We had a companion piece by Allen on the writing of the New Testament a few weeks ago
In a day when AI is doing some of our writing for us and some writers are celebrating what a great thing that is—at least, until AI puts them out of work—we’ve been graced with some recent books reminding us of that alchemy of pen and ink and flesh and blood that literature has always been.
William M. Schniedewind’s Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes treats of those scribal communities whose labors produced the Hebrew Bible. In Schniedewind’s understanding, these ancient texts were produced not by individual scribes but by communities of them, “communities of practice” that were “attached to institutions like the palace or the temple or to social groups like the military, merchants, or landowners.”
Schniedewind’s account of the diffusion of writing in the ancient Near East begins with empire: he explains how writing in the Levant was an indispensable instrument of Egyptian imperialism. Communiqués emitted from the Pharaoh in hieroglyphs were rendered in the local language of his distant administrators in the Levant. By providing written translations, scribes managed the long-distance relationship between the Egyptian sovereign and his imperial subjects.
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