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

As 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.

That is the book’s core idea, and while he shades and nuances it very expertly, the reader will have grasped the key point within the first five pages. It is not wholly original: the only wholly original ideas in biblical studies are mad. But it does allow Schniedewind to approach an old problem from an unusual perspective and, with careful analysis, to trace a non-traditional history of ancient Hebrew writing.

In fact, the question of who wrote the Bible is on the back-burner for much of the book. Schniedewind’s opening question concerns who did the work of writing at all in ancient Judah and Israel. He has no time for scribal ‘schools’, or any other formal institutions. ‘Scribe’ was not a job for which you trained; scribing was a set of skills you learned by apprenticeship when pursuing some other career. The bulk of the book uses inscriptions and other fragmentary, archaeological traces of Hebrew writing to reconstruct who these scribal communities were and what they did.

We have such traces of Hebrew writing going back to the 11th century BC and beyond – but only traces. Until the later eighth century BC, Schniedewind argues, writing was very unusual in the Hebraic world, mostly used by kings and their armies, who kept records, burnished royal narratives and maintained lists of soldiers and tributaries. The great religious figures of the age – Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah – did not use writing. Nor, at least initially, did the disciples and apprentices who transmitted, interpreted and continued their teaching.

The decisive change, Schniedewind argues, came with the rise of the Assyrian empire and its conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel around 720 BC. Assyria’s bureaucratic literary culture was felt beyond its borders, but the critical impact, in this telling, was the flood of refugees from the northern kingdom fleeing south to Jerusalem. Those refugees included Israel’s literate caste, now thrown into destitution: Schniedewind includes a compelling account of an inscription made by labourers digging a tunnel in seventh-century Jerusalem, executed in a polished northern script. Much like Huguenot refugees in 17th-century Europe, or Jewish refugees in 1930s America, this intellectually transformative wave of immigrants fuelled an unprecedented boom in Hebrew literary culture.

This was the period when writing properly spilled out beyond the palace walls, and in which, as Schniedewind suggests, a wider set of scribal cultures emerged which were open to women as well as to men. Much of the ancient Hebrew literature we have dates back to the long seventh century, Jerusalem’s cultural golden age between the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions.

And then, when the Kingdom of Judah was conquered by Babylon in 587 BC, it all fell apart. The shattering of Hebrew literary culture is demonstrated by the appearance of something hitherto unprecedented: individual authors, torn from their communities and forced to speak for themselves, notably the prophets Jeremiah and, especially, Ezekiel, whose book really does appear to have been written by him. But even this is not as individual as it might seem. Schniedewind argues that we should classify both of those gentlemen not primarily as prophets but as priests: and it was priestly communities who assembled and codified the Hebrew Bible over the following centuries, even as the Hebrew language fell out of everyday use.

So who wrote the Hebrew Bible? Communities of seventh-century scribes and fifth-century priests. But perhaps that is not the right question. These ‘authors’ were receiving, shaping and editing oral traditions and fragments of text reaching back much further. As a historian of writing, Schniedewind is not really interested in who originally composed the accounts we have. Most likely that question is unanswerable, but, given this book’s alluring title, it feels like a bait-and-switch. It is a little like promising to reveal the author of a famous anonymous book, and instead telling us, with a flourish, about its publisher.

Still, if we want to understand some of the Bible’s many strangenesses, this approach is very fruitful. I am particularly taken by Schniedewind’s view that the scribes had an ‘anthological impulse’: their duty was to preserve the many-faceted traditions they 
had received. When the New Testament was canonised, centuries later, the early Christians were selective, not daring to include any texts of whose authority they could not be sure. By contrast, these Hebrew scribes, in a world where writing was so much rarer, were expansive, not daring to exclude any texts or traditions that might include elements that God had once entrusted to his people. To read these familiar, yet deeply alien ancient texts with that more generous, even naïve impulse in mind may be to move one step closer to the world that created them.

• Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes
  William M. Schniedewind
  Princeton University Press, 360pp, £35
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University.