WHOSE BIBLE IS IT ANYWAY?

Abstract

Philip Davies' 1995 book “Whose Bible is it Anyway?” is the provocation that lies behind this article. While Davies in his 1995 book sought to create a sound dichotomy between confessional use of “Scripture” and academic discipline's “biblical studies”, this article questions the validity of such enterprise since the Hebrew Bible and the bibles from which it arose are, in fact, always a loan. The books of the Bible(s) were created by somebody in the past and any use of ancient literature must take seriously the obligation of identifying these peoples. The subtitle of the article: “Medieval Manuscripts, Ancient Authors and Modern Perceptions”, indicates the anachronistic fallacies that in most instances have beguiled scholarly search for origins of the Hebrew Bible. While Medieval manuscripts in modern editions have been treated as if they were ancient manuscripts, the texts of such manuscripts have been basic to scholarly perceptions and creations of space and time of the 1 Millennium BCE history of Palestine. That is, the world view of the (Hebrew) Bible has formed scholarly interpretation's favouring of the Davidic kingdom and Jerusalem against other houses and cult centres, some of which were not less Yahwistic or had less importance than had Jerusalem before the Hasmonaean kingship from the second half of the second century BCE. Questions of origin of the Bible must take into consideration, on the one hand, the impact of the Samaritans since early in the Persian period, for the formation of the Penta- (Hexa)teuch, and, on the other hand, biblical literature's function as apologia on a par with other Jewish literature from the third-second century BCE onwards.