Who wrote the Bible

Who really wrote the Bible? A Dec. 3 lecture by William Schniedewind will offer a bold new answer to that age-old question.

"Although the Hebrew Bible rarely speaks of its authors, people have been fascinated by the question of its authorship since ancient times," said Schniedewind, the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and a professor of biblical studies and northwest Semitic languages. "But the Bible was not written by a single author, or by a series of single authors."

Rather, he said, it was written by communities of scribes.

"It's important to think of the Bible as an anthology of ancient Jewish communities as opposed to a singular voice," he said. "To understand the Bible, you have to understand the communities that produced it."

Schniedewind's lecture will be based on his latest book, "Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes" (Princeton University Press, 2024), which draws from ancient inscriptions, archaeology, anthropology and the biblical text itself to explain how those communities worked. The lecture will also give highlights from history of those scribal communities in ancient Israel and early Judaism.

Beginning with the earliest scribes who were affiliated with the state, Schniedewind said, writing spread under the globalization and urbanization of the ancient Near East that was taking place with the rise of the Assyrian empire around 720 B.C.

"People of different professions, including priests in Jerusalem, peripheral priests, merchants and soldiers, in addition to social groups like elders of ancient Israel and women, developed a writing practice through an apprenticeship model," he said.

The apprenticeship model of learning to read and write differs from the idea of individualistic biblical authorship. The apprenticeship learning model emphasized the need to preserve and replicate traditions of a community of practice rather than inventing and reinventing tradition.

"In antiquity, scribes weren't authors," he said. "Writing was a skill that was part of some professions. It wasn't until the Hellenistic period [323 to 31 B.C.] and the Roman period [27 B.C. to 486 A.D.] that 'scribe' became an actual occupation in Judaism."

Therefore, projecting individual authorship onto the writing of the Bible would be anachronistic. Ideas about authorship were part of the reception of Bible rather than its composition. Schniedewind's lecture will take aim at that idea of authorship and present a new approach to uncovering who really wrote the Bible.

The lecture is part of the Bible and the Ancient World seminar series, a collaboration between the Leve Center and the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures that focuses on the formation and interpretation of the Bible in the ancient world.

The talk will place Dec. 3 from 2 to 3:30 p.m. in Royce Hall 314. Visit the Leve Center website for more information and to RSVP.