Moses & Aaron did not write or approve the Jewish Torah or Old Testament

In the Shadow of Sinai (c. 1250–1200 BCE), the people of Israel wandered beneath a blazing sky, guided by the prophet Moses, lawgiver, liberator, and shepherd of a restless nation. Tradition holds that it was here, on stone tablets and in inspired words, that the Torah — the Law — was first entrusted to humankind. The five foundational books — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — are attributed to Moses. Yet history tells a quieter truth: that what Moses began as divine instruction was preserved not in parchment but in memory. Songs, laws, and stories lived first on the tongues of priests and prophets, echoing around desert fires long before they were bound in scrolls. When Moses died — sometime around 1200 BCE — no complete scripture existed. What endured were fragments of revelation, carried by tribes through centuries of conquest and exile, faith and forgetting.

II. Voices of Many Hands (c. 1000–600 BCE)

Over the next six centuries, those fragments became the seeds of a vast spiritual library. In the southern kingdom of Judah and the northern kingdom of Israel, poets, priests, and prophets gave new shape to old memories. The earliest songs — such as The Song of Deborah (Judges 5) — sang of battle and deliverance. The scrolls of Exodus and Genesis evolved as tribes sought meaning in their past. Modern scholars trace this intricate weaving to several distinct traditions:

The Yahwist (J) source, writing in Judah around the 10th century BCE, spoke of God as Yahweh, walking among His people in intimate narrative tones.

The Elohist (E) source, emerging in Israel around the 9th century BCE, employed Elohim—a more distant and majestic name—and emphasized prophecy and moral testing.

The Deuteronomist (D) voice, which emerged during King Josiah’s reforms in the 7th century BCE, emphasized covenant and obedience as the foundation of national renewal.

The Priestly (P) writers, in the 6th century BCE, refined the sacred laws of purity, genealogy, and ritual — preserving Israel’s spiritual identity even as its political power waned.

Together, these voices formed the living current that would one day be known as the Torah — a tapestry of faith woven by generations.

The Fire of Exile (586–539 BCE)

Then came the shattering: Jerusalem fell to Babylon, the Temple burned, and the people were led away in chains. The exile was more than a political defeat; it was a crisis of meaning. Who were the chosen if their land and Temple were lost? In the sorrow of Babylon, priests and scribes began to gather what had survived — laws, prophecies, ancestral tales — shaping them into a coherent record of identity and covenant. Faith became the homeland that no empire could destroy. It was here, far from Zion, that the dream of a written scripture began to take form. The scrolls that had once been scattered among tribes became a single chorus of remembrance.

The Return and the Rebirth of the Law (c. 458–450 BCE)

When Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, he allowed the exiles to return. Among those who answered the call was Ezra the Scribe — a descendant of Aaron, brother of Moses. Ezra arrived in Jerusalem around 458 BCE, carrying royal permission to teach and restore “the Law of Moses.” In a city still scared by ruin, he stood before the people, opened the scrolls, and began to read. According to Nehemiah 8, men, women, and children wept as they listened — not from sorrow alone, but from recognition. For the first time, their sacred history was read aloud as one unified book. The Levites explained the meaning to the people, and the covenant was renewed. That day, faith became text, and text became the heart of a nation.

The Making of the Canon (450–400 BCE)

To preserve what Ezra had restored, scholars and elders formed the Great Assembly (Knesset HaGedolah)—a council of 120 wise men who safeguarded and expounded the Law. Under their guidance, the Torah was copied, studied, and standardized. Ezra’s reforms went beyond worship. He built schools, founded systems of teaching, and — according to tradition — established the first synagogues. The reading of scripture became a public act, and study became a form of devotion. Ezra is remembered as the second Moses, for he gave the Law anew — not to a wandering people in the desert, but to a wounded nation learning to stand again.

The Prophets and the Writings (400 BCE–100 CE)

After Ezra’s time, the sacred collection continued to grow. The Prophets (Nevi’im), Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others, were gathered and recognized between 200 and 150 BCE. The Writings (Ketuvim), comprising songs, wisdom, and history, matured over the following centuries, with books such as Psalms, Proverbs, and Daniel gaining their place by approximately 100 CE. By then, the Hebrew Bible — or Tanakh — was complete: twenty-four books in three parts, a thousand years in the making.

Scrolls, Scripts, and Scholars (250 BCE–1000 CE)

From Jerusalem to Alexandria, from Babylon to Rome, the sacred text journeyed through languages and empires. Around 250 BCE, Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, creating the Septuagint —a version that would have a profound influence on early Christianity. The Dead Sea Scrolls (c. 250 BCE–70 CE), discovered millennia later in Qumran’s caves, preserved fragments of nearly every biblical book, revealing how living and varied the early text once was. In the centuries that followed, the Masoretes (6th–10th CE) standardized the Hebrew text, adding vowels and pronunciation marks — crafting what became the Masoretic Text, still used in Jewish tradition today. Meanwhile, St. Jerome, in the late 4th century CE, translated the Scriptures into Latin, producing the Vulgate, the cornerstone of Catholic biblical tradition. Through all these translations and transmissions, the heart of the message remained — that God speaks through history, and history preserves His voice.

The Diverging Canons

By the dawn of the Common Era, the Hebrew Bible had been fixed — but not uniformly. The Jewish Tanakh contained 24 books. The Protestant Old Testament, following the same Hebrew text but arranged differently, lists 39. The Catholic canon included seven additional works — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and the Maccabees — drawn from the Septuagint. The Eastern Orthodox canon extended even further, preserving extra psalms and histories.

The Old Testament is not a single book, but a library chorus of law, prophecy, poetry, and wisdom composed over a millennium. It carries the faith of shepherds, kings, poets, and exiles, all seeking to understand their place in God's eyes. It began as whispers in the desert and became scripture through exile and return. It survived the burning of temples, the fall of kingdoms, and the passage of languages. Its words — “Let justice roll down like waters” and “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” — have shaped not only Judaism and Christianity but the conscience of civilizations. Through Ezra’s steadfastness, the prophets’ courage, and the scribes’ devotion, memory became a manuscript, and the manuscript became a moral vision. The Old Testament stands as a testament of human resilience — a bridge across time where faith, law, and hope met to form the written heart of Western faith. No scholar has ever claimed that the present Old Testament is what Moses communicated to people in their language because he was not alive when it was put into writing.