Why The Bible Began by Jacob L. Wright
The book argues that the Hebrew Bible emerged as a cultural and technological product of writing rather than solely as a divinely transmitted corpus: as literacy and scribal practices spread in the ancient Near East, texts were composed, edited, and deployed to preserve memory, standardize beliefs, legitimize institutions, and bind communities across time and space. Using archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence, it traces how administrative record-keeping, social upheaval (including exile and return), and the needs of elites and communities for authoritative records combined to produce the idea of sacred scripture and to reshape religious life. Emphasizing the social functions of texts—political legitimation, legal codification, and identity formation—it shows that the material practice of writing was central to the Bible’s origin and authority.
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- English
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