Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes by William M. Schniedewind asks what authorship meant to the hidden hands behind the Old Testamen

‘Who Really Wrote the Bible’ by William M. Schniedewind review

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2024-11-18 06:30:05

Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes by William M. Schniedewind asks what authorship meant to the hidden hands behind the Old Testament.

A s sure as chickens come from eggs, books have authors. Knowing the author’s identity gives a book authority; that’s how we know it’s authentic. No wonder that so many people have asked the question in this book’s title. The traditional answer – it was God, obviously – may be theologically satisfying but doesn’t get you very far. Most of the Bible’s books were long linked by tradition to specific, big-name authors: Moses, David, Solomon, Paul. For centuries, scholars have been dismantling those attributions, often shredding biblical books into ribbons to tease out their different authors in heroic feats of textual analysis which it is quite impossible to prove either right or wrong. William Schniedewind’s book approaches the problem in a different way.

His scope is exclusively the Hebrew Bible, the ‘Old Testament’. There are also questions about the authorship of the New Testament, but that was written in Greek and Schniedewind sees ‘authorship’, in the modern sense, as a Greek idea that was a latecomer to Jewish culture. Almost none of the books of the Hebrew Bible claim to have an author, simply because that’s not how books were written in ancient Hebrew. They were the product of scribal communities, not individuals.

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