There is much disagreement within biblical scholarship today over the authorship of the Bible. The majority of scholars believe that most of the books of the Bible are the work of multiple authors and that all have been edited to produce the works known today. The following article outlines the conclusions of the majority of contemporary scholars, along with the traditional views, both Jewish and Christian.
Divine authorship
The rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud held that God wrote the Torah in heaven in letters of black fire on parchment of white fire before the world was created, and that Moses received it by divine dictation. The early Church Fathers agreed that the scriptures were inspired or dictated by God, but not on which writings were scriptural: as a result, the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches treat some books (the Apocrypha) as inspired, but the Protestant tradition does not. In the 20th century the vast majority of theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, moved away from the divine dictation model and emphasised the role of the human authors. As a result, even many conservative scholars now accept, for example, that the Book of Isaiah has multiple authors and that 2 Corinthians is two letters joined.
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, is the collection of scriptures making up the Bible used by Judaism; the same books, in a slightly different order, also make up the Protestant version of the Old Testament. The order used here follows the divisions used in Jewish Bibles.
Torah
The first division of the Jewish Bible is the Torah, meaning "Instruction" or "Law"; in scholarly literature it is frequently called by its Greek name, the Pentateuch ("five scrolls"). It is the group of five books made up of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy and stands first in all versions of the Christian Old Testament.
According to Rabbinic tradition the five books of the Torah were written by Moses, with the exception of the last eight verses of Deuteronomy which describe his death. Most Jews and Christians believed Mosaic authorship until the 17th century. Today, the majority of scholars agree that the Pentateuch does not have a single author, and that its composition took place over centuries.
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers
From the late 19th century there was a consensus among scholars around the documentary hypothesis, which suggests that the first four books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers) were created by combining four originally independent documents, known as the Jahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist, and the Priestly sources. This approach has since seen various revisions, yet while the identification of distinctive Deuteronomistic and Priestly theologies and vocabularies remains widespread, they are used to form new approaches suggesting that the books were combined gradually over time by the slow accumulation of "fragments" of text, or that a basic text was "supplemented" by later authors/editors. At the same time there has been a tendency to bring the origins of the Pentateuch further forward in time, and the most recent proposals place it in 5th century BCE Judah under the Persian empire.
Deuteronomy
Deuteronomy is treated separately from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. Its place in the documentary hypothesis is anomalous, as it, unlike the other four, consists of a single "source". The process of its formation probably took several hundred years, from the 8th century to the 6th, and its authors have been variously identified as prophetic circles (because the concerns of Deuteronomy mirror those of the prophets, especially Hosea), Levitical priestly circles (because it stresses the role of the Levites), and wisdom and scribal circles (because it esteems wisdom, and because the treaty-form in which it is written would be best known to scribes). Deuteronomy was later used as the introduction to the comprehensive history of Israel written in the early part of the 6th century, and later still it was detached from the history and used to round off the Pentateuch.
Prophets
Former prophets
The Former Prophets (נביאים ראשונים, Nevi'im Rishonim), make up the first part of the second division of the Hebrew Bible, the Nevi'im, which translates as "Prophets". In Christian Bibles the Book of Ruth, which belongs in the final section of the Hebrew Bible, is inserted between Judges and Samuel.