Francesca Stavrakopoulou

Therefore, how come he can do this?

Well, because he's a creator god.

He created the whole world.

All right.

Okay.

So if he created the whole world and he's a universal deity, that means that he could bring the Babylonians in against us and take us out into exile, destroy his own temple.

That's completely fine.

And he can be with us in Babylon, sod the rest of the people who are in Judah.

They don't matter.

We are the chosen ones.

And it's in that context that this kind of refiguration

of Yahweh worship begins to happen, that this is a deity intolerant of any other gods.

There are no books at this point.

Old traditions begin to become compiled and some early forms, like the Books of Kings, for example, we have probably some early versions of those by the time of the 6th century, but not much else.

But early poems, early traditions about prophets, early oracles, early narratives begin to be shaped and reformed.

And then from this point on, particularly in the following century, when the Jerusalem Temple is rebuilt, because by this point the Persians are in charge, and Cyrus the Great allows the kind of the movement, the return of various displaced communities to their homelands.

Some

returning exiles from Jerusalem, go back to the city, rebuild it, and they start to reshape and rewrite the past.

And the result is quite a few of the books that we now have in the Hebrew Bible.

And that writing process continues, new books are written, new scrolls are added, all the way through into the Roman period.