Members of the Scribe

In the 1930s, archaeologists excavating the ancient Judahite city of Lachish, southwest of Jerusalem, unearthed several Hebrew ostraca—that is, potsherds that were written on. One of them was a letter sent by a soldier named Hoshayahu. He reported a message “from the prophet saying, ‘Beware.’” Strikingly, he appears to have sent it shortly before Jerusalem fell to Babylon in 586/587 BCE.

However, the prophecy isn’t even the most interesting part. Rather, it is when Hoshayahu, referring to himself as “your servant” and his recipient as “my lord,” complains about being disrespected:

Your servant has been despairing ever since you sent [your letter] to your servant. This is because my lord said, “You do not know how to read—call a scribe!” I swear to God that no one has ever had to read a letter to me! And also, any letter that came to me, I could read it, and I can recount it in every detail!

When I first read this text in graduate school, I laughed out loud. Hoshayahu’s righteous indignation was refreshingly relatable. But the more I thought about it, the more I was moved rather than tickled. At the heart of academic biblical studies is a paradox: Although the biblical writers tell us a tremendous amount about their world, they tell us basically nothing about themselves. Somewhat improbably, Hoshayahu’s petty squabble goes some way to answering the question that drives the entire field: Who really wrote the Bible?

That provocative phrase is the title of the latest book by William M. Schniedewind, an accomplished professor of biblical studies at UCLA. Schniedewind knows that the religious implications of biblical authorship are central for many of his readers, emphasizing, “I didn’t intend this book to be a broadside . . . against divine inspiration.” Instead, he clarifies, “I merely intend to take the human side of scripture quite seriously”—which means taking people like Hoshayahu seriously. This isn’t about replacing divine authorship with human authorship. It’s about abandoning the category of authorship altogether. Instead of authors, Schniedewind argues, we need to use the category that Hoshayahu himself uses. We need to talk about scribes.

The word “author” comes from Latin auctor, meaning “progenitor” or “creator.” It wasn’t used with regard to writing until the Hellenistic era, after most of the Bible was written. The Romantic period (early nineteenth century) further shaped our modern conception of great authors as unique, creative geniuses. Schniedewind cautions that because of these later origins, “the view of biblical authors is anachronistic.” In fact, there’s no ancient Hebrew equivalent for the term. The word mehabber now plays that role, but it comes from hibber, meaning “join” or “connect”—like Latin componere, which gives us “compose.” This is a better fit for how Schniedewind presents the Israelite scribe, or sofer. Scribes saw themselves not as creators but as curators.

This might seem like old news. Take the Documentary Hypothesis, the classic theory that the Torah was composed from four distinct, preexisting documents: J, E, P, and D, as scholars call them. This is the one idea in biblical studies that most nonacademics have heard of. In America, this is in part thanks to the 1980s bestseller whose title Schniedewind plays on: Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliott Friedman.

Since then, however, scholarly consensus around the Documentary Hypothesis has evaporated. Schniedewind suggests that this is because the theory treats the four sources as four individual authors. Indeed, Friedman presented biblical criticism as a kind of whodunit, uncovering the identities of these biblical authors. In good Romantic fashion, they come off as towering geniuses who produced an utterly unique work of literature transcending their ancient world.

Schniedewind argues that switching from “authors” to “scribes” means approaching the very process of ancient writing in its social context. The “who” in “who really wrote the Bible” is not a question of which individuals but of which groups. If we want to understand the scribes who wrote the Bible, we need to understand the groups in which those scribes learned to write in the first place.

Hoshayahu was one such scribe. His letter is historically valuable because he didn’t expect anyone other than the recipient to read it. Unlike the biblical writers, he didn’t have a public agenda. Think of it like reading someone’s text messages versus reading their social media posts. We all know that the text messages will give a more accurate picture of the person’s life.

For Schniedewind, uncovering how scribes learned to write the Bible involves reading as many of these scribes’ “text messages” as he can get his hands on. His book surveys a millennium’s worth of Hebrew inscriptions. All are beautifully illustrated, in most cases by Schniedewind himself, so that readers can appreciate what these artifacts look like. Indeed, seemingly minor physical features will turn out to be just as important as content for understanding who wrote these texts, why they did so, and what they have to do with the Bible.

Hoshayahu appears relatively late in the story. Schniedewind opens nearly a millennium earlier, in Amarna, the Egyptian capital during the fourteenth century BCE (not long before the time of the Exodus). Here, a little more than a hundred years ago, antiquities dealers and archaeologists discovered a trove of letters sent between Egyptian officials and their subjects in pre-Israelite Canaan. These are written in Akkadian, which was common practice—but with a unique Canaanite inflection. Schniedewind argues that the writers were the earliest scribal community in what later became Israel.

The Amarna letters reveal three key characteristics of early scribes. First, and most importantly, they learned to write in groups. The consistent use of idiosyncratic language across letters by different people suggests guild-style apprenticeships. It’s like how contemporary academics write in technical jargon (Schniedewind himself admirably avoids this). No one naturally writes this way. They are socialized into it.

Second, being a scribe was “a skill used in a profession” rather than “the profession itself.” If the Amarna writers had business cards, they would have said “administrative assistant,” not “scribe.” Accordingly, the Jewish concept of a dedicated professional sofer—someone whose main gig is writing Torah scrolls and other ritual texts—is, perhaps surprisingly, just as anachronistic as our modern concept of an author.

Third, scribes were closely tied to the establishment. The Amarna writers were government bureaucrats who primarily addressed military issues. Their writing was possible only because of training and material provided by the state. Accordingly, most texts from this period focus on political administration.

Schniedewind traces these three features through numerous early inscriptions. As he moves into the era of the divided monarchy—Israel in the north, Judah in the south—the implications for the Bible become clearer. For example, an inscription from Arad, a Judahite military fortress in the northeast Negev, contains the oldest known Hebrew list of royal officials. It is strikingly similar to the arcane rosters of such officials in the book of Kings (for instance, 1 Kings 4:1–19). This suggests that some of the earliest textual deposits of what became the Bible were “first of all the work of royal scribes.” Sacred scripture began in the most mundane forms of writing imaginable: bureaucratic recordkeeping.

Schniedewind argues that by Hoshayahu’s time, there had been a shift on the third point: Writing broke free of establishment control. If this soldier was offended by the allegation that he was illiterate, then literacy must have been a “social expectation.” For Schniedewind, it’s obvious why. “The rise of the Assyrian Empire,” he explains, “was accompanied by . . . globalization, industrialization, and urbanization. These all encouraged the use and spread of writing.”

As evidence of these developments, Schniedewind highlights the Siloam Tunnel inscription. This is a dedication for a Jerusalem irrigation tunnel that was built during the reign of Hezekiah. Oddly, the inscription is hidden deep in the tunnel itself, where it would rarely be seen. Even more oddly, it focuses on the workers, not the king who bankrolled the project. It’s as if the dedication plaque for a new shul building were displayed in the boiler room, celebrating the construction crew rather than the donor. What is it doing there?

Schniedewind finds the answer in the details. The inscription bears traces of a northern dialect and is penned in refined, professional handwriting. He proposes that the writers were highly trained northern scribes who fled south to Judah after Assyria conquered Israel. “There probably were not enough jobs for them in the Judean bureaucracy,” he explains. “They seem to have found work in a public works project and carved out their legacy in its inscription.” As a vivid comparison, he recalls that while living in Jerusalem in the 1990s during the post-Soviet aliyah, he befriended a Russian immigrant working as a street sweeper. Back in the USSR, the man had been a concert violinist.

The social shifts reflected in the Siloam inscription were basically permanent, some ebbs and flows notwithstanding. Although writing remained rooted in scribal communities, it would never be fully redomesticated by the establishment. Different scribal groups with different religious and political interests could now leave their mark.

One such group, Schniedewind argues, was the Am ha-aretz, literally “people of the land.” (In the Bible, this doesn’t mean “ignoramus” as it later would for the rabbis.) The Am ha-aretz appear at some major turning points in Judahite history. For instance, the book of Kings says, “The Am ha-aretz put to death all who had conspired against King Amon” and “made his son Josiah king in his stead” (2 Kings 21:24).

Josiah is famous because he instituted a far-reaching reform based on a scroll that was purportedly discovered in the temple. If the account of his reign has any truth to it, then the scroll was surely written as a pretext for the reform; scholars typically identify it as an early version of Deuteronomy. Accordingly, Schniedewind proposes that the Am ha-aretz who supported Josiah were a scribal group representing the interests of rural Judahites who, like northern Israelites, had been displaced by Assyria. Beyond Deuteronomy, they were involved in producing the Holiness Code (Lev. 17–26), Kings, and Micah—all of which, to one extent or another, are attentive to the economically marginalized.

As evidence for this theory, Schniedewind points to the Yavneh-Yam ostracon. Discovered in 1960 at the site of a remote Judahite agricultural fortress not far from contemporary Tel Aviv, this inscription records an allegation of workplace exploitation: “When I had finished my harvest—this very day—he took your servant’s garment!” This directly parallels Deuteronomy’s injunction against keeping poor people’s garments in pledge overnight.

What does this have to do with the Am ha-aretz? Schniedewind observes that the handwriting on the ostracon diverges from royal conventions. The letter aleph is sometimes reversed, and the letter dalet is written with an atypical opening. To Schniedewind, these don’t look like mistakes so much as the unique style of an outsider scribal community—in other words, the Am ha-aretz. If he’s right, then the irony is rich: Some of the most powerful texts in history were written by scribes representing some of the least powerful people of their day.

“In order to understand the Bible,” Schniedewind says on the first page of his book, “we need to understand the people who wrote it and the communities in which they worked.” His account of the social dynamics, cultural structures, and material realities that enabled ancient scribes to write the Bible is masterful and compelling. But does this help us “understand the Bible”? Having learned how scribes learned to write, are we better able to interpret the stories, poems, laws, and discourses that they used those skills to produce?

Schniedewind shows convincingly that the administrative lists in Kings originated in the royal bureaucracy. The parallel with the Arad texts is undeniable, but this only highlights the literary gap between the simple lists and the complex historiography that now contains them. Bureaucratic origins do not explain, for instance, the substance of its presentation of Josiah or its theology of Judah’s fall.

When it comes to the Yavne-Yam ostracon, the issue is even starker. Although the inscription and the (alleged) Am ha-aretz texts reflect similar economic concerns, they have nothing in common literarily. Deuteronomy is not just a program for social reform. It is also a portrait of Mosaic prophecy, a narrative about the law-giving, an account of divine transcendence, and a theory of textual religion—among other things. Similar points may be made for the Holiness Code, Kings, and Micah. Even if Schniedewind is right that these texts began as the political intervention of an outsider scribal group, it does not necessarily follow that these social origins determine the texts’ meaning.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the problem more clearly than Hoshayahu’s letter. Schniedewind notes that prophetic literature is indebted to the scribal conventions of letter writing. Just as human messages begin with “Thus says So-and-So,” so, too, do divine messages begin with “Thus says the LORD.” Because letters were read aloud by messengers, this connection tells us something crucial about the medium of the message: Prophecy was oral, even when described in writing. However, this tells us little (if anything) about the message itself. Does Hoshayahu’s letter regarding a one-word prophecy—“Beware”—really deepen our understanding of the content of the elaborate oracles attributed to Isaiah or Jeremiah?

Schniedewind is right to dispense with the Romantic notion that the Bible was written by unique geniuses. However, his reorientation toward scribal groups cannot escape the historical reality of the Bible’s own uniqueness as literature. The inscriptions are helpful because they are normal, everyday texts. But that is also precisely why they only go so far: The Bible is not a normal, everyday text in terms of literary scale, ambition, and complexity.

It would have been enough to say that studying where literature comes from and studying how literature works are mutually enriching but not identical. Instead, however, Schniedewind treats the Bible as if it were one giant inscription. The result is that in this book about who really wrote the Bible, the Bible itself feels strangely marginal. The scribes are no longer simply telling the story. They have become the story.

When I first read Hoshayahu’s letter back in graduate school, I dreamed of writing back to ask him all about his scribal training. If I knew more about that, I thought, I could answer the question that consumed me more than any other: Who produced the scriptures to which I’d dedicated my life?

My soft spot for Hoshayahu and his bruised ego remains. Yet having read Schniedewind’s Who Really Wrote the Bible, I find myself wondering whether there’s a good reason that Hoshayahu’s burst of personality has no real analog among the biblical scribes. Perhaps these scribes weren’t hiding so much as trying to tell us something: “We aren’t the point; what we wrote is the point.”

I now think that, given the chance, I’d respond to the sullen soldier’s letter differently: “My dear Hoshayahu, you’re right. No one should insult your education. Now, please—tell me more about this prophet.”