The traditional answer – it was God, obviously – may be theologically satisfying but doesn’t get you very far. Most of the Bible’s books were long linked by tradition to specific, big-name authors: Moses, David, Solomon, Paul.
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.
‘Scribe’ was not a job for which you trained; scribing was a set of skills you learned by apprenticeship when pursuing some other career. The bulk of the book uses inscriptions and other fragmentary, archaeological traces of Hebrew writing to reconstruct who these scribal communities were and what they did.
We have such traces of Hebrew writing going back to the 11th century BC and beyond – but only traces. Until the later eighth century BC, Schniedewind argues, writing was very unusual in the Hebraic world, mostly used by kings and their armies, who kept records, burnished royal narratives and maintained lists of soldiers and tributaries.
The decisive change, Schniedewind argues, came with the rise of the Assyrian empire and its conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel around 720 BC.
This was the period when writing properly spilled out beyond the palace walls, and in which, as Schniedewind suggests, a wider set of scribal cultures emerged which were open to women as well as to men. Much of the ancient Hebrew literature we have dates back to the long seventh century, Jerusalem’s cultural golden age between the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions.
So who wrote the Hebrew Bible? Communities of seventh-century scribes and fifth-century priests. But perhaps that is not the right question. These ‘authors’ were receiving, shaping and editing oral traditions and fragments of text reaching back much further. As a historian of writing, Schniedewind is not really interested in who originally composed the accounts we have. Most likely that question is unanswerable, but, given this book’s alluring title, it feels like a bait-and-switch. It is a little like promising to reveal the author of a famous anonymous book, and instead telling us, with a flourish, about its publisher.
When the New Testament was canonised, centuries later, the early Christians were selective, not daring to include any texts of whose authority they could not be sure. By contrast, these Hebrew scribes, in a world where writing was so much rarer, were expansive, not daring to exclude any texts or traditions that might include elements that God had once entrusted to his people.