As positive as chickens come from eggs, books have authors. Figuring out the creator’s id offers a guide authority; that’s how we all know it’s genuine. No marvel that so many individuals have requested the query on this guide’s title. The standard reply – it was God, clearly – could also be theologically satisfying however doesn’t get you very far. A lot of the Bible’s books had been lengthy linked by custom to particular, big-name authors: Moses, David, Solomon, Paul. For hundreds of years, students have been dismantling these attributions, typically shredding biblical books into ribbons to tease out their totally different authors in heroic feats of textual evaluation which it’s fairly not possible to show both proper or mistaken. William Schniedewind’s guide approaches the issue differently.
His scope is solely the Hebrew Bible, the ‘Previous Testomony’. There are additionally questions in regards to the authorship of the New Testomony, however that was written in Greek and Schniedewind sees ‘authorship’, within the fashionable sense, as a Greek concept that was a latecomer to Jewish tradition. Nearly not one of the books of the Hebrew Bible declare to have an creator, just because that’s not how books had been written in historical Hebrew. They had been the product of scribal communities, not people.
That’s the guide’s core concept, and whereas he shades and nuances it very expertly, the reader can have grasped the important thing level throughout the first 5 pages. It isn’t wholly unique: the one wholly unique concepts in biblical research are mad. Nevertheless it does enable Schniedewind to strategy an previous downside from an uncommon perspective and, with cautious evaluation, to hint a non-traditional historical past of historical Hebrew writing.
The truth is, the query of who wrote the Bible is on the back-burner for a lot of the guide. Schniedewind’s opening query considerations who did the work of writing in any respect in historical Judah and Israel. He has no time for scribal ‘colleges’, or some other formal establishments. ‘Scribe’ was not a job for which you skilled; scribing was a set of expertise you discovered by apprenticeship when pursuing another profession. The majority of the guide makes use of inscriptions and different fragmentary, archaeological traces of Hebrew writing to reconstruct who these scribal communities had been and what they did.
We’ve got such traces of Hebrew writing going again to the eleventh century BC and past – however solely traces. Till the later eighth century BC, Schniedewind argues, writing was very uncommon within the Hebraic world, largely utilized by kings and their armies, who saved data, burnished royal narratives and maintained lists of troopers and tributaries. The nice non secular figures of the age – Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah – didn’t use writing. Nor, not less than initially, did the disciples and apprentices who transmitted, interpreted and continued their instructing.
The decisive change, Schniedewind argues, got here with the rise of the Assyrian empire and its conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel round 720 BC. Assyria’s bureaucratic literary tradition was felt past its borders, however the crucial affect, on this telling, was the flood of refugees from the northern kingdom fleeing south to Jerusalem. These refugees included Israel’s literate caste, now thrown into destitution: Schniedewind features a compelling account of an inscription made by labourers digging a tunnel in seventh-century Jerusalem, executed in a refined northern script. Very similar to Huguenot refugees in Seventeenth-century Europe, or Jewish refugees in Thirties America, this intellectually transformative wave of immigrants fuelled an unprecedented increase in Hebrew literary tradition.
This was the interval when writing correctly spilled out past the palace partitions, and during which, as Schniedewind suggests, a wider set of scribal cultures emerged which had been open to girls in addition to to males. A lot of the traditional Hebrew literature we’ve dates again to the lengthy seventh century, Jerusalem’s cultural golden age between the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions.
After which, when the Kingdom of Judah was conquered by Babylon in 587 BC, all of it fell aside. The shattering of Hebrew literary tradition is demonstrated by the looks of one thing hitherto unprecedented: particular person authors, torn from their communities and compelled to talk for themselves, notably the prophets Jeremiah and, particularly, Ezekiel, whose guide actually does seem to have been written by him. However even this isn’t as particular person because it may appear. Schniedewind argues that we must always classify each of these gents not primarily as prophets however as clergymen: and it was priestly communities who assembled and codified the Hebrew Bible over the next centuries, even because the Hebrew language fell out of on a regular basis use.
So who wrote the Hebrew Bible? Communities of seventh-century scribes and fifth-century clergymen. However maybe that isn’t the correct query. These ‘authors’ had been receiving, shaping and enhancing oral traditions and fragments of textual content reaching again a lot additional. As a historian of writing, Schniedewind just isn’t actually involved in who initially composed the accounts we’ve. Most definitely that query is unanswerable, however, given this guide’s alluring title, it seems like a bait-and-switch. It’s a little like promising to disclose the creator of a well-known nameless guide, and as an alternative telling us, with a flourish, about its writer.
Nonetheless, if we wish to perceive a number of the Bible’s many strangenesses, this strategy could be very fruitful. I’m notably taken by Schniedewind’s view that the scribes had an ‘anthological impulse’: their obligation was to protect the many-faceted traditions they
had obtained. When the New Testomony was canonised, centuries later, the early Christians had been selective, not daring to incorporate any texts of whose authority they might not be certain. In contrast, these Hebrew scribes, in a world the place writing was a lot rarer, had been expansive, not daring to exclude any texts or traditions which may embody components that God had as soon as entrusted to his folks. To learn these acquainted, but deeply alien historical texts with that extra beneficiant, even naïve impulse in thoughts could also be to maneuver one step nearer to the world that created them.
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Who Actually Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes
William M. Schniedewind
Princeton College Press, 360pp, £35
Purchase from bookshop.org (affiliate hyperlink)
Alec Ryrie is Professor of the Historical past of Christianity at Durham College.
