Who Really Wrote the Bible

The Story of the Scribes

William M. Schniedewind

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English

Princeton University Press
25 February 2026

Bibles; Judaism: sacred texts

A groundbreaking new account of the writing of the Hebrew Bible

Who wrote the Bible? Its books have no bylines. Tradition long identified Moses as the author of the Pentateuch, with Ezra as editor. Ancient readers also suggested that David wrote the psalms and Solomon wrote Proverbs and Qohelet. Although the Hebrew Bible rarely speaks of its authors, people have been fascinated by the question of its authorship since ancient times. In Who Really Wrote the Bible, William Schniedewind offers a bold new answer: the Bible was not written by a single author, or by a series of single authors, but by communities of scribes. The Bible does not name its authors because authorship itself was an idea enshrined in a later era by the ancient Greeks. In the pre-Hellenistic world of ancient Near Eastern literature, books were produced, preserved, and passed on by scribal communities.

Schniedewind draws on ancient inscriptions, archaeology, and anthropology, as well as a close reading of the biblical text itself, to trace the communal origin of biblical literature. Scribes were educated through apprenticeship rather than in schools. The prophet Isaiah, for example, has his ""disciples""; Elisha has his ""apprentice."" This mode of learning emphasized the need to pass along the traditions of a community of practice rather than to individuate and invent. Schniedewind shows that it is anachronistic to impose our ideas about individual authorship and authors on the writing of the Bible. Ancient Israelites didn't live in books, he writes, but along dusty highways and byways. Who Really Wrote the Bible describes how scribes and their apprentices actually worked in ancient Jerusalem and Judah.

By: William M. Schniedewind
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 133mm,
ISBN: 9780691233673
ISBN 10: 0691233675
Pages: 360
Publication Date: 25 February 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

William M. Schniedewind is professor of biblical studies and the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was the inaugural holder of the Kershaw Chair of Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies. He is the author of How the Bible Became a Book, A Social History of Hebrew: Its Origins Through the Rabbinic Period, The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible, and other books.

Reviews for Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes

""Insightful and enjoyable. . . . Schniedewind’s erudite but still conversational prose brings admirable clarity to ancient breadcrumb trails of evidence. It’s an enlightening deep dive into the social world in which the Bible was written."" * Publishers Weekly * ""[An] illuminating book."" * Library Journal * ""An important work in academic biblical studies.""---David Tesler, AJL Reviews ""An important corrective to the tendency to impose contemporary notions of lone authorship onto these ancient texts."" * Choice *