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750 word response for OT281 I started this course after reading Unseen Realm and most of Heiser’s work. His content has truly been a blessing to the body of Christ and we are very fortunate to have him to this day in age. Heiser deals with several key understandings in this course, but I think fundamentally is to understand that in the construction of the Old Testament, inspiration is a process not an event. In the course Heiser explains the process in order of its construction, namely, inspiration, composition, transmission, translation. More boarding is the actual phrase “Old Testament” Old comes from the fact that these texts are derived from early antiquity and of course Testament which is actually a reference to covenant. It's about how God started His relationship with His people. The scope of the Old Testament includes the torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, all the way until around 400 BC, the authority is encapsulated within about a thousand years, which is quite remarkable considering the way it correlates to one another book. In addressing the process Heiser goes into detail with regard to his use of inspiration, that has two roles, one role is accomplished by God, He is the ultimate source. The other role is fulfilled by the human author. In Heiser’s words, “We have an ultimate source, which is God, and then an immediate source, which is the human being who is actually doing the writing.” The second part of how we got the Old Testament is the composition, mankind has a writing system, but first there was an oral tradition, which played a significant role in how we got the Old Testament. When it was finally written done, it wasn’t done poorly it was done so with great ability including things like literary techniques, they used sources to quote to bring out their theological idea and of course, at times you would see the biblical writers create original material. Something I think really challenges a lot of people and was a bit of a surprise to me was the concept of editing. Heiser demonstrated this in a few places in the bible, most specifically within Ezek. 1, toggling back from first person to third person perspective, it points to an editorial hand. From that point in the class we begin to discuss the transmission of the text, we see Heiser explore the various Codex, i.e. books that have been recovered and preserved for the church. Something that was quite striking that Heiser built up is quoted here, “ Prior to 1947—that is the key date, as you’ll find out in a moment—prior to 1947, scholars who were working with manuscript evidence of the OT frankly didn’t have a lot to work with. All that we really had in terms of Hebrew evidence was medieval. That is, the traditional Hebrew text, which is referred to as the Masoretic Text, was preserved primarily in documents that dated to around 900 or 1000 AD. That’s AD. That’s quite a bit after, quite a bit subsequent to the biblical period. There were some major documents. One was called the Aleppo Codex. There’s something called Leningradensis, and then there were documents from a place called the Cairo Geniza. We’ll talk about all of those in a moment. They were not ancient is the point. Now, when it came to a Greek material, again, the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, that actually took people back farther, but it was Greek. It wasn’t Hebrew. There was also the Hebrew Torah that was used by the Samaritan community. The Samaritans are a sect of Judaism, and they consider only the books of the Torah as canonical. They had their own version of the Torah, and that was available to scholars as well. Prior to 1947, this is what the academic community had to work with as far as manuscript evidence for the OT. Again, that date is going to become critical, but just so that we catch what I’m saying right here, there were basically three bodies of evidence. Only one of them really had great antiquity: the Septuagint. We didn’t have any Hebrew material that really extended far back into time.” He builds up this quite significantly, which makes sense because that was when the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered.  Finally, we reach translation, there are several text critical issues that were addressed by Heiser. He spoke about the process and in determining variants, how we look at the evidence when the data has been gathered. I thoroughly enjoyed this course and I recommend it to everyone I know.  Michael S. Heiser, OT281 How We Got the Old Testament, Logos Mobile Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014).