Ready to go deeper? Have you ever wondered how we got the Bible? As we learn its backstory and see the experiences and views of its writers and earliest readers — we can understand better what kind of book it is.

It all started with Moses, a man who God “used to speak to … face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Ex. 33:12). He would often go into “the tent of meeting” to meet with God, and a pillar of cloud would descend on it (Ex. 33:7-10). Then God would speak to him. At some point, God had him write down the things he wanted people to know about — laws and ideas; stories and instruction. Where did he start? At the beginning! The first chapters of the Bible answer some of our biggest questions. Who is God? Where did we come from? Why are we here? And how did we lose our way and let things get so messed up? His writings became the Bible’s first five books, sometimes called “the Book of the Law” (Deut. 31:24-26).

Now, let’s jump centuries later to a time when people had tragically lost their copies of Moses’ writings. They lost their way without the book to lead them, even forgetting how to worship God the way he instructed. But when a young king named Josiah commissioned a project to restore their rundown house of worship (2 Kings 22:3-7), someone found the book in the rubble (2 Kings 22:8). It was a big deal! And their response was surprising. The king read it and ripped his clothes in sadness at how far they’d drifted from what Moses wrote. From that day, he enacted initiatives to align themselves with the Book (2 Kings 23).

A generation later, God continues to give the Jews other books through the prophets, like Jeremiah to whom “the word of the Lord came” (Jer. 1:2). He partnered up with a scribe to construct a masterful book, the longest in all the Bible. Jeremiah’s book predicted that the kingdom would soon fall to Babylon. But Josiah’s son, King Jehoiakim, heard it read and cut the book up with a knife and threw it in the fire. So the Lord told Jeremiah to “Take another scroll and write on it all the former words” (Jer. 36:28). Despite Jehoiakim’s efforts, we still have that book today, and looking back, we can see it all came true. These books were made to last, so prophets and editors organized them into the first section of the Bible — the Old Testament. Reading these books, you could see that all these writers, separated by hundreds of years, were telling parts of the same story. But it was an incomplete story, full of promises and events that foreshadowed a future king and the very different kind of kingdom he would bring.

Jump ahead in our Bibles, past that page dividing the Old Testament from the New Testament. For now we’ll zoom past the life of Jesus, all the way to a time when Paul traveled around to tell people about him. From town to town, he went to Jewish places of worship and “reasoned with them from the Scriptures explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, ‘This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ’” (Acts 17:2-3). Though many rejected the teaching, some “received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (‭‭Acts‬ ‭17‬:‭11‬). They let the prophets’ writings decide what they should believe, so when they heard something challenging, they checked it (and themselves) against the Bible. Though the words were from the mind and pen of a person, they saw them as from God, too. They called books of the Bible “Scriptures,” or holy writings, believing that God breathed into them (2 Tim. 3:16) so that these were “living and active” words that could pierce right through a person like a sword (Heb. 4:12). As Paul traveled and taught, something happened in those who heard and believed — the message changed people. Paul wrote over a dozen letters to help guide early Christians. They collected those along with writings by other apostles and prophets — assembling them into the library of 27 books we call the New Testament.

That completed the Bible we have today — a collection of books, each with their own purpose and original audience, yet all united into one story. Though originally written to other people in other languages, God has preserved them down through the centuries for us.