How the Bible was written and details of its background.
"The Bible, at first sight, appears to be a collection of literature—mainly Jewish. If we enquire into the circumstances under which the various Bibli-cal documents were written, we find that they were written at intervals over a space of nearly 1400 years. The writers wrote in various lands, from Italy in the west to Mesopotamia and possibly Persia in the east. The writers themselves were a heterogeneous number of people, not only separated from each other by hundreds of years and hundreds of miles, but belonging to the most diverse walks of life. In their ranks we have kings, herdsmen, sol-diers, legislators, fishermen, statesmen, courtiers, priests and prophets, a tentmaking Rabbi and a Gentile physician, not to speak of others of whom we know nothing apart from the writings they have left us. The writings themselves belong to a great variety of literary types. They include history, law (civil, criminal, ethical, ritual, sanitary), religious poetry, didactic treatises, lyric poetry, parable and allegory, biography, personal correspond-ence, personal memoirs and diaries, in addition to the distinctively Biblical types of prophecy and apocalyptic.
"For all that, the Bible is not simply an anthology; there is a unity which binds the whole together. An anthology is compiled by an antholo-gist, but no anthologist compiled the Bible." F.F. Bruce(The Books and the Parchments, Fleming H. Revell)
