HSSB 6020
UCSB Campus
About the event
Why doesn’t the Bible name its authors? This lecture answers this question by offering a new model for the authorship of biblical literature, or more precisely, the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. In ancient Israel, literacy was acquired through apprenticeship in different professions, and these professions created the scribal communities that wrote the Bible. This lecture, based on Schniedewind’s recent book, answers the question of Who Really Wrote the Bible by tracing and documenting the Story of the Scribes through archaeology, inscriptions, anthropological theory as well as a close reading of biblical literature.
About Professor William Schniedewind
William Schniedewind is a Professor of Biblical Studies and the Director of the Alan D. Leve Center of Jewish Studies at UCLA.
He received his Ph.D. in Bible and Ancient Near East from Brandeis University, and he has been a Visiting Scholar at the Hebrew University and a Research Fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. He is the author and editor of ten books, including The Word of God in Transition, A Social History of Hebrew (Yale, 2013), Torah: Functions, Meanings, and Diverse Manifestations in Early Judaism and Christianity, and most recently, Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes.
