Dr. Dylan Johnson

Royal scribes, are they recording the annals of kings?

Are they helping to put together long historical narratives about the monarchy?

Samuel, Kings, which gets rewritten again later in a book called Chronicles.

So the long answer to a very short question is a lot of different redactors, all kind of semi-consciously working to put this book together.

And book is a bit of a misnomer because they don't even have books.

They don't know that they're making a book.

It's only us who have the Old Testament in a book.

They're making individual scrolls.

So that's a very complicated answer.

I'm sorry.

So all of the extant manuscript versions, so that is the physical scrolls on which Genesis appears, has the Adam and Eve story, the Eden story, with some small variations.

And usually these are more grammatical.

They're not changing the plot.

They're not revolutionizing our understanding of the story.

But we do have different versions.

Versions, we can say we have what we call the Masoretic Text.

This is the standard version of the Hebrew Bible.

This is the version from which most Bible translations are based on.

And these are medieval manuscripts from around 1000 AD.

So way after the time period we're talking about.