Who Wrote the Bible?
Richard Elliott Friedman
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0060630353
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The contemporary classic the New York Times Book Review called “a thought-provoking [and] perceptive guide,” Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard E. Friedman is a fascinating, intellectual, yet highly readable analysis and investigation into the authorship of the Old Testament. The author of Commentary on the Torah, Friedman delves deeply into the history of the Bible in a scholarly work that is as exciting and surprising as a good detective novel. Who Wrote the Bible? is enlightening, riveting, an important contribution to religious literature, and as the Los Angeles Times aptly observed in its rave review, “There is no other book like this one.”
clay tablets and occasionally carved them i n stone or wrote them on plaster. They wrote shorter notes on pieces of broken pottery. People lived i n one- and two-story homes, mostly of stone. I n cities the houses were built close together. Some of the cities had impressive water systems, including long underground tunnels and huge cisterns. Some houses had indoor plumbing. Cities were surrounded by walfe. People ate beef, lamb, fowl, bread, vegetables, fruits, and dairy products. They made wine
kings ever held on to the throne for more than a few generations. The kingdom lasted two hundred years. Then the Assyrian empire conquered it i n 722 B.C. and ended its existence as a nation. The population was dispersed. The Assyrians deported many Israelites into exile i n various sections of the Assyrian empire. The exiled Israelites have come to be known as the ten lost tribes of Israel. Presumably there were also great numbers of refugees who fled from Israel south to Judah to escape the
the first few books of the Bible. The two different names, Yahweh and Elohim, seemed to line up consistently i n each of the two versions of the same stories i n the doublets. If we separate the Elohim (E) stories from the Yahweh (J) stories, we get a consistent series of clues that the E stories were written by someone concerned with Israel and the J stories by someone concerned w i t h Judah. 5 62 W H O WROTE T H E BIBLE? J from Judah, E from Israel First, there is the matter of the
the beginning of the book of Genesis and appreciate the fact that at the conclusion of the story of Adam and Eve i n the garden of Eden, which is a J narrative, Yahweh sets cherubs as the guardians of the path to the tree of l i f e . Since cherubs were i n the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple, it is only natural that an advocate of Judah's religious traditions should picture cherubs as the guardians of something valuable and sacred. The golden calf story reveals more about its author than
puzzle. The history of the centralization of the religion around the Tabernacle (meaning around the Temple) was the clue to the history of the writers: In the stories and laws of J and E, there was no idea of centralization. Why? Because they were written in the early days of Israel, when anyone could sacrifice anywhere. In D, centralization was strictly demanded: "You must only sacrifice at the place where Yahweh causes his name to dwell." Why? Because it was from the time of King Josiah, a time