Dr. Dylan Johnson

That's the usual assumption, but we don't know.

That's just the going assumption.

And this becomes very important as we'll get into because gender is such a core component of this narrative.

this is really biblical scholarship today, is trying to answer those questions.

Who are these redactors?

Because we know the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, it's a compiled text.

It's not written in a single moment.

It's written over the course of centuries.

I mean, the language evolves.

The language changes at one point in the Hebrew Bible.

It stops being Hebrew and starts being Aramaic.

That's quite a shift.

So obviously these are not one person writing, nor does the Bible make that claim.

So who are the people?

It's a really complicated question because it probably grows very slowly and depends on what part of the text you're looking at.

So let's take the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

This is the real core of the Old Testament.

This is the most important part for Jewish congregations.

There's theories, priestly redactors living after the exile in 586 BCE by the Babylonians.

But priesthood is a very large category, and there's probably lots of different kinds of priests.