"Religious people have struggled with the Bible's contradictions since they first read it, and scholars have used them as a window into how it was created. What my project can explain is why those contradictions were put in the text in the first place," Sanders said.Background here and here, and PaleoJudaica has referred often to his work as well.
"As a collection of incompatible versions of similar stories, the Torah is unlike any other major work of ancient literature," Sanders said. "Biblical scholarship still cannot agree on how this new paradigm arose. My project draws on ancient Near Eastern evidence to explain what is new about it by placing the Torah in literary history."
You can read a lot more about Prof. Sanders's research at his current blog, sethlsanders and his earlier blog Serving the Word.
