Jacob Wright on "Why the Bible Began"

INTERVIEW: New book examines how the Bible came to be — a loser’s tale. Successive expulsions and exiles forced the ancient scribes to forge from their defeats a new identity as a people (Yonat Shimron).

(RNS) — Studying the Bible from a historic and critical lens is a longstanding project dating back to the 18th century. As new archaeological evidence comes to light, that project of better understanding the ancient world and its most influential text keeps evolving.

Jacob L. Wright, a professor of Hebrew Bible at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, has now written a book that takes all the latest findings to help illustrate how the Hebrew Bible came together — and critically, why.

In “Why the Bible Began,” he concludes that successive expulsions and exiles — first the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, the Persians, and later the Greeks and Romans — forced the ancient scribes to forge from their defeats a new identity as a people.

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New Book: Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

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