Big Ideas · 30 · Conclusions
Babylon had the pieces, but never made a Bible
Cuneiform literature has nearly everything the Bible has: laws, prophecies, laments, hymns, proverbs, school curricula. But, as scholar Bernard Levinson notes, it never came together as scripture.
The question isn't how the Bible developed, but that it did at all.
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The Bible uniquely joins rival law codes, combines ritual, criminal, and civil law, and embeds them in a larger narrative. Nowhere else did a people document its own defeat and use that story to rethink every facet of its existence.
Source: Why the Bible Began, pp. 464–465
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