Episode 308: Bill Schniedewind - The Scribes Who Wrote the Bible

Aug 31

In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Nerd-in-Residence Cynthia are joined by Bill Schniedewind to discuss who really wrote the Bible. Bill explains how different scribal communities each left their own mark on the texts they were writing, and how the diversity of the Bible’s human authors reflects the beauty and richness of the text itself.

Mentioned in This Episode

Books: Who Really Wrote the Bible by Bill Schniedewind

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Pete: You are listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.
Pete: Hey everybody. Welcome to this episode of The Bible for Normal People, and today it's me joined by my wonderful co-host, Cynthia Schafer Elliot.
Cynthia: Hey everyone.
Pete: Isn't it great to be here, Cynthia? I mean, really,
Cynthia: It's wonderful. It is. I'm always happy to be here.
Pete: It’s fun talking with Bill Schniedewind today, and the topic was, you know, a lot of people think the Bible was written by individual authors, but that's probably not the case.
It was written by communities of scribes, and that's what we're talking about today.
Cynthia: So Bill is Professor of Biblical Studies and Northwest Semitic Languages, as well as Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director at the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. Wow. That is a job description.
Pete: Yes, it is.
Cynthia: His books and articles cover a wide range of topics relating to biblical studies, Dead Sea Scrolls, and ancient languages and inscriptions. And his most recent book is called Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes.
Pete: Right. And that's. The big topic of the conversation today. So folks, as always, thanks for tuning in and listening, and we hope you enjoy this conversation as much as Cynthia and I did.
All right, Bill, it's great to have you back on our podcast.
Bill: It's great to be back.
Pete: We talk about scribal culture and, and where, who really wrote the Bible. So I think the first question to get at is, um, I think it's fair to say most people. I think even a lot of academics will sort of assume authorship when it comes to books of the Bible. Like, who wrote Genesis or who wrote Deuteronomy?
Bill: Absolutely, absolutely.
Pete: Um, like why, why, why do you think that even is a thing?
Bill: I mean, it's the paradigm we sort of live in, right? It's the world that we live in. I mean, books have authors. You look on the front page of whatever book and it's, you know. Uh, Clancy or whatever, you know, someone wrote this book.
And we, we, so that's the paradigm that we sort of work with, but it's, it's an anachronistic para paradigm. It's a paradigm that, in my opinion, really emerges in the Hellenistic period. Um, and before the Hellenistic period, books usually didn't have authors. So you know, something like the Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, or the book, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, or The Story of Egyptian, you know, story of Wenamun.
We could go on, and the Enuma Elish, you know, books don't have authors and that's actually true of the Bible too. I mean, Genesis doesn't begin, you know, with an author. It doesn't tell you about an author, so your question becomes like, why do we assume there's an author. It's something that essentially becomes an issue in the Hellenistic period, you know, the, which is like the third, second century BC uh, uh, Jews come into, into a context of Greek, a Greek world where Greeks had authors, you know? And Greek, and authorship was a central part of Greek literature. And then the Jews are asking her so well, who wrote our books?
You know? Right. We have people that we can assign to the author as authors. They're usually not out there in the front.
Pete: So, so maybe that gave rise to the idea that Moses wrote Torah. Right. Because we, we have to have sort of an author 'cause you know, we have to have our Plato or Socrates or, you know, Homer or somebody.
Bill: Right. But, you know, authors are also in a, in a way, you know, Moses is there, you know, he's a character in the book.
Cynthia: Mm-hmm.
Bill: Um. Sometimes the interesting thing is if you read the, the book carefully, like I think a great example is the book of Deuteronomy. It starts off, you know, you know, these are the words that Moses spoke, right?
Not, these aren't the words that he wrote. These are the, the words that he spoke. Now, eventually, you know, there are some places in the Bible where Moses is also regarded as a writer, but usually, you know, Moses is a speaker, and then we just sort of make the leap and say, oh, Moses spoke, spoke this. Oh, he must have written this right.
But of course, if that's what you meant then, then why didn't you say that? Or, you know, a really great example is the book of Isaiah. We assume Isaiah wrote Isaiah, but that's not what the book says. The book says this is the vision of Isaiah, which he saw, which gives you the impression that, yeah, somebody else is writing it.
Although sometimes, you know, you know, a good Isaiah is also a good example because there are moments of, you know, I would say biographical moments. Autobiographical moments in Isaiah, like Isaiah 6, right? In the year that King Uzziah died. Who saw the Lord? I saw the Lord. And that difference between the beginning of the book and, and that one, you know, story in, in, in chapter 6, 7, 8, you know, you get this kind of autobiographical, um, voice in Isaiah sort of is the contrast, I guess I would say it's the exception that proves the rule that, um, these books don't have authors.
Cynthia: You instead argue for a scribal culture, uh, writing these books or texts or parts of the book. So why then, do you, why do you think, like so many people, scholars, and just lay people alike, why do you think they gravitated towards, like, a single authorship?
What was it that made us think Moses wrote Torah, or Isaiah wrote Isaiah or any of the other examples. 'Cause if you talk to just normal folks about this and we tell them, hey, we think, you know, a group of scribes over a long period of time, put all this together. That's really groundbreaking for them.
Bill: Yeah. But it, it's the world that we kind of live in. But it's also the world of the New Testament, right? The New Testament has authors. I, and my point would be about the New Testament is that the New Testament lives in a post-Hellenistic world, that lives in the Greco-Roman world, where authors had already become a thing.
When we step back to the Old Testament, right, to the Hebrew Bible, we're stepping back to a different world. And it's a world that predates the centrality of authors in, in literature, rather scribal communities produce literature is the argument that I, I try to make in, in, in my book. And I think that's really well supported by the biblical text itself, but also, you know, archeological and comparative, um, inscriptional evidence.
Cynthia: Well, great. Maybe you could tell us, 'cause of course I'm fascinated by the archeological part. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about, you know, the different archeological evidence that you point to in the book, both maybe in the wider ancient Near East, and then a little bit closer to home in Judah and Israel.
Bill: Yeah, I mean, I'm looking, I'm looking at inscriptions, uh, largely so-
Pete: And what is an inscription? Explain, what is an inscription?
Bill: Ancient, ancient writing on, you know, cunieform, that we excavate or ancient Hebrew, uh, inscriptions. Sometimes they're ostraca that is broken from chards written, you know, with, uh, ink on clay.
Sometimes they're inscribed. Um, sometimes they're seals and seal impressions. Um, sometimes it's writing on a wall like a plaster wall at a place like Kuntillet Ajrud or Deir Alla, they, they were writing probably liturgical texts on walls of the, of the buildings, the purpose of which were for scribal communities to memorize the texts.
Kinda like we, we're in school, like we memorize the Declaration of Independence, or we memorize Robert Frost, or we memorize, um, I don't know, the Gettysburg address. You know, they've got their texts that they memorized as well, and that's how you learn as part of the schooling. How do you learn to read and write is by, a lot of it was by memorizing texts.
So that's what, that's what I'm looking- Kuntillet Ajrud is a really big, you know, um, archeological site that was important for me. I wrote a book, my previous book, which really inspired this book was, um, called The Finger of the Scribes: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible. And one of the things I noticed when I was looking at Kuntillet Ajrud, which is this fortress.
Um, in the, in the Negev, in the southern part of Judah in the desert. And because it's in the, in the Negev in this desert dry south, it preserved inscriptions really, really well. And so we have dozens and dozens of scripture, plaster on floors, you know, um, big, huge pots. And there you see an entire scribal community learning to read and write.
And you see some of the different kinds of curriculum that they use in, uh, in for practicing writing. You see a master and students, so there's, it's very interesting. You have the master writes in red ink and the students copy in black ink. You know, so this idea of red ink, you know, and, and the teacher, it goes all the way back.
Cynthia: We're still using red ink.
Bill: Yeah, we're still, we're still using it. It's a paradigm we know really well from Egyptian, Egyptian, um, school curriculum, but we find it in ancient Israel as well. So it's, it's really very interesting.
Cynthia: So, can I just go back just a little bit, Pete, I wanna make sure, um, so we're, when we're talking about your book, if you could just maybe summarize the argument of your book. Give us your elevator pitch for the book.
Bill: So the main point of the book is that, that the driver of the formation, collection, editing of biblical literature is scribal communities and not individual authors.
Um, and this, this is because of the way people learned. I mean, this, you know, a derivative of my last book, which is, people learn to read and write in, um, community through apprenticeship. Right? So for example, you know, I become Pete's student and he has five or six students and we all sit around a table and then you know, Pete is the master and he teaches us all, you know, to read and write.
And that's how people learned to read and write. There weren't formal schools. Everything was like, in a way it was like homeschool..And, um, that, that learning to read and write was done as an apprentice, for different kinds of professions. So if you were a priest in Jerusalem, you were an apprentice, you were apprenticed there, and your job wasn't actually to be a quote-unquote scribe or author.
Your job was to be a priest. But writing was part of that, or you were, um, the royal steward in Jerusalem. You were part of the Jerusalem bureaucracy. You learned to read and write as part of that bureaucracy. And so you were apprenticed, and your job wasn't to be at quote unquote scribe. Your job was to be, um, a royal bureaucrat or, you know, there's the sons of the prophets.
I have, this is one of my favorite parts of the book, is the prophetic scribal communities. There's something in the Hebrew Bible. A reflection of this called The Sons of the Prophets. It's a group of people who are essentially bound, bound together in a, in a community. In, um, 2 Kings 9, it talks about, Elisha calls one of the sons of the prophets to go anoint, um, Jehu as king, and then it says the apprentice of the prophet, you know, it, it actually calls him an apprentice of the prophet.
And he goes, and I think, um, uh, apprenticeship was an important, really important part of, of, uh, prophet, the prophetic office in, in Ancient Israel.
So there are different kinds of communities then, and each of these communities produce their own literature parts of the Bible. You know, there's the government bureaucrats who did, who did things like the Book of Kings. Then there are, you know, obviously, um, priestly, um, uh, communities there. I think there are, there's a Jerusalem priestly community, and then there are peripheral priestly communities, which I think produce the Holiness code of the Bible.
Um, so there are different kinds of, you know, communities and, and actually some of the, um, ideas that we have about like source criticism. You say, well, this is p, now, how do you know this is p or priestly literature in the Bible? Well, because priestly literature has a certain kind of language, you know?
And this fits really well with the kind of thing, of scribal communities, right? Because scribal communities have their own idiolect, we would say. That is to say it's the community groupspeak of that community. You learn in a closed community and you use the language of the closed community. And each of these different communities in the Hebrew Bible have their own idiolect.
We usually describe these as the quote-unquote sources with authors, but they're not single authors, they're the groupspeak of these different communities who, who were, who were, um, bound together in these, uh, uh, through apprenticeship learning to become the various different kinds of professionals.
Cynthia: Yeah. So you would prefer to use the term like scribal communities as opposed to like scribal schools or something like that?
Bill: Yeah, because I think school's the wrong, the wrong word. You know, because it gives us ideas unless we're thinking of homeschooling, right? Um, it gives us ideas of sort of formal public education.
And what, what really is happening is it's more like guilds. Mm-hmm. I mean, I don't use the word guild. I talk about the word guild. Um, but the problem with the word guild is sort of loaded with sort of the medieval overhang of the way it's used. Um, but it, it better fits, you know, that idea.
So I, yeah, but I, in the end, I come up with, I, I choose to, to talk about scribble communities.
Pete: So, I mean, while we're on that, let, let's talk about what we know about the beginnings, maybe of these scribal communities in Israel and Judah. And, um, maybe we can tie into that a couple of pretty important events, the exiles that, uh, were a part of the history of those two people groups.
Um, so can you, can you first just talk about what those exiles were, just so everybody's on board, who's listening and why that, why those exiles are important for the development of these scribal communities and writing.
Bill: Yeah, so I mean, usually when we talk about exiles, we, we usually emphasize the one exile that is the exile of the Judeans by the Babylonians.
Um, but there's an earlier exile, I would actually say two exiles. So let's, let's, let's call. Exile 1A and B. Exile 1A is, and this is really important, is, um, the exile of the northern kingdom. Right? The northern kingdom gets destroyed by the, the Assyrians in the eighth century BC so they come down around 732.
Then again in 721 and they destroyed Galilee and then Samaria and the, and uh, and the interesting thing about that first, you know, exile, you know, seven, uh, you know, um, my 1A is that it's, I think absolutely critical, critical for understanding how we get so much of biblical literature, because so much biblical of literature is about the northern tribes of Israel, right?
Um, and the question is, if the Bible were largely being collected by people in the Persian, you know, in the fourth century bc you know, three or four centuries after the Northern Kingdom had ceased to exist, then where did we get all this material? And, and more than that, it's like, why is it even important anymore?
You know? So it's really important to see to, uh, for me to explain, you know, why we have stories about the Northern Tribes in the Book of Judges in the book of Genesis. Um, uh, and a good way of explaining that is to say we have a huge amount of refugees.
Actually, this is a great, you know, talking about immigrants and refugees. Right, right. This is one of the, the major themes of biblical literature, like this concern for the, the widow, the orphan, and the, and the ger. I would, which I would translate refugee, you know, the immigrant, you know, sometimes it gets, you know, um, what's, what's the way they translate?
Cynthia: Foreigner. Sometimes it's foreigner.
Pete: Yeah. Sojourner.
Bill: Mm-hmm. But what is it? It's a refugee. It, it's what's happening in war. What happened, you know, where do, what happens in war as you get widows, orphans and, and refugees. And we see it, you know, in Syria, in Europe, you know, all these people coming in Europe, a lot of what's going on in the American borders is people coming as refugees because of violence and conflict.
So this is a major theme. If you read the Hebrew Bible, over and over and over again. This widow, the orphan, the alien, uh, right, the refugee. Why, why is this an important theme? Because. In Jerusalem in the late eighth century, you had, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people that came into Jerusalem and Hezekiah and the Kings tried to accommodate the refugees and biblical literature reflects this, um, interest and, and, and it preserves their story, right?
It preserved the story of the Northern Kingdom, but it also preserves the story of the 12, uh, the 10 tribes from the north as well. But I, my, but I think one of the great interesting con contributions of my book is to, to also talk about Exile 1B, which is in 701, the, the Assyrian King Sennacherib came and he destroyed the Judean Shfela or the Judean foothills, uh, west of Jerusalem.
And, and it's just completely wiped out. All the small villages were just completely destroyed, and we tend to talk about the exile is one event, you know, of the, you know of the seventh century. But actually this is a totally different group of people. Um, from the north you get, I think a lot of elites I have, there's some really cool, um, inscriptions that I talk about.
Um, seal impressions. There's a guy named Mehahem, son of Yawbana, and he, um, he seems like he is related to the northern aristocracy and he becomes an important figure in, in Judah. So you can see some of the fingerprints of these refugees in Jerusalem, but then you get these other refugees and they're from the, from villages in the Judean Shfela, and they're, they're like, I, I like to say they're like the red states, you know?
Because, because they're from, they're rural. They're, they're rural people, you know? Yeah. And, and they're, culturally, they're totally different from the Israeli and northern refugees who are pushing sort of, I would say more progressive religious ideas. You see it in the time of Manasseh in the Bible.
And then, um, and then I think you get this sort of swing back in the Josianic religious reform somewhere around 622 BC give or take if you follow biblical chronologies. Um, Josiah has this, I would say, return to good old time religion. And it's a, and it's a reform that's inspired by the Judean refugees, by a group of people in the Bible are called the Am ha'aretz or the people of the land.
Who are these people? I think I make a really good case that these people are the second wave of refugees from the Judean foothills. And they're culturally totally different than the first wave of refugees from, from the time, uh, from the north. And you get two different kind, you know, you get this sort of swing back and forth in religious reform under Hezekiah and then, um, and Josiah, and that explains a whole bunch of biblical literature as well.
You get this, I would, I would say books that and literature that's inspired by these refugees, like the Holiness Code in the book of Leviticus. Leviticus 17 through 26 is a group, is a set of texts that's all concerned essentially with the rural sites of, and the, and holiness in the rural, uh, sites.
Um, so yeah, so the, these different groups, then of course it all comes together, right? That's why the second exile, in the Babylonian exile, is so important. 'cause that's when it all comes together. 'Cause after the second exile, um. Everything essentially comes to Jerusalem and the Jerusalem priests are in, are, are in charge of bringing it all together.
So they have to take all the little various strands and collections, and they bring it all together in, in the Hebrew Bible as we know it, in the fifth, fourth, third century BC. Um, that's the other, you know, main point that I would make is that in the Iron Age, during the monarchy, there are a lot of different scribal communities.
There's the bureaucrats, there's the soldiers, the peripheral priests, there's the Jerusalem priests. I mean, there's the sons of the prophets. There are a variety of different strands of scribal communities that make up the many voices that we see in scripture. But when you get to the Persian period, there's only one.
Jerusalem becomes a very small city. It's a city of maybe a thousand people. And, and aramaic is the language of the empire. Hebrew is now the language of century of the Jerusalem temple, and if you follow the community scribal community model, this is essentially one scribal community in Jerusalem related to the temple.
That's left, that's all that's left, you know? And those are the people that are bringing all this literature together, making choices about like, what are we, and, and how are we fusing this all together into one book.
Pete: And that's, and that's, and that scribal community really influenced the shaping of the Hebrew Bible?
At least, you know, initially, maybe after, after the exile and, and maybe inserted, a lot of priestly, I mean, I don't, I don't want to sound out here, you know? Uh, but, but, um, people don't worry about that. I did a podcast on that five years ago, but it's not, um, oh, those bad priests came around and screwed everything up.
But they had an agenda, right? I mean, who doesn't have an when they were-
Bill: Well, I mean, they’re preserving, they're preserving the legacy of ancient Israel, right? I mean, and, and they, they preserve the, the, the beauty of the multiplicity of voices that we see in scripture. I mean, if it weren't for those priests essentially trying to preserve the traditions, we wouldn't have them.
Now, did they have agendas and views of the world? Yeah, I, I think, uh, I think they did. And I, I would probably say the marginalized voice of women in the Hebrew Bible is a result of the Persian period priestly community.
Pete: Yeah. Well, we want to get to that because that's, we think that's important.
But can I try to, I want to just try to sum up a little bit where we are here. We have scribal communities rather than individuals writing books out of their head right on, on scrolls. And, um, there are many different kinds of scribal communities for different needs, whether they're military or administrative or whatnot.
Um, what I, I wanna get back to, to the north coming down, you know, just the refugees from the north when the Assyrians are sacking Samaria and the elite are escaping and they're bringing with them what? They're bringing with them, their, their stories, they're traditions, but also they're tribal activity?
Bill: Probably even some like physical materials. Okay. But a lot of stuff. Is stuff you memorized. So I mean, in terms of like how does scribble learning work? Um, you're memorizing the Declaration of Independence. You're memorizing, you know, the Gettysburg Address, you're memorizing the poems of Robert Frost.
You're memorizing the stuff. Um, so you don't need to carry all this literature, you know, down with you in order for it to come. Right. A lot of the stories, you know, you just, everyone just knows them and they tell them. There are things, though there, I think there is evidence of physical manuscripts that are being brought.
Because if I read the book of Kings, Samuel and Kings, especially Kings, there are too many technical details about the reigns of Northern Kings to account for it as simply oral traditions being brought. Sure. Now if you're talking about the Elijah Eisha narratives, I can totally get, you know, all those, those stories being essentially oral traditions that are just brought, being brought.
But there's, there's documentary evidence, you know, that was being brought from the northern kingdom into Judah, uh, and into the royal court from scribes, uh, in the North. And we have the names on seal impressions of some of those scribes who worked in the Judean court, which I think is just totally cool.
Yeah, I mean, my, my favorite one, I mean, I have to tell this story. My favorite one is this guy, um, Menahem, son of Yawbana. And we have seven, at least 17 seal impressions of this one guy, most of which are actually excavated in several different sites of all different places. Now, how do I know this guy is an Israeli?
Because his name is, um, his father's name is Yawbana instead of Yobana.
Cynthia: Mm-hmm.
Bill: And, um, uh, Pete's nodding his head. He knows this already, you know? Biblical scholars know that whenever you have, uh, the letters, uh, y uh, or yo that's the prefix or suffix, for a Judean scribe, uh, or a Judean person.
But whenever you have just, uh, a yo hey or a yo. That means you're, um, that the person is Israeli or Northern. So you can tell by the way they spell their names, whether their heritage is northern or southern.
Pete: So you, you're talking about Bill, about the spelling varying spellings of the divine name.
Bill: Yes.
Pete: Just to be explicit about that.
Bill: Correct. And these are really clear in the inscriptional record. So you can go to like the Samaria ostraca and it's always Yw, essentially. Yaw instead of Yahoo.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Bill: Now that's just a dialectical variant. That's just the way it happened, right?
I mean, you know, it is dialectical, but I, it's, I think it's also conventional, like, in other words, um, we learn in school how to spell things. So for example, I spell the word center with an ER instead of an RE because I'm American. Right? But it has nothing to do with dialect. Brits, British people spell center or, or speak, you know, and say the word center the same way we do, they just spell it differently.
Cynthia: Mm-hmm.
Bill: So spelling is a convention you learn in school and it's a marker of your identity. And it, and sometimes it has a dialectic, you know, there's a pronunciation that is related to it, but sometimes there's no pronunciation related to it.
It's just what I learned in school to make sure you know who I am. If I spell center with an RE, you know I'm British and I spell it with an ER, you know I'm American, right? And that it's just that simple, right? Yeah. Not really, but you know.
Cynthia: It's a great example.
Bill: Yeah. Yeah. So, so this guy Menahem has 17 seal impressions that we found in excavations and, and in the record.
And, but there are three different seals, and one in the seal, the most common one, it says Menahem, the son of Yawbana. He's Israeli, and in the second seal it says, son of Yobana they took out the, the, the W and they made his identity of his father ambiguous. Um, so it's, it's spelled, you know, in English, it'd say YBNH, uh, Yobana.
Right? And now it's not clear he's, he's not marked, he's unmarked. Right? But then the most interesting one is there are two seal impressions. Where some scribed after the seal was already inscribed, added the letters, squeezing them into letters like you're trying to correct it. Now, what do those two letters do?
Those are the two letters that make him into a Judean as opposed to an Israeli. Right. So they've changed his identity, he's negotiated his identity to make him look like he's an authentic, in his, at least his spelling his name, right? Mm-hmm. It's like now he's spelling center ER instead of like those, those damn Israelis who are spelling it like RE, right?
And so he's changed, he's changed his name and he had to, he had to squeeze the letters in. It doesn't even really make sense. But I think it's really interesting because in a way you see in it, you know the plight of an immigrant, right? He comes in. Mm-hmm. At first it's okay to be, you know, a northerner.
But suddenly, you know, a new administration comes, I'm not gonna say which administration is, but a new administration and some, somehow it's no longer legitimate to be northern. Right. Israeli. Yeah. And so now he's just he, he, he kind of wiggles his way to make, to make him sound like he's an authentic Judean.
So it's really, it's really fun. But, you know, this is an example of somebody who's working in the Judean administration. Really well-connected in the Judean administration and him and his, you know, ilk are probably the people who bringing all this, you know, literature into the, uh, into Jerusalem, and it's getting incorporated in the scribal circles in Jerusalem and, and into our Bibles, you know?
If it wasn't for Menahem and his, you know, fellow scribes, you know, a lot of these stories of the northern kingdoms could have been lost.
Pete: Literally when you dig a little bit right, and, and you find things, it just, um, I, I love being reminded of just the human complexity of these processes and that these were real people and they developed and they had hangups or they had traditions and they had political things to maneuver.
And those things are sometimes noticeable in the Bible itself. You know, you have to know what to look for. But, um, you know, we have this curated text, which took centuries to develop and there's a story behind every sentence up, you know, there, there's, there's real humanity there. And what I, I was telling Cynthia before we, we, before he came on, I remember it wasn't until graduate school when I first learned of, you know, the migration of people from the north was rather significant in the development of the Hebrew Bible.
And, and it, it just, it made instant sense to me and I just wished I had known that. I wish I had learned that in seminary, but I didn't. You know, it was all about authors and individuals and, and it's like, we don't worry about this north south thing.
It's just all one big thing and they're just writing together and everybody's happy until the north gets blasted and they never, and they're done, never hear from them again. They're totally irrelevant, the rest of the stuff and the Bible is solely a product of Judah, of, of Judean influence. And it’s not.
Bill: Right.
I mean, we have these remnants of, of the, this great complexity and all these different voices. And to me, it's one of the really great things about scripture is, is the feeling that we wanna include everyone, you know? Um, sometimes divergent voices, right, um, in, into the, into the story.
And, um, yeah. Then sometimes we try to submerge them. Yeah. And occasionally. So, I mean, that's the one thing, you know, when I think about my book, one of the things that I, I think about scripture more generally is that, you know, there's a tendency to think of scripture, uh, as only a divine work. And kind of marginalize the human work.
And I, sometimes I think that the, in, you know, the incarnation is the same kind of problem. You know, we like Jesus, we like the divine Jesus, but you know, we have a really hard time, you know, um, coming to grips with the human Jesus. Right? Yeah. And I think the same thing is true of scripture. You know, we like the Divine inspired book, but you know, we don't like that.
We don't like the human side of, of the book,
Pete: The messing of it.
Bill:Yeah. But to me, you know, and, and to me sometimes that's, that's the best part, right.
Cynthia: You already kind of alluded to women in scribal communities or, I'm wondering if you can expand a little bit on that because you, I read, I was reading the chapter in your book about it, and you explore how female voices and experiences are present and also at the same time, marginalized within the biblical text.
I'm wondering if you can explain that a bit more. Because for most people, you know, we hear a lot about, you know, women are not part of this process, and I think it would be really, um, some good news for this to hear some of your thoughts on that.
Bill: Yeah, I, I mean, what, this is actually one of the most interesting parts of the book for me when I was working on it.
I think women scribes were more prominent in ancient Israel than we realize. And I think it's, I think it comes out in the inscriptional record to some extent or another, but part of the problem is in my model also, you know, once you get rid of authors is the central way, you know, then, then, um, that means women are part of scribal communities.
And a good example of this actually is probably this guy Menahem, son of Yawbana, his daughter in a, in a tomb just outside the city, of the old city of Jerusalem. They found a seal impression of Hamiohel, the daughter of Menahem. And I think this is almost undoubtedly the daughter of the same Menahem from all these other seal impressions.
She looks like she was a, probably worked in mercantile. She was probably a, you know, fish merchant or something like that. It's a very interesting part of the book, but, but there are a number of seal, there are a number of seal impressions, there are a number of inscriptions that mention women, um, in the Iron Age.
They prob, you know, the, the, the role of Huldah the prophet, for example. I mean, she's really prominent, I think, um, related to the group called the people of the land. There's no way, you know, if she wasn't really a, a prominent part of this community that she wouldn't, that she, that, uh, that she would've got, made it her way into the Bible and the story of Josiah's reform if she wasn't a central part of the community.
And we have a couple seal impressions of women from that area of excavating that in, in Jerusalem. Um. So there's, there is this kind of fragmentary evidence. I don't wanna make it seem like, oh, you know, like there's 50% of scribes were women, you know, but, but when you start like, pushing around and, and thinking there was no problem with women being literate.
Um, there's no, the only problem is, is probably in terms of scribal communities, what scribal community didn't have women? Priests. Because there are no women priests in the Hebrew Bible. Right. And ancient, ancient Israel, we don't have good evidence that, that women were part of that scribal community.
Well, then that becomes the problem, if you get to the Persian period, and the, and the scribal community and the Persian period is, is strictly the Jerusalem priests and the Jerusalem scribal community is, is all affiliated with the temple and, and women don't have a central role or important role in that.
And yet they're the people who are essentially, um, deciding what gets in and what gets out. Right?
Cynthia: But there, but there are some, like, there's some central texts in the Hebrew Bible. Like, you know, for example, the Book of Proverbs has Lady Wisdom, right? And she's the tutor. Um, and this is a whole, um, uh paradigm that you see in your eastern, uh, literature of, of scribe, scribe, uh, uh, the scribal profession being, um, gendered female.
Um, and I think it's really significant that the book of Proverbs ends with this, you know, the story of the valorous woman or the Chayil, whatever you want. Um, you know, it's an acrostic poem. Which means acrostic means that it's ordered by the alphabet, which means that it's fundamentally framed as a scribal, you know, thing. Because it actually makes no sense, unless you know Hebrew, you have to know Hebrew. You have to be, you have to be literate to even understand the way that the, the thing is framed.
And actually the, the, the, um, the, uh, poem or the proverb section just before that is the, the words of. Lemuel's mother, right? Yeah.
Lemuel gets the credit, but you know, it, it's really his mother. It's his mother, it's his mother's words, right? And, um, the book of Proverbs more generally has this kind of yin and yang.
This is, you know, listen to your father's teaching, listen to your mother's words, right?
That's the parallelism that you find throughout, um, the Book of Proverbs about education and teaching. So there are a lot, there's a lot of good reasons to know, to say that the foundations of education and including, you know, scribal education, uh, are gendered, you know, equally female, if not even, you know, um, uh, trending toward female.
Um, it's just that, I think in the final editing. I mean, there's some great examples of, it's like, you know the song of Deborah?
Becomes the song of Deborah and Barak, you know? YAnd he's, I mean, he's irrelevant to the story, but somehow he gets added into the, you know.
Or um, or the Song of Moses. Yeah. You know, the Song of Sea, you know, is the Song of Miriam, really. And most scholars would say that. You know, that it, it gets, you know, re-gender, you know, re, you know, sort of framed as Moses's songs. Yeah.
There in, there are number of places in, in scripture where it's, it's almost heavy handed and obvious what they're, that somebody is doing this, and I hate to, I hate to point the finger, but, um, it looks like, it looks like this is, you know, part of the agenda of the priestly, um, temple community in the Persian period to, um mm-hmm. Not, they don't write women out of, of, of scribal communities, but they, they marginalize them or they in different ways. I mean, they're, yeah. I mean, Huldah is still there.
Miriam's still there. You know, Deborah is still there, but there's a ways in which they're kind of like, let's make them kosher. Right. By bringing them alongside, but, but I think it's also important to, to realize that. Rather than looking like, oh, a woman wrote the book of Jay. You know, this is a famous Harold Bloom, you know, argument.
No, I mean, women were part of the community that was responsible for this body of literature, you know? They were part of the community and it was, um, just normal for some women to be part of it. And how did you learn, I mean, probably your father was a scribe in a certain kind of profession, and he, like, when he was doing the apprenticeship, you know, he included his daughters along with it. Right. There's no problem. They saw no problem including daughters, you know, in, uh, scribal education in ancient Israel.
Pete: You know, the, um, the, the, again, the role of the priestly class, you know? And, and, um, in the Persian period, I, again, I think, you know, getting back to, you know, Cynthia, the question you asked that started this, that started down this, uh, road.
Um, I, I, I would hope that would be encouraging to Bible readers to see there are layers to this text. There is development in these texts, and we might see, let's say, some sort of marginalization of, um, the presence of women, uh, due to, um, later movements that for whatever reason, you know, we're dealing with the priesthood here, you know, um, that, that might've felt they needed to do that, you know?
Uh, but that doesn't mean they were right. So, so now we have this text. Again, this is what studying these texts historically in context as, as, as you're all about, both of, you're all about this, it, it really helps us to not, like, throw the Bible away, but simply to understand that this is not, this isn't dropped out of heaven someplace.
This is a book that developed over a long period of time and whatever role God plays in, I have no earthly idea. What I do know is what I'm reading and I'm seeing these movements and developments, I'm seeing this complexity and diversity, even contradiction in, in places.
And to me that simply speaks to, like, the normal human development of texts. And I think that's, that's what keeps me going, even in this field. Right. I want, I want to see that not to undermine anything, but simply to understand it and understand it well, so, I I, I love that you're doing this stuff, Bill, you know?
Bill: Yeah. No, to, to me, you know, it all adds to the richness of the text, you know? Mm-hmm. Um, yeah. There's this, I mean. It's okay in Sunday school to have a simple text, you know? Um, I mean there's only so much you can teach, you know, your 6-year-old ab about, you know, the exodus. Right, right. Yeah. But it's also really cool to see some of the richness of the text as we mature and get older and, and can and can see all the different variations.
Um, and so, and I think that's some of the profound nature of the text, isn't it? The rich, diverse voices right that one sees and over, you know, time and it's great to sort of place them historically into different moments, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, for me, like one of the most really fun parts of the book was this whole thing about immigrants from the north versus immigrants from the south and in the late eighth century and, and how they brought different literatures into the Bible.
And how they, and how they responded and how, uh, how the historical, you know, sort of ebb and flow of the eighth and seventh century, um, is embedded in, in, in these different texts, so. Anyway.
Pete: Well, maybe just, uh, we're, we are coming to the end here, just, uh, you know, speaking of all these profound things you've just been saying, what, what would you really, to the average person out there who's reading their bible, who's really interested in learning things, but like what would you like them to take away from your work on scribal culture maybe versus the author mentality?
Bill: I guess in, in some ways, if I'm gonna, I'm not really a theologian, but I’ll theologize about it. Um, you know, I like to see the, the texts as a product of the Ecclesia, you know, of the church. You know, of which is the, a community, you know, it's not the, the product of individual.
You know, there are individuals.
And sometimes you see their voices, you know it, you know, and here and there you'll get the individual voices. So it's not like scripture doesn't have the individual voices, but there is a sense that it's produced by the community. And I think that that's an incredibly, um, um, rich model. And there are different communities.
It's not one community that is responsible for the texts, you know? And that's good too. It's okay to have multiple voices in multiple communities, um, sort of coming together and it's the, it's the multiplicity of voices. It's the multiplicity of communities that gives the text its richness.
Right? If there was one voice, it wouldn't be nearly as profound.
Pete: Well that’s it, right?
Bill: Yeah. As the, and you know, this is the. You know, I'm gonna use a, you know, I use a Jewish, you know, metaphor from Mount Sinai, you know, on, on, uh, Mount Sinai, the midrashim talk about God spoke in many voices.
In Hebrew, the word thunder. Voice is the same. It's cold. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. God doesn't speak in one voice on Mount Sinai. Mm-hmm. He speaks in OT in many voices, right? Mm-hmm. And the beauty of the divine voice is the, is the richness of the many voices, right? Mm-hmm. And that's to me, what you see in, in, um, in this model that I'm bringing of, of scribble communities, that there are lots of different voices.
And rather than sort of. Um, trying to make it simple, you know, the divine voice is much, much, much more profound when it has a, a multi, multi multiplicity to it, multi layering, if you will, than if you know, it's this one simple thing.
Pete: Well, Bill, that's a great point to end on and um, I thank you for your work.
Thanks for being with us. You know, I had a lot of fun. Cynthia, I don't know about you. This was a great idea.
Cynthia: I did. I could talk about this all day.
Pete: We could, and that would make for a very long podcast that nobody would listen to. It’d be very long. I think they would listen to it. So anyway, but Bill, thanks.
It's good to be, thanks for taking the time, especially after getting off a plane, and it's, it's good to have you.
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