Well I'm glad you survived Yom Kippur pugtm san !! Welcome back again.
I'm finding it a bit hard to start out on this. Hummm...well here goes.
In the year 100 BCE was there a Bible? Yes, there was, but it was not the one we have today! That, whether a person is emotionally inclined to clasp their hands over their ears and shut their eyes or not, is a fact. In what way can we so confidently claim that it was a fact? There were no gospel accounts, no letters written by any Christian religious leaders circulating--so, relative to our Bible of 66 individual works of today, there was no Bible in 100 BCE.
Was there a Bible in the year 500 BCE? Yes, there was, but it was not the same as what would have been considered 'the body of sacred writings' in the year 100 BCE. How is that so? There were quite plausibly some books within that group of sacred writings which had since been lost with the fall of Israel to Babylon. Also there were written documents added to that group later than 500 BCE. In fact, if a person goes back far enough, there will be no Bible in any shape, size, function, or content.
This fact must be kept in mind when dealing with this field of study !! There was a time, when there was not !! For this reason, we must work at verifying the claims made by those who adopted the written works which passed through time and hands, to reach us today--in whatever forms they may have taken along the way.
It is for that reason that I had put the cut off point for the referent for our term 'Bible' to be the first quarter of the fourth century--the 'Bible' from that point in time has not changed much at all.
POINT NUMBER ONE : The Bible was penned by human beings.
There is no contest against this understanding at all ! It is absolute fact that people wrote down on some medium, in some language of human design, the content that is to be found on the pages which make up the works that we include in our definition--Bible.
POINT NUMBER TWO : The Bible's content changed as people changed with the flow of time.
Now here is where we will start to get embedded--go into detail. I hope that all that are really interested, take the time to take it all in carefully. (of course I will not go into too much detail) I will start with the Jewish religious works, although starting with the Christian works is usually much easier due to much closer text forms to extrabiblical writings.
A. The Mishnah and Gemara (Talmud) are explanations of what had been considered the oral law, and are from the late second to early third centuries, and later third to sixth centuries, respectively. There is no written record of such oral tradition before that, so it has no room in the discussion.
(1)
At first, the writings had been in the various stages of Hebrew, and had consisted of primarily the Torah. This basic work, however, more likely than not appears to have been built upon as time proceeded.
(2) Also, we do have both the Judean Torah and the Samarian Torah which display some differences.
Then, in time the several Jewish documents went Greek. In his work
Antiquites of the Jews, Joseph ben Matthias (Favious Josephus) written sometime around 93 or 94 CE, gives us the following:
II.13--Now when the law was transcribed, and the labour of the interpretation was over, which came to its conclusion in seventy-two days, Demetrius gathered all the Jews together to the place where the laws were translated, and where the interpreters were, and read them over. The multitude did also approve of those elders that were the interpreters of the law. Moreover they all, both the priests and the ancientest of the elders, and the principal men of their commonwealth, made it their request, that since the interpretation was happily finished, it might continue in the state it now was, and might not be altered. (3)
This work, the Septuagint (LXX) became the all-round sacred collection of writings for especially Jewish groups of the diaspora. This work, however, differs from the best recension of the line of texts in the Hebrew language. Also, there are a few variance of LXX textual exemplars that can be found.
I will go into those next, but the main point up to
this point is that we can very clearly see that there had not been one single and invariably agreed on textual format for the Torah, the Nevi'im, and the Kethuvim, among other texts that did not eventually make the standard group in 90 CE.
1. What the Great Religions Believe by Joseph Gaer; 1963, pp 107, 108; 2. The Yahwist: The Earliest Editor in the Pentatech by Christoph Levin; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munchen, Germany (Journal of Biblical Literature--HERE AFTER JBL--Vol. 126/2 '07, pp 209-230; 3. The Complete Works of Josephus by Wm. Whiston 27th printing; p250. 
k)
no food or water for 25 hours straight. 
:gulp:!!!!
