Many people over many centuries shaped the Old Testament, and that is how God chose to give it. The story starts with Moses told to write down a battle so Israel would remember it. It moves through generations who received older stories and arranged them, and it ends with a three-part collection that Jesus read as his Father’s word and as the story about himself. The history doesn’t threaten the Bible’s authority. Following it in order shows a people who kept faith with a text that kept faith with them.
This guide walks through that history one stage at a time, using Tim Mackie’s conversation with Lisa Fields on the Jude 3 Project podcast. Mackie is co-founder of the Bible Project. You can work through it alone in about an hour, or with a group over one long session or two shorter ones. Along the way you will build a timeline, sort what is known from what is inferred, and then ask what difference the history makes to how you believe and how you worship. Have a Bible open, a few sheets of paper, and a pen.
Start with the picture you already carry
Before reading further, write two or three sentences describing how you think the Old Testament was written. Who did the writing? How long did it take? Where were the words kept? Don’t edit yourself. You will come back to this at the end.
Mackie argues that most modern readers start from the wrong place without knowing it. We meet the Bible as one bound volume or one app, so we picture it being produced the way we would produce a document. For most of Israel’s history, he points out, the Scriptures were scrolls, and the collection grew over time. He also warns against popular documentaries on the subject: “It’s sensational to watch, but hardly any of it’s actually true.” The point is not that the real history is boring. The point is that it has to be followed in sequence, from the evidence the texts themselves give.
Stage one: writing so Israel would remember
Read Exodus 17:8-16. Israel has just escaped Egypt and is attacked by Amalek. Moses holds up his hands on the hill, Aaron and Hur support them, and Israel wins. Then, in Exodus 17:14, the LORD tells Moses, “Write this for a memorial in a book.” Mackie notes that in the Old Testament the word translated “book” means a scroll.
Mackie calls this the first mention of the Bible’s writing inside the Bible’s own story. He finds it striking because it is so ordinary. There is no vision and no tablet from heaven. The purpose is memory: God’s people must not forget what God did to deliver them.
Now read Exodus 24:3-7. Here, at Sinai, “Moses wrote all the words of the LORD” (Exodus 24:4), and then he “took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people” (Exodus 24:7). Mackie treats this as the second mention of the Bible’s writing and describes it as “the story of God and Israel getting married in the covenant on Mount Sinai.” The laws that fill so much of the first five books are, on his reading, the terms of that relationship.
So the earliest writing the Old Testament describes does two things. It preserves memory of what God did, and it records the covenant God made. Keep both in view. They will matter when we reach worship.
Mackie adds a limit that a careful reader should notice. Genesis tells of events long before Moses. Moses did not witness them. Mackie says that Moses, or later authors who worked on the Torah after him, received those memories from earlier generations. Even the first stage, then, already involves inheritance.
Stage two: pieces sewn into one story
Mackie’s main image is a family quilt. Some pieces come from your mother, some from your grandmother, some from further back. Some pieces arrive already sewn together, like the stories of Abraham or Jacob. Then someone sets the Jacob stories beside the Joseph stories, and those beside the Exodus. The arrangement is someone’s handiwork.
He offers a second image that is especially useful for a timeline. Think of a museum exhibit. A curator chose and arranged the pieces, “but the arrangement of the exhibit is not the same date as the pieces of the exhibit.” Reading the Hebrew Bible, he says, “It’s like walking through a museum and someone from the last phase of its formation is guiding you through by how they designed the Hebrew Bible to be read as you go through these old, old narratives and poems and so on.”
This distinction does real work. When someone hears that a book reached its final form late, they often assume its contents were made up late. Mackie answers that “the date of the final form of the quilt is not the same thing as the date of individual pieces within the quilt.” A timeline has to carry at least two kinds of dates: when material was first remembered or written, and when it was set into its final arrangement.
The books themselves sometimes show this process. Read 1 Kings 22:37-40. After Ahab’s death, the writer points the reader to another source for the rest of his acts. Mackie’s observation is that the author of Kings is selecting from available records to make a theological point about Israel’s monarchy, namely that it failed. You are watching an author choose pieces for the quilt.
Mackie also says that at the latest stages, probably after the period of Ezra and Nehemiah, the people shaping the collection stop being named. His explanation is simple: “they’re not trying to draw attention to themselves, they’re trying to pass on the quilt.”
Stage three: a collection with a clear center and softer edges
Mackie describes the final shape as three parts: the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. Read Luke 24:44-45. Jesus speaks of what was written “in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me,” and then “opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.” Mackie explains that the Psalms was designed to be the first book of the third collection, so Jesus is naming the whole shape.
Here the history gets more complicated, and Mackie doesn’t hide it. Ancient Jewish communities knew they had a coherent collection, but he says they did not seem concerned to draw sharp borders around it. Other writings kept being produced and read. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, according to Mackie, there are as many copies of the book of Enoch as of Jeremiah. He suggests picturing a stream with headwaters and lower waters, where different communities placed the dividing line in different spots.
He gives two test cases. Esther is never explicitly quoted in the New Testament, yet “it’s fully woven into the quilt.” Enoch, by contrast, is quoted in Jude 1:14, where Jude writes that “Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these.” Mackie says the passage Jude quotes is itself a blend of lines from Deuteronomy and Malachi. Enoch, he concludes, is a worthwhile book, but “It’s not woven into the quilt in quite the same way.” Being quoted is one kind of evidence. Fitting the design of the whole is another.
Mackie admits this ambiguity bothered him when he first learned it. What changed his mind was noticing that the ancient readers were not troubled: “this wasn’t a crisis for people back then.” Their categories were different because they never had the Scriptures in one volume. As he puts it, “it’s not that they didn’t know what was in their Bible, they just had a different way of thinking about it.”
Facilitators may want to slow down here. Some participants will hear “softer edges” as “nobody knew.” That is not what Mackie claims. He claims a clear center and a debated margin. A separate Jude 3 Project conversation takes up the question of which books belong; this guide stays with how the books came together.
Stage four: copied, treasured, and argued over
Mackie says that once the three-part collection appears as a unified whole, about two hundred years before Jesus by his account, everyone is quoting it. On his telling, “what they’re not debating is whether these books are authoritative. They’re debating what they mean, their interpretation.” The early church carried that pattern forward. Christians argued over how the Scriptures pointed to Jesus, not over whether they were Scripture.
Mackie’s own graduate research was in the Dead Sea Scrolls and early translations. He says those scrolls let us trace manuscripts back to somewhere in the three hundreds to two hundreds before Christ, and that what they show is complicated. A date like that is his assertion, and a group leader can treat it as a point for further reading rather than settled fact. What he does not claim matters too. Manuscripts can show how a text was handed down and how it varied. They cannot, on their own, prove inspiration. That claim rests elsewhere, and for Christians it rests above all on Jesus, who “appealed to his Bible as the way to understand who he was,” in Mackie’s words.
The practice: build the timeline yourself
This exercise takes twenty to thirty minutes. In a group, work in pairs and then compare.
- Draw a long horizontal line across a sheet of paper. Mark four regions along it: Moses and Sinai, the kings, exile and return, and the time of Jesus.
- Place these items where they belong: the battle with Amalek and the command to write (Exodus 17:14); the book of the covenant read at Sinai (Exodus 24:7); the writer of Kings citing other records (1 Kings 22:39); Jeremiah’s scroll written by Baruch, burned, and rewritten (Jeremiah 36); the period when contributors stop being named; the earliest Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts; Jesus naming the law, the prophets and the psalms (Luke 24:44).
- Now make two marks for Genesis: one near Moses for when Mackie says its memories were received, and one further along for when the larger story reached its final arrangement. Draw an arrow between them.
- Draw a second line below the first. On the top line, write only what a text itself says happened. On the bottom line, write the interpretations you have heard in this guide, such as Mackie’s reading that Kings selects its material to show the monarchy failed. Ask of each item: is this something the text reports, or something a reader concludes?
- Circle any item where you are unsure which line it belongs on. Those are the places to keep studying.
The point of the exercise is to feel the difference between a date and a judgment. Skeptics and believers both blur them. A late final date gets treated as proof of invention, or a confident interpretation gets treated as a historical fact. Your two lines keep them apart.
Questions for discussion
- Look back at the picture you wrote at the start. Which part of it did this history confirm, and which part did it correct?
- Mackie says the first writing command in the Bible was for remembrance. What changes when you read Old Testament narrative as preserved memory rather than as a set of isolated lessons?
- On your timeline, which item was hardest to place on the line of what the text reports versus the line of interpretation? Why?
- Esther is never quoted in the New Testament, while Enoch is quoted in Jude. What does Mackie’s distinction between being quoted and being woven into the whole suggest about how a collection holds together?
- Ancient readers did not treat the soft edges of the collection as a crisis. Why might a modern reader feel differently, and is that feeling based on evidence or on habit?
- If a friend told you that learning this history made them trust the Old Testament less, what would you ask them before offering any answer?
From history to worship
The history ends where the covenant story ends. Mackie says the Old Testament tells of a people who broke covenant again and again, while “they break their covenant with God, but God doesn’t break his covenant with them.” Read Jeremiah 31:31-34, where God promises, “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts.” Then read Ezekiel 36:26-27: “And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes.”
Notice what has happened across the whole timeline. It began with Moses writing on a scroll so Israel would remember. It closes with a promise that God himself will write on hearts. The collection describes itself, in Mackie’s phrase, as “a covenant document that’s inviting us into a living vital relationship with God.” Knowing the formation history is not a substitute for that relationship. It is a way of seeing how long God kept speaking to a people who kept forgetting, and how many ordinary hands he used to make sure they did not lose the record.
That is why Mackie, who came to faith compelled by Jesus before he had read much of the Bible, can say, “I don’t even know how to make sense of Jesus without the first three quarters of my Bible.” Jesus received this long, inherited, carefully arranged collection and said it was about him.
This week, choose one short Old Testament book, such as Ruth or Jonah, and read it in one sitting. Before you start, place it on your timeline as best you can. When you finish, add one line beneath it: what this book remembers about God, and what it hopes for. Then compare that line to Jeremiah 31:33 and see whether the hope you wrote down is the one God promised to fulfill.