Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

This first and all-important reference is generally agreed to have been made by Ezra, a priest well-connected in Babylon. He too had been an official at the Persian court in Mesopotamia and he arrived in Jerusalem in 398 BC, ‘with a royal letter of support, some splendid gifts for the Temple and a copy of the law of Moses’.10 It is only now, according to scholars like Lane Fox, that ‘we find for the first time “an appeal to what is written”’. We conclude from this that an unknown editor had begun to amalgamate all the different scrolls and scriptures into a single narrative and law. Whereas there was an agreed form of Homer in Greece by, roughly speaking, 300 BC, the Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament for Christians) was not fully formed in Israel until about 200 BC, when figures such as Ben Sira, the author of Ecclesiasticus and the first Jewish author that we know by name, refers to the ‘book of the covenant of the most high god, the law which Moses commanded’.11 As was mentioned earlier, the idea of a covenant with God, such a central element in Judaism, may have been adapted from Zoroastrian beliefs in Mesopotamia. After exile, the covenant that dominated Jewish life the most was with the book, which in turn meant that great effort was made to ensure there was strict agreement on what went into it and what was left out. The Jews had to establish a canon. So began the first steps toward the compilation of the Bible, arguably the most influential book of all time.