal wave of physical evidence from archaeology and even from surviving history that none of the traditions can possibly be true.

Take for example for most of history it was believed because of a tradition that appeared out of no where that the first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah or Tanak, were written by Moses. With the arrival of higher criticism that belief was eliminated. Rather than drop the entire tradition it was modified so they were still old stories about real events. That is a tradition we can trace as a reaction to what was had been in writing right in the face of believers for some 1500 years and more.

Archaeology began having its impact about fifty years ago and with its finds the Torah lost its antiquity and the conquest of Palestine of Joshua lost its credibility. Some thirty years ago David, Solomon, the United Kingdom of Israel followed the path of Moses into mythology. Traditional belief was again modified so that everything but those things were still true.

What started as a tradition that it was all true became a tradition in which all of the parts essential to it being considered a source of religious belief and moral behavior were no longer true. The tradition of it being a religious text still exists despite all the important parts of it as a religion have vanished.

This is the power of tradition. It is also the reason an atheist point of view is essential. When the essential religious component is eliminated by unquestionable fact it remains religious.

With all those parts eliminated what possible basis is there for considering it a religius texts? Without those opening books there is no god handing down divine law. There is no divine intervention in favor of the Israelites. There is no moral standard. Nor is there any claim that later people were divinely inspired with these religious practices and morality.

Moreover there is no pretension of profound, but anonymous, religious thinkers having created these moral precepts and should one actually read all of them on could not imagine any rational person conceiving of them.

What we do see after the elimination of the early books and of profound religious thinkers is a person or small group deliberately falsifying their own past and knowing they are doing so. We are left with incredibly dishonest people, mean spirited frauds, creating these stories knowing full well they were creating a pack of lies.

This also has a direct bearing upon when these lies were created. Prior to higher criticis when Exodus could be viewed as a memoir or diary no problem was apparent. Once it was clear Exodus did not occur and therefore Moses did not write it, the creation of the story could not come from the "time" of Exodus. An author in the 14th c. BC cannot be chronicling events in the 14th c. BC which are not happening. People would notice.

So also the age of any story cannot have been created in the time it is pretending to write about. If a person creates a story which internally dates to the time of Solomon and is writing about Solomon people around our phantamagorical author would notice there is no Solomon.

These stories cannot in any manner be considered chronicles any more than can Exodus. One cannot chronicle what is not happening. No story can be considered a chronicle of events if archaeology or surviving mentions from history show the events could not have occurred at that time.

So when we find there is no basis for the story of the captivity in Babylon and therefore no return we know that story could not have been created in that century.

And then when we find there is no evidence for the existence of Judah/Judea prior to the 1st c. BC all previous stories come into question. When we add to the no evidence that there should be evidence in surviving documents such as the chronicles of Alexander's conquests and the histories of Herodotus it is only a religious tradition that is left. And as we have no idea what significance this collection of stories had for anyone in the 1st c. BC it is not clear what people might be trying to salvage.

From the working atheist point of view the first crack in the tradition would be sufficient to reject it completely and start over. From the point of view of a believer it is important to retreat as little as possible. Believers are now stuck in a 6th c. BC as their trailing edge of retreat in spite of the fact there is no evidence of a religous tradition for the Old Testament in the 1st c. BC.

               Who could possibly have written these stories?

Absent some incredible discovery we can never know who did it. The perps are forever safe. What they were as people we can describe.

We know they knew they were creating fiction. They knew they were making it up. Why they did so also awaits that incredible discovery.

When were they created? There we have some evidence but of course must completely reject anything and everything from any tradition because we have seen tradition was rejected by believers who have created their own in their slow and painful retreat from Moses wrote the Torah.

We can look at many other ancient civilizations and when they could write we find all kinds of writings following roughly the following order of quantity. We find mainly contracts and legal documents, dull, dry and boring. Next most common are legal decrees of property and land ownership which are nearly as boring. And then in lesser numbers what might be called diplomatic followed by government and finally religous material as the smallest.

They are all not in that order. Clay outlasts papyrus. There are many factors but if we exclude the much different priorities and possibilities which followed the printing press that is roughly the order of frequency we find from ancient to pre-Gutenberg times.

In comparison we can look at the small part of the world in which the Old Testament purported arose. We are reasonably certain there were other books like those in the present Old Testament which are lost to us. We know there are books like Enoch which were not included. Why the books disappeared and why they were not included we have no idea.

But if we take the King James Version of the Old Testament we find some 600,000 words. This is in translation and Enlish is wordier than Hebrew but still that is a lot of words. So what about all the other categories of written material we find find in much greater quantities than religous material? They are not there.

Whatever we view the books of the Old Testament to be they were not the creation of a normal society. They were the dedicated work product of people who wrote little to nothing else. They were not scribes as we find in all other ancient societies which applied the skill of writing to the many useful and desirable purposes leading to a better organized society with fewer conflicts by putting laws and contracts into writing. These were created by a society interested in doing nothing with writing but creating an historical record they knew to be false.

We then consider the very writings we find from region outside of these religous books (keeping in mind we have nothing but tradtion to say they were religous works) is not in the same language as the "hebrew" version of these books. It is related. It is close. But so also is Aramaic.

The first mention of these people outside of the books of the Old Testament is also the first time there are records of these people. Were it not for the Old Testament they would first appear in mentions of Pompey of Rome dealings in the region in roughly 67 BC. Without the bible this would be all we know of them.

When Pompey arrives they are all speaking Aramaic. They are not speaking Hebrew or any variation of it. To jump forward in time the next religious text of the Jews to appear in history is the Mishna which is in Aramaic and following that the Babylonian Talmud also in Aramaic.

                   What is this Hebrew? Does anyone know?

One of the oddest facts is that the first appearance of the books of the Old Testament in history is the Septuagint, the LXX, which is in Greek. And there is no known reason for that. There are several guesses, speculations if you will, but no known reason. The rationale for the speculations are in fact based upon older speculations not upon any evidence.

It was not until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls some sixty years ago that there was any evidence of the stories of the Old Testament in Hebrew prior to the Masoretic text from about 900 AD. Even then the Masoretic is significantly different in important ways from the DSS. But still the oldest Dead Sea Scroll dates from the time of Pompey while the Septuagint was in circulation at that time.

No matter how we look at the physical evidence the Septuagint is older. There is argumentation that the Septuagint is a translation of an older language. This is not a tradition but a fact. The problem with this fact is that it is a known forgery, the letter of Aristeas which is dated to the early 1st c. AD. The argumentation centers on saying the translation part is correct even though all the rest is either clearly wrong or miraculous. This is another reason for the atheist attitude. An atheist would not argue to preserve one small desired truth amid a sea of lies.

So here we have a part of the middle east which has almost no surviving records until after it becomes part of the Greek empire. Some time after the Greeks rule and before the Romans rule these stories first appear in history in Greek. Also after the Greeks begin to rule the normal kind of local records start being kept but in Aramaic not Hebrew.

Upon what basis other than tradition of unknown origin can anyone for a prior version the Septuagint in Hebrew?

There is the argument from "semiticisms" in the Septuagint. There are some constructions in it that are obviously poor translations from some semitic language like Aramaic. But then should an Aramaic speaker pick up Greek as a second language and attempts to write in that language it will have indications that his native language is Aramaic. Those who argue for a translation from an original Hebrew text do not explain why it has to be a translation of an pre-existing text nor why it had to be Hebrew instead of the well known Aramaic.

Many will look at the squared script of Hebrew and declare it is proof positive. But this squared script is in fact the script of Aramaic. Those arguing for Hebrew as a separate language from Aramaic introduce another problem.

There are some surviving inscriptions from the early 1st millennium BC which are described as proto-Hebrew or paleo-Hebrew which use the Phoenician alphabet. If it is still correct that Hebrew was a separate language then it continued using the Phoenician alphabet until it switched to the Aramaic alphabet and yet still retained its identity as a separate langauge. A separate language for which there is no evidence anyone ever spoke is a difficult concept. It is even more difficult to introduce this unique example to only one people in the world and then because of its religious interest.

This brings us to another point. There are thousands of ancient documents of interest of which maybe a hundred or so merit continuing interest. Of these interpretation and explanation has change slowly but inevitably over the years for some centuries as more is known about related documents and the times in which they were created. In only one case is there a dedicated effort to argue that the oldest ideas about the document is the most correct. That is the Old Testament.

This is where the consequences of traditional beliefs show most glaringly to those who have adopted the atheist viewpoint.
  * The bible is considered of special merit.                              
  * The bible is the standard against which all other ancient material must be tested.
  * Discrepencies in the bible must be explained instead of simply noted, that is, they must be of intrinsic significance instead of just dumb.
  * The bible is important to something larger than itself.                
  * It has to be viewed as a superior religious and moral system no matter  how hard that is to ustify.
  * Disagreements must be resolved in favor of religous tradition.         
  * There is something superior about having only one god.                 
_______________________                                                    

And then there is the pseudo-atheist tradition. This one is like starting all over again at square one over a century ago and quite frustrating to deal with.

This is like taking a copy of all the OT stories and erasing all the god references and declaring it is a record of a "people" showing their group identity and culture back to ancient times. This can also be described as the zionist tradition which invented the idea of a people independent of the religion in the 1890s. It is the idea that a person can be a Judean/Jew without being a believer in the religion.

This flies in the face of every Old Testament statement that all of the promises are for "those who keep my commandments." As they have erased the god words they are not bothered with this.                               

As this is not a tradition but an invented fact there is no real reason to address it. It is a recently invented fact whose origin is in the Zionist political movement.                                                      

The same considerations of the very late and obviously not as tradition says origin of the religion also applies to the appearance of a people. If the stories do imply a people they were invented after the Greeks arrived to rule the region.

The same consideration of the invention of the Old Testament stories by a small number of people during Greek times applies. A few people knowing they are creating a pack of lies does not establish a group identity for the people they are lying about. Even if they managed to successfully impose the religion on the people, and all organized religions are imposed on the people as kings are imposed on the people, it does not establish a group identity for the people in any matter save perhaps killing priests in dark alleys if they get the chance.

The people cannot be any older than the religion.

To get an idea of what the Old Testament is we look at it like an atheist.
  * It describes a ritual/taboo lifestyle. This barely passes for a religion today.
  * It was primitive and remains primitive compared to the other religions in the known world at the time.
  * It enforced violations with the death penalty.
  * It was radical in its primitiveness and attracted fanatical followers.

Today we find "religions" like this as barbaric offshoots of credible religions. Islam has its Wahabis and Ayatollahs. Christianity has it Jim Joneses. The people of the gentle Yahweh and Astarte had their Yahweh cult of murder and destruction.

Here we have a point of comparison with our well known fundamentalist cults to provide a context for this Yahweh cult. We also read it in the stories of the Maccabes. While these are questionable they do have the merit of having a single, albeit tenuous, connection to the non-fiction world. In essense it describes a conflict between civilized Judeans who had learned from the Greeks and a fundamentalist reaction to what was modern at the time. This Yahweh cult is closest to the rise of the Taliban against western civilization. The Taliban of their day, the Judeans won.