Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

This volume is a refreshing new look at an aged problem, an old one, indeed: who wrote the Bible? Critical introductions to the Hebrew Bible usually describe its twenty-four books one by one, relating to such topics as content, literary structure, form and style, date of composition or historical background, authorship, and the process by which the individual books came into being. The later issue often entails analysis of the books' basic components, identifying them and labeling them as sources, fragments, additions, expansions, interpolations, insertions, etc., and arranging them chronologically as to the order in which they were composed, edited and incorporated into the growing work in progress. Everything is done viewing the books of the Bible from within, with only occasional resort to other Biblical books or external historical circumstances, and especially in the effort to fix absolute dates. Karel van der Toorn's fascinating and informative volume reviewed here is based on and informed by existing literary-historical analyses such as described above (especially in Chapters 6 and 7 which trace the development of the Books of Deuteronomy and Jeremiah), but adds many new factors so as to move illumination of the Bible's origins several important steps forward, and in previously uncharted directions. He studies the Bible not as some abstract, incorporeal entity, which somehow came into being of its own power, but as a substantial, physical artifact formed by real people, in real life. In order to do so, he considers the technological realities, life circumstances, flesh and blood people, and social processes which brought the Bible into being. Above all, van der Toorn eschews the modern notion of "book" as descriptive of the Bible's essence, as well as the present day concept of "author" as characterizing the people who participated in its genesis. The Bible, which reached its final form only in the Hellenistic age is rooted and gestated in the Ancient Near East, and as such is not a single book, nor can it be a book in the accepted sense of the term. Nor is it a collection or library of individual books,