If you know how Wikipedia works, you have a good idea of how the authorship\u00a0of biblical books went down: an anonymous text is added to over time, but none of the additions are screaming for individual recognition.<\/p>\n
Benjamin Sommer explains the phenomenon this way:<\/p>\n
As Walter Jackson Bate and Harold Bloom have shown, poets since the romantic era [sic] have\u00a0attempted\u00a0to cover up the extent to which\u00a0they\u00a0are indebted to their\u00a0predecessors. Ancient and medieval authors, however, saw their writings as valuable\u00a0only\u00a0if they contribubted to a mighty stream that predated and transcended them.<\/strong> Where a modern author (to borrow language from T. S. Eliot) emphasizes individual talent, the ancients found meaning in tradition<\/strong>. They believed in all sincerity that anything of\u00a0merit\u00a0in their writing was\u00a0the\u00a0product of insight they culled from earlier authorities and of skills they learned from their masters. (Revelation and Authority<\/a><\/em> Modern notions of \u00a0\u201cauthorship\u201d value individual talent and creativity. In antiquity, \u201cauthors\u201d were valued by being seen as part of a greater whole, as standing in a tradition.<\/p>\n The modern obsession\u00a0with individual\u00a0authorship of biblical texts is the very thing that the Old Testament \u201cauthors\u201d seem determined to obscure.<\/p>\n Consider the book of Psalms<\/strong>.\u00a0Over time, David came to be associated with the book as a whole, which included \u00a0\u201cauthoring\u201d psalms\u00a0that stem from a much later time. Why? Because these later authors and compilers saw themselves not as individual authors, but as purveyors of a tradition.<\/p>\n Likewise, the book of Proverbs<\/strong>\u00a0is associated with Solomon, but the book as a whole is a compilation of proverbial sayings that span\u00a0a\u00a0great length of time.<\/p>\n This same notion can be applied to\u00a0Isaiah<\/strong>. All but a very few scholars agree that the book of Isaiah, though rooted in the 8th c. BCE, is added to until the postexilic period (late 6th and into the 5th centuries BCE) where it reached the form as we know it. These later authors, however, continue to\u00a0attribute the book as a whole the 8th century prophet Isaiah\u2014not in an attempt to fool anyone, but because their notion of \u201cauthorship\u201d demanded it.<\/strong><\/p>\n And of course, we have the Pentateuch<\/strong>\u2014that diverse collection of laws and narratives that did not reach it\u2019s final form until well after the return from Babylonian exile (539 BCE), though all of it claims to be rooted in the time of Moses.<\/p>\n The \u201clate\u201d authorship of biblical books\u2014which is so central to modern biblical scholarship and yet so problematic, even heretical, to others\u2014makes perfect sense if we adopt ancient notions of \u201cauthorship\u201d rather than modern ones.<\/p>\n Adding one\u2019s voice to an ancient tradition without acknowledging it isn\u2019t \u201clying\u201d or \u201cshowing disrespect for God\u2019s word.\u201d It is how ancient authorship works\u2014it is how the truth\u00a0is told and how one shows respect for the tradition.<\/p>\n Sommer uses a well-known internet joke to explain further how ancient authorship works: \u201cWhy God Could Not Get Tenure at a University.\u201d<\/strong> The reasons include:<\/p>\n A real knee-slapper, of course, but Sommer noticed that none of the forwarded emails contained precisely the same list. Some of the reasons remained constant, but the exact wording\u00a0was tweaked and the number of reasons given varied. (I might also add that the joke exists with at least one alternate name, \u201cWhy God Couldn\u2019t Get a PhD,\u201d or some other variation).<\/p>\n Sommer explains:<\/p>\n Because anyone who forwards an email can alter the text, various people (whether my friends, or the people who sent them, or some unknown person in the chain before that) had introduced small modifications, additions, and subtractions. Some people must have said to themselves, \u201cIt would be even funnier if I rephrase this one a little,\u201d \u201cHere\u2019s a good one I thought of myself,\u201d \u201cI can take a joke as well as the next guy, but this one\u2019s just sacrilegious.\u201d Even though it was clear that people who passed the lists on often intervened in the text, I never saw anyone\u2019s name attached to a list as author, even as partial author<\/strong>. It would have been ridiculous for someone who made a minor alteration to claim that status. <\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=inspirandinca-20&l=am2&o=1&a=0300158734\")
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<\/p>\nModern assumptions of how authorship \u201cshould\u201d work need to be set aside if we want to \u201ctake seriously\u201d the biblical text.<\/h2>\n
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