Authorship and the Hebrew Bible

A major challenge for biblical studies is the issue of the author and authorial intention. Authorship and the Hebrew Bible (co-edited with Sonja Ammann and Katharina Pyschny) brings together experts in biblical texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Near East and Greek world to reimagine the literary and discursive functions of “authorship” in biblical literature. 

It critiques the assumption that the aim of historical research of the Bible is to uncover the individual authors whose intentions dictate the meaning of the text. Instead, we argue that historical critics should instead focus on “authorship”—understood as the discursive devices (such as Mosaic attribution, divine voicing, or pseudepigraphic attribution to prophetic figures of foundational kings) that shaped how ancient Israelites understood the act of creating, editing, and reworking texts.

My essay “Divine Authorship: Diverse Images of Yhwh as Legislative Author in the Pentateuch and Beyond” traces the development of divine voicing from Exodus 20–23, where we arguably find the earliest laws attributed to God; to Deuteronomy, where divine law becomes associated with the mediatory role of Moses; Leviticus and Ezekiel, where divine law is intractably linked to sanctuary space; and late texts of Exodus and Jubilees that emphasize the importance of the divine writing on physical tablets. While divine authorship was a consistent means for investing Israel’s legislative traditions with authority from the Iron Age to the Hellenistic period, there was a rich diversity in how the deity’s role as legislative author was conceived. It was thus the capacity of divine authorship to change over time that enabled it to endure as a literary strategy.