A revolutionary new perspective on the authorship of the Hebrew Bible. Who wrote the Bible? Its books do not have signatures. Tradition remembered Moses as the author of the Pentateuch, with Ezra as the editor. Ancient readers also suggested that David wrote the Psalms and Solomon authored Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Although the Hebrew Bible rarely mentions its authors, people have been fascinated by the question of who wrote it since ancient times. In the book Who Really Wrote the Bible, William Schniedewind offers a bold new answer: the Bible was not written by a single author, nor by a series of individual writers, but by communities of scribes.

The Bible does not name its authors because the very idea of authorship was a concept established in later periods by the ancient Greeks. In the pre-Hellenistic world of ancient Eastern literature, books were produced, preserved, and transmitted by community seals. Schniedewind draws on ancient inscriptions, archaeology, and anthropology, as well as a careful reading of the biblical text, to demonstrate the communal origin of biblical literature.

Scribes were trained through apprenticeships rather than in schools. Does the prophet Isaiah have “students”? Does Elisha have his “apprentice”? This way of learning emphasized the importance of passing down traditions within a practicing community rather than individualizing and inventing them. Schniedewind shows that it is anachronistic to impose our ideas of individual authorship and writers onto the composition of the Bible. The ancient Israelites did not live in books, he writes, but along dusty highways and byways. Who Really Wrote the Bible describes how scribes and their apprentices worked in ancient Jerusalem and Judah.