The Jewish nation was first called The Children of Israel, later Israel, then Hebrews and finally Jews. Any of these names used in the text refers to the same race of people. Comments about the Jewish faith should not be taken as anti-Jewish. My comments are in relation to what the Christian religion has taken out of the ancient Hebrew texts. The Old Testament was concerned with the welfare of the nation rather than life in a hereafter. Classically it did not even consider an afterlife. It was the Christian dogma which overly concerned itself with the notion of a heaven, hell and judgement in the nether world.

The most sacred text of the Jewish faith is the Torah. It states the laws and traditions of the Hebrew race. Together with other Jewish sacred texts it comprises about two-thirds of the Christian Bible known as the Old Testament. The Old Testament records a great deal of uncertain history, laws, traditions and myths of the Hebrew race. It predates the Christian era and is a collection of books written by various authors over some hundreds of years. The first Greek translation was made between the first and the third centuries B.C.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us that it is certain that before the second century A.D. the various manuscrips of the Old Testament differed very materially from one another and that the official Hebrew text was probably fixed in the second century A.D., thereafter it was scrupulously preserved. Most of the Old Testament was brought together in its present form and finally given authority by a council of Jewish Rabbis in the year 90 A.D. None of the Biblical writings in their present form is older than the eighth century B.C. There are no original writings by Abraham, Moses, King David, or any of the early prophets. Indeed, most of them would not have known the art of writing.

By recording a written history of the Persian invasion of Greece the historian Herodotus (480-424 B.C.) came to be known as the father of historians. He was believed to be the first to record a written history. It is possible that the Jewish scribes preceded him by a hundred years, although their "history" included a great deal of mythology. Many Biblical scholars believe that the first books of the Bible were written or collated during the second exile of the Jews in Babylon in 586 to 538 B.C. The first five books of the Bible were not generally regarded by the Jewish nation as divine commandments until 444 B.C. (see Neh. Chapter 8.) The book of Psalms cannot have been completed until two centuries later. This did not mean that all the Psalms were newly written, since some earlier writings would have been included.

An obvious example of how later material has been included in the supposed writings of King David is found in the 137th Psalm, which without doubt refers to the time of exile. It could not have been written by King David who lived several hundred years earlier. It reads:

"By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?"

Nearly all the larger books, and some of the shorter, were not completed by a single author but by several. They were gradually expanded through additions and alterations by a succession of persons who used existing material and sometimes added their own ideas. The Old Testament is a conglomeration of Jewish myth and history, some of which had been passed down orally, and some of which was written record. It had then been altered to suit the fancy of the manuscript holder.

In his book "Mankind and Mother Earth" A.J. Toynbee makes this strong statement:

"Since the date at which the oldest books of the Old Testament were written, the Jews' religion has undergone changes that, cumulatively have been revolutionary, and the texts have been edited and re-edited to make them conform to the thesis that the changes have not been innovations but have been revisions of pristine faith and practice".

We should remember that there were no copyright laws in those days to protect authors and their works. Persons who inherited or otherwise acquired a manuscript were entitled to add or delete anything they wished from the work of the original author. This, in fact, is what happened. Philological scholars (those who make a special study of language) assure us that some of the books of the Bible have been subject to a number of alterations by various persons who have wanted to include their own ideas.

After the conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. there was a dispersal of Jews from their homeland. Many were attracted to the city of Alexandria. The children grew up speaking Greek and not Hebrew. In 288 B.C. the Alexandrian Jews invited seventy learned scribes from Jerusalem to translate manuscripts of the Old Testament into Greek. This famous translation is called the Septuagint (literally seventy).

So we see that understanding the Old Testament is not as straight-forward as many of us were taught. It had a long, hazardous and capricious incubation. It seems that much of the material existed in scattered form but was finally selected and collated into the approved sacred texts, t have no intention of embarking on a summary-of the many-contradictions and doubtful statements found in the Bible.

I do propose, however, to discuss Bible statements which will illustrate the ease with which a myth can grow over hundreds of years and finally be accepted as historical fact. This is what happened with the various creation myths of many ancient societies. People sincerely believed their creation myths as facts of history. Scientist and explorer, Humboldt, once said "All religions offer three different things, a moral rule, (the same in all religions and very pure) a geological dream, and a myth or legend. The last element has assumed the greatest importance."

The Sumerians lived in the broad delta lands between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers, present day Iran. Sometimes they experienced serious flooding and over time had accumulated several myths to explain the reasons why the gods allowed this to happen. All of these stories pre-dated the Biblical account of Noah and the flood. A cuneiform tablet of forty lines discovered in 1955 tells this story. The gods decided to destroy the human race because people were too noisy and numerous. But the god Enki conspired to save a pious king so that sacrifices to the gods could continue. The king was told to build a vessel and to take into it "the seed of all living things". The flood lasted seven days, and the vessel finally came to rest on Mt. Nisir. To find out whether the flood had subsided enough, the king sent out a dove, a raven and a swallow. He later sacrificed to the gods. The Biblical story of the flood is almost identical to the much more ancient Sumerian myth recorded above. Names of gods and details are changed, but the essence of the myth is the same.

It is most evident that when the Jews were held captive in Babylon, the cultural centre of the world at that time, they gathered together and recorded their traditions and myths and adopted some new ones. The Hebrew religion did not grow out of a vacuum. It was intimately associated with the mythology of the surrounding nations. The Hebrews adopted some of the creation myths and religious beliefs of the surrounding countries. The main difference was that by the first millennium B.C. they had accepted monotheism as a tenet of their national religion. That also was not an original idea. Monotheism was promoted by the Pharoah Amenhotep in 1360 B.C. the nation of Israel took up the idea many years later.

The Hebrew story of the infant Moses being placed in a reed basket in the bulrushes on the river Nile and being found by the Egyptian princess is identical to the Babylonian mythical story of the mighty warrior Sargon who lived about 2500 B.C. ("Cradle of Civilization" by S.N.Kramer).

Much later still, the Jews were driven out of their homeland and scattered among other nations. The people were in danger of becoming lost as a separate race. We should not be surprised, therefore, if the Jewish rabbis were afraid for the nation's survival. What better way to prevent absorption into other races than to record their traditional history, and thereby emphasise the differences in religious belief by reaffirming faith in their own god, Yahweh. It would have been surprising if the Jews had not been influenced by the strong mythological elements found in the surrounding religions and incorporated some of them into their own written traditions.

When talking about the Mesopotamian written records Samuel Noah Kramer has this to say:-

"Cuneiform documents ranging in date from as early as 1700 down to about 1300 B.C. frequently mention a people called Habiru, a name closely identified with the Biblical word "Hebrew". According to these texts, the Hebrews were wanderers, nomads, even brigands and outlaws - men who sold their services as mercenaries to Babylonians and Assyrians, Hit-tites and Hurrians alike."

Let us now look at one of the most famous Bible stories, which has been celebrated by the Jewish people every year for thousands of years. I refer to the Exodus story, when Moses is said to have led the Hebrew nation out of slavery and the land of Egypt in about 1200 B.C.

Egypt occupies the southern portion of the fertile crescent which runs north through what is now Israel and spreads out into the broad reaches of Mesopotamia (modern Syria and Iraq). It was in this area between the Tigris and the Euphrates that people first began to record their activity by writing commercial records on soft clay tablets. Writing was accomplished with a wedged-shaped stylus and is known as cuneiform writing. The date was about 3,000 B.C. The idea of recording their achievements was quickly adopted by the rulers of Egypt. Egyptians chiseled their history on stone monuments and temples. They also made their records on papyrus (a paper made from the rushes which grow on the Nile swamp land; we acquired our word "paper" from the Egyptian word papyrus). Thousands of papyrus scrolls have been discovered. Parchments called the "books of the dead" were placed in ceramic jars in the tombs of the dead. Their preservation over the centuries was possible because of the extremely dry climate.