April 2, 2004: That question did not become important until after the rise of Greek civilization in the fourth century B.C.E. - well after most of the books of the Bible had been written. In contrast, the importance of authorship was largely an unknown concept in the ancient Semitic world.
The famous Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the Babylonian creation myth known as The Enuma Elish, the Egyptian tale The Shipwrecked Sailor, and the Canaanite epic literary account of the battle between the gods, Baal and Mot, have no authors. They have scribes who pass along the tradition. The scribes were first of all administrators or bureaucrats; they were not authors. The Classical Hebrew language does not even have a word that means "author." The nearest term would, "scribe," a transmitter of tradition and text rather than an author. Authorship is a concept that derives from a predominantly written culture, whereas ancient Israelite society was largely an oral culture.
Traditions and stories were passed on orally from one generation to the next. They had their authority from the community that passed on the tradition rather than from an author who wrote a text. These stories and traditions were the things that fathers and mothers were oblige d to teach their children, as Deuteronomy 6:6-7 commands, "Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away."
The fall of the Persian Empire to Alexander the Great ushered in profound changes in the Near East. The age of Hellenism - that is, the spread of Greek language, culture, and values - brought with it the concept of authorship. The authority of a text came to be associated with its author. Jewish tradition naturally felt compelled to find authors for its literature in this age, although there was little explicit evidence about authorship in the Bible. The earliest Jewish text that identifies its author is the Wisdom of Ben-Sira, dating from the early second century B.C.E. In some places, the Bible indirectly would contradict later ascription of authorship. This is clear, for example, in the Book of Deuteronomy, which is framed as a third-person report of a speech by Moses and not as something that Moses himself wrote, "These are the things Moses said to all Israel . . ." (Deut i:ii). In the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, Moses is a character, not an author. Genesis does not mention Moses in any capacity. In spite of this, Deuteronomy, along with the other four books of the Torah, has usually been ascribed to the pen of Moses rather than being understood as traditions passed down from Moses or more generally as traditions of the Israelite people.
Writing that time was both a display of state power and a tool of state administration. Second, writing was a gift of the gods. As such, writing was part of magical rituals like the Execration texts or the ritual of the bitter water (Num 5)- Writing was also something done in heaven, as with the Book of Life or the divine tablets that originally had the blueprints for God's earthly abode. Oral tradition, in contrast, was the medium of cultural continuity. Early Israel sang songs of their ancestors and told stories of their forefathers. Through proverbs and folktales and songs each generation received and passed on the cultural legacy of ancient Israel.
A major transition in ancient Israel began in the late eighth century B.C.E. Writing became both more centralized and more widespread in Judah; as the society became urbanized, the economy more complex and the government more substantial. Writing had always been a projection of royal power, and now this power extended to the collection of a great library in Jerusalem (just as the Assyrians and the Egyptians were doing during this same period). King Hezekiah desired to create a kingdom similar to the legendary (in his days) kingdom of David and Solomon. The oral traditions of ancient Israel were compiled into written texts. The palace archives containing administrative texts of ancient Judah were used in composing histories of the Judean kings. One catalyst for the restoration of the golden age of Israel that is, the united monarchy of David and Solomon - was the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel.
This final destruction vindicated the house of David, which had struggled for centuries with its northern neighbor. As many refugees from the north flooded into Jerusalem, Judah accommodated not only these new citizens but also their traditions. Some of their prophetic traditions, as in the Book of Hosea, were edited in the Judean royal court. These also were understood to vindicate Judah. A history of Israel was written as though Judah and Israel were one kingdom, though even this account acknowledges that the "united" Israel was but a fleeting historical moment. Nevertheless, this ideology of one kingdom of the twelve tribes of Israel was embodied in the literature of the late eighth century. This literature both preserved and created the golden age of David and Solomon. This great literary flourishing, albeit short-lived, was the beginning of biblical literature as we know it. The political vision 6"f Hezekiah took its military expression in a revolt against Assyria in 705 B.C.E. The Assyrian king Sennacherib crushed this revolt in 70-1 B.C.E. and with it all dreams of a new golden age under the sons of Hezekiah. Judah then struggled as a vassal of Assyria until the demise of the Assyrian Empire in the days of King Josiah (r. 64o-609 B.C.E.).
The second major phase in the literary formation of the Bible came in the days of King Josiah in the late seventh century B.C.E. The use of writing for mundane economic and administrative purposes had continued unabated from the days of Hezekiah. Literacy had spread throughout the fabric of Judean society. Soldiers could read and write. Craftsmen were literate. Whereas writing had previously had a restricted role in society, the spread of writing into everyday life meant that now writing could become a tool for subversion of the centralized power of the government. Texts were no longer only the products of the palace or the priests. A turning point for biblical literature was the assassination of King Amon (r. 642-640 B.C.E.); the "people of the land" set up the boy-king, Josiah, at the tender age of eight years old, on the throne in Jerusalem. Influenced by the "people of the land" and his family connections in the rural foothills of Judah, Josiah instituted political and religious reforms that were directly aimed at the cultural influence that urbanization and northernization had had in the days of Hezekiah. Writing became a tool, as in the Book of Deuteronomy, for critiquing the vision of Hezekiah. Solomon was not a great king according to the Deuteronomists, but a king who violated the divine law as recorded in "the book of the covenant" (compare i Kgs iii with Deut 17:14-2-0). The Deuteronomists advocated a return to the traditional religion of their forefathers. Of course, this tension between the urban and the rural, between the central palace and the rural elders, must have always existed. However, the Deuteronomic revolution gave the rural elders a written voice. Ancient writings, which had been elevated as literary propaganda in the days of Hezekiah, were turned on their head. Writing becomes a typical mode of expression in the latter days of the Judean monarchy. Biblical literature realized its apex in the last decades of the Judean monarchy.
The end of the great independent literary flourishing came swiftly. The lull between the fall of the Assyrian Empire and the rise of the Babylonian Empire lasted only as long as the reign of Josiah (r. 640609 B.C.E.). When Josiah died in battle at Megiddo at the hands of the Egyptian Pharaoh Neco, with him died the hope for an independent Judean kingdom.
The Babylonians quickly assumed control of the region; three military campaigns, in 597, 586, and 5811 B.C.E., were punctuated by destruction and exile. The royal family led by King jehoiachin submitted to the Babylonians in 597 B.C.E. and were taken into exile where they were apparently treated relatively well. Those who remained and resisted the Babylonians did not fare quite as well. The Babylonians pillaged the region, and Judah was depopulated by destruction, exile, and flight until the land was nearly uninhabited. Judean captives worked as slaves on the canal projects of Babylon while the Judean royal family and their entourage lived in relative ease in the southern citadel in the city of Babylon. Because of all this the exilic period was a period of retrenchment for biblical literature. The writing and preservation of biblical literature returned to the hands of the royal family. The continuity in the royal family of Jehoiachin reached to the end of the sixth century B.C.E. continuing even after the fall of Babylon to the Persian king Cyrus in 539 B.C.E. Under the Persians, a descendent of Jehoiachm, Zerubbabel, assumed leadership of those who returned to Jerusalem in the late sixth century. However, Jerusalem and Judah were but shells of their former selves. The land was ravished by war and depopulated. As part of the royal family's claim to leadership in the restoration, Zerubbabel helped rebuild the Temple (completed in 5-15 B.C.E.). Shortly thereafter, however, Zerubbabel and the royal family mysteriously disappeared. The biblical literature of the exile and early post-exilic periods mostly complete and update earlier works. The great shift from orality to textuality that began in the late Judean monarchy suffers an enormous setback in the devastation of Jerusalem and Judah. The conditions in which literacy and textuality could flourish disappeared.
The Persian period was a dark age for biblical literature. The Persian province of Yehud was depopulated, impoverished, and geographically isolated. The once great city of Jerusalem remained mostly in ruins, even though some semblance of a temple had been rebuilt. Even the Hebrew language saw a decline, as Aramaic language and letters began to replace Hebrew as the language of the Jews. In the shadow of the Persian Empire, faithful priests who served in the Jerusalem Temple preserved biblical literature. For the most part, the work of the priests was not the composition of literature, but its preservation. This meant that they added the editorial framework to some biblical literature. The great poems of the Book of job, for example, were given an editorial prologue and conclusion. The prIests shaped the Psalms into a five-part book that paralleled the Five Books of Moses (or, Pentateuch). The priest Ezra was an ideal exemplar of the new priesthood. Ezra was both a secular and religious leader who was trained in the courts of the Persian kings and served in Jerusalem with their support. From the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which were among the few biblical books actually composed during the Persian period, it is clear that Ezra was trained in the Aramaic scribal chancellery. Ezra and the priestly leadership were both the guardians and the teachers of the sacred texts. As such, they controlled the authoritative texts. This secular priestly leadership continued to the end of the Second Temple period and the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. It is clear that in the late Second Temple period the priestly leadership explicitly rejected the authority of oral tradition. Undoubtedly, they did so because it undermined the scriptural authority that they could claim as the teachers of Israel. The Rabbinic leadership that followed the destruction of the Second Temple would mark a decisive break with this model of secular leadership by priests and with its rejection of oral tradition.
In the third century B.C.E., Jewish literature would again begin to flourish under the cultural renaissance of Hellenism. Egyptian Hellenistic rule brought peace and relative prosperity back to Jerusalem. The city began to grow again. But the canon of biblical literature was largely closed. For the most part, the Bible was no longer being written. Rather, it was being copied, translated, paraphrased, commented upon, and embellished in every conceivable way. The literati were largely composed of the priests and the Levites. By the end of the third century B.C.E., students at Jewish schools in Jerusalem were studying the Scriptures as exemplified in the proverbs of the priestly schoolmaster Sirach. By the mid-third century, the Scriptures were being translated into Greek by priests in the Egyptian Diaspora. The Dead Sea Scrolls include Hebrew manuscripts dating to the third century B.C.E. pointing to the active copying and transmission of the Hebrew Scriptures. Neither Rabbinic Judaism nor early Christianity, in contrast, would number their early adherents from among the scribes. They were not dominated by social elites or by learned priests. Rather, they were lay movements and emerged out of the unlearned and unschooled. As a result, they would reflect the authority of both the oral tradition and the teacher.
It is hardly surprising that early Christianity, with its roots among the common people, should show some distance from writing. In its attitude toward writing, early Christianity is a close sibling of Pharisaic Judaism orthodoxy.
So overall one could say that there was ebb and flow to oral tradition and sacred texts that began with the Josianic Reforms. The written word traveled a rocky road to its eventual place as sacred text and the standard for religious.
And two issues shaped the path of this road. The first was the give and take between orality and literacy. As literacy became more prevalent, textuality became more plausible. That is to say, the better people could read, the more the written word could serve as guidepost for religious orthodoxy. The second was the competition between orality and textuality as modes of authority. Orality and literacy were stages along the same road, whereas orality and textuality was the fork in the road. The road more traveled was oral tradition, where the community and the teacher provided education and defined authority as they had for generations. The new road was textual authority. This was a road built by the government with the support of the social and religious elites.
The Great War with Rome destroyed the power of the priests and the social elites. In 66 C.E., the Jewish masses led by messianic Zealots revolted against the Roman Empire. Within four years, the revolt was quelled, the city of Jerusalem destroyed, and the Temple burned in a great conflagration. More importantly perhaps, the aristocratic leadership of the Temple was also destroyed. Although Sadducees did not support the revolt, the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem destroyed their base of power. Parenthetically, the religious sect at Qumran was also destroyed by the Romans at this time. These two groups that best represented the religious authority of the text were wiped out along with the Temple by the Romans. With their demise, traditional orality would reassert itself.
Both early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, which grew of the lay classes, struggled with the tension between the sacred text and the authority of the oral tradition in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple. Although they acknowledged the authority of the written Scriptures, they also asserted the authority of oral tradition and the living voice of the teacher. Christianity, however, quickly adopted the codex. In fact, early Christianity was quite innovative in its adoption of the codex. This fact probably encouraged the authority of the written Scriptures in the early Church. Judaism, in contrast, was quite slow in adopting the codex and even today it is a Torah scroll that we find in a synagogue ark. Eventually, Judaism too would cloak its oral tradition in a written garb. Still, a fierce ideology of orality would persist in Rabbinic Judaism even as the oral Torah and the written tablets were merged into one pre-existent Torah that was with God at the very creation of the world.
May 27, 2004