How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel

By Schniedewind, William M.
Cambridge University Press, 2004, Hardcover, 258 pp, ISBN: 0521829461, $29.99

This book combines recent archaeological discoveries in the Middle East with insights culled from the history of writing to address how the Bible first came to be written down and then became sacred Scripture.

For the past two hundred years biblical scholars have usually assumed that the Hebrew Bible was written and edited mostly in the Persian and Hellenistic periods (the fifth through second centuries B.C.E.). Recent archaeological evidence and insights from linguistic anthropology, however, point to the earlier era of the late Iron Age (eighth though sixth centuries B.C.E.) as the formative period for the writing of biblical literature.

This book, written for general readers and scholars alike, provides insight into why these texts came to have authority as Scripture and explores why Ancient Israel, an oral culture, began to write literature.

It describes an emerging literate society in ancient Israel that challenges the assertion that literacy first arose in Greece during the fifth century B.C.E. Schniedewind's provocative thesis will likely generate some controversy, but it will be well received among those who accept the historical revisionism of Israel Finkelstein and others.