The idea of God-inspired Scripture was not one of the primordial themes of Israelite religion. This is understandably so for this religion originated among people who at first had no knowledge of writing and who existed for a long time under general conditions unfavorable to literacy production. Nevertheless in the course of time, the religion of Israel did become centered in the collection of books that Christians now call the Old Testament (OT). In spite of the centrality it acquired in Judaism, the OT does not itself contain a doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture. Although the OT certainly and emphatically refers to the divine action of God upon the minds of the prophets, this influence was phrased in terms of the oral proclamation of a message that God had communicated to them. It is true that the OT sometimes records God’s commanding a prophet to write, and that Isaiah referred to his own written prophecy as “the book of the Lord” but, of themselves, none of these expressions would seem to indicate anything more than the prophet’s consciousness of a pressing duty to write. There is no indication of a divine influence upon the prophetic writer that would make it appear as if God were the author of such writing. Moreover,  the divine action upon men, which, at least in emphatic instances, is described in some such phrase as “The spirit of the Lord came upon…,” is limited to the areas of action and of speaking and does not extend in the OT to the area of writing or even of thinking. Seemingly, then, the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture, as it is understood in the Church today, is not mirrored in the writing of the OT. To be sure, it is not denied there, but neither is it affirmed.

Nevertheless, later on, the belief that divine inspiration was the origin of Scripture appeared among the Jews. This doctrine, while extra-scriptural, is reflected in the Bible to the extent that we already read in later sections of the OT about the Jewish “sacred books.” It would seem that the psychological thrust toward this doctrine sprang from Josiah’s adoption of the “book of the covenant” and therefore became an irreversible dynamic from the time when Ezra read to the people from the “book of the law of Moses” as something that “the Lord had commanded to Israel.”

More to follow!