Review of Schniedewind, Who Really Wrote the Bible

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Who Really Wrote the Bible’ by William M. Schniedewind review. 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 (Alec Ryrie, History Today 74, vol. 11).

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.

Cross-file under New Book (Princeton University Press, 2024).

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