The Bible tells us that Moses was "educated in all the learning of the Egyptians", so he would have been familiar with the major writing systems of his time. We also read that God gave Moses "two tablets of the Testimony, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God"(Exodus 31:18). All this leads to the conclusion that the earliest writings in the Bible were set down around 1400 BC.
The writings of the thirty or so other contributors to the Old Testament span a thousand years. They recount the times and messages from Moses' successor, Joshua, to the last of the Old Testament prophets, Malachi, who wrote his little tract around 450 BC.
