When were the Hebrew scriptures written?

Answer 1

The earliest known examples of Hebrew writing dates back to about 1100 BCE, more than 3000 years ago.

Answer:

From the earliest times.

Our tradition states that Hebrew was the language with which God created the world (Rashi commentary, Genesis 2:23, quoting the midrash); and it is the language with which He gave the Torah.
Since it was considered a holy language and was used for prayer and the teaching of religious tradition, it was not spoken in mundane contexts and wasn't taught to just anyone. It was handed down from individual teachers to disciples as part of the original tradition; and the same goes for the art of writing (letters on parchment, as opposed to cuneiform or heiroglyphics). Thus, certain Hebrew Psalms (92 and 139) and teachings are attributed to Adam, the first man. The wider public, most of whom descended relatively quickly into idolatry and sin, were not given access to the treasures of the original tradition, since by their actions they implicitly repudiated it.
After the Flood, the Hebrew language had a brief period in which it was generally known, thanks to Noah (see Rashi commentary on Genesis 11:1). This is why many hundreds of Hebrew words have cognates in languages as diverse as German and Japanese. The alphabet, which secular scholars trace back to the Phoenicians, is according to our tradition actually one step older than that: it is from the Hebrew aleph-bet, which those of the Phoenicians and Greeks closely mimic.
After the Flood also, the knowledge of Hebrew eventually declined (see Genesis ch.11) and was preserved only among the Western Semites, the ancestors and cousins of Abraham. Eber, from whom our word "Hebrew" (Ivrit) is named, was a Semitic descendant of Noah and ancestor of Abraham. He was one of the major transmitters of the original traditions. He is credited with having broadened the Hebrew language, and some Hebrew grammatical constructs are attributed to him by certain Jewish researchers.
As time passes, languages grow and adapt. Thus today we can identify words and types of usage that go all the way back (and these are the ones that are most likely to have widespread cognates). And then there are Late Biblical Hebrew; the Hebrew of the Mishna; Medieval Hebrew, and so on. All of these have a broad overlap, but each has introduced its added vocabulary words and usages. Today, Torah-Hebrew includes some words that were borrowed from the Persian, some words taken from ancient Greece, Aramaic words, etc.

Answer 2

Tradition holds that Moses wrote the Torah (or received it from God) in 1312 BCE. Modern scholarship suggests it remained an oral tradition until much later, but no exact date is given for the first written Torah scroll.

Answer 3

A:Tradition says that the earliest scriptures, the Pentateuch, were written by Moses around 1400 BCE. However, nearly all biblical scholars now accept a much later date for their authorship. The Hebrew scriptureswere written over a period of centuries during most of the first millennium BCE.

Although the Book of Genesis was not completed in more or less the form we know today, some of the source material was written down by the J Source around the tenth century BCE and by the E Source around the ninth century BCE. These sources also contributed to other parts of the Pentateuch.

The last book in the Hebrew scriptures to be written is the Book of Daniel, which has been reliably dated to approximately 167 BCE, although the Catholic Deuterocanonical books are somewhat later.

Answer 4

There is evidence of Hebrew writing as far back as 1600 BCE. The Torah is believed to have been written between 1300 BCE and 1000 BCE (some modern scholarship suggests it was written a few centuries later).

Answer 5

Torah is the collective Jewish name for the five books that that Christians refer to as the Pentateuch. If, as biblical tradition says, they were written by Moses around 1400 BCE, they could not have been written in the Hebrew language or even in the Hebrew script, as these belonged far into the future. The Jewish Virtual Library tells us that the Hebrews adopted the alphabetic script together with other cultural values from the Canaanites in the twelfth or eleventh century B.C.E.
The evolution of the Hebrew language from a dialect of Canaanite is just one piece of evidence that undermines the biblical tradition of the Israelites as genocidal conquerors of the Canaanites. Archaeologists have established that there was no unified military conquest of the Canaanites, and the general consensus of historians is that the Israelites were themselves rural Canaanites who left the environment of the rich coastal cities to settle in the hitherto sparsely populated hinterland. If the Hebrew people were already inhabitants of Palestine, then there was not only no conquest but also no Exodus from Egypt, as described in The Bible. This means that Moses did not write the Torah during the legendary Exodus.

We now know that the Torah had at least four principal sources, over a period of several centuries during the first millennium BCE. They were anonymous, but are now known as the Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist and the Priestly Source. The final version of the Torah was completed some time after the Babylonian Exile. The earliest writing in the Book of Genesis is attributed to the Yahwist, who wrote in the sourthern kingdom of Judah around 900 BCE.

Answer 6

Sometime prior to 1300 BCE