Who Really Wrote the Bible
The Story of the Scribes
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- $30.99
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- $30.99
Publisher Description
A groundbreaking new account of the writing of the Hebrew Bible
Who wrote the Bible? Its books have no bylines. Tradition long identified Moses as the author of the Pentateuch, with Ezra as editor. Ancient readers also suggested that David wrote the psalms and Solomon wrote Proverbs and Qohelet. Although the Hebrew Bible rarely speaks of its authors, people have been fascinated by the question of its authorship since ancient times. In Who Really Wrote the Bible, William Schniedewind offers a bold new answer: the Bible was not written by a single author, or by a series of single authors, but by communities of scribes. The Bible does not name its authors because authorship itself was an idea enshrined in a later era by the ancient Greeks. In the pre-Hellenistic world of ancient Near Eastern literature, books were produced, preserved, and passed on by scribal communities.
Schniedewind draws on ancient inscriptions, archaeology, and anthropology, as well as a close reading of the biblical text itself, to trace the communal origin of biblical literature. Scribes were educated through apprenticeship rather than in schools. The prophet Isaiah, for example, has his “disciples”; Elisha has his “apprentice.” This mode of learning emphasized the need to pass along the traditions of a community of practice rather than to individuate and invent. Schniedewind shows that it is anachronistic to impose our ideas about individual authorship and authors on the writing of the Bible. Ancient Israelites didn’t live in books, he writes, but along dusty highways and byways. Who Really Wrote the Bible describes how scribes and their apprentices actually worked in ancient Jerusalem and Judah.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"If we want to understand" the origins of the Hebrew bible, then "we need to think about... where scribes really worked," according to this insightful and enjoyable study. Biblical historian Schniedewind (Finger of the Scribe) argues that notions of individual authorship (e.g., Solomon wrote the Proverbs) are wrongheaded, and that even recent scholarly theories about collective authorship by scribal communities have been overly aggrandizing. Instead, he presents a more down-to-earth vision of scribal community authorship that emphasizes a universal truth: "Scribes were not venerable wise men hanging out with their books. Everyone needs to ‘pay the rent' and scribes were no exception." In the eighth century BCE, when the Hebrew Bible was written, all scribes labored under an apprenticeship system in which one master would have multiple apprentices. Schniedewind demonstrates how these relationships—half professional, half familial—are woven into the Bible's stories (the prophets Elija and Elisa, for example, have something like a master-apprentice relationship). He also evocatively portrays the doting brotherly relationship between scribes (in one government missive, a scribe tacked on "I am always, utterly yours!" as a personal message to the scribe on the receiving end). Schniedewind's erudite but still conversational prose brings admirable clarity to ancient breadcrumb trails of evidence. It's an enlightening deep dive into the social world in which the Bible was written.
