Chris Jaffe's Reviews > Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

It's a decent book, though one I found myself grazing/skimming later on. Wright notes that plenty of books have been written on questions such as who wrote the Bible (that's literally the title of an excellent book by Richard Elliot Friedman) but Wright looks at a less investigated question: why. Why was the Jewish Bible as we know it assembled?

His answer: to create a sense of peoplehood, to create a proto-national identity for the Jews. And it was incredibly successful, as evidenced by how we still have Jews nowadays, whereas Moabites and others are all long gone. Wright argues you had a couple dueling notions come together to form the Bible as we know it. He says there was the Court History, focusing on the imperial courts. This mostly came from the southern kingdom of Judah. There was also the People's History, which he associates with the northern kingdom of Israel. After the northern kingdom fell, some fled to the south and took their history with them. When the southern kingdom fell, some of their priests adopted the notion of a People's History to keep the community going.

Wright argues that the patriarchs were intially a series of separate stories of leaders that were eventually combined together into one narrative, but even now, he says, you can see how some of the early leaders were largely associated with sites from the northern kingdom and others from the southern kingdom. There is also the Conquest Narrative, as Wright notes how Joshua's conquest begins wtih towns located at the south end of the Northern kingdom, skipping Judah altogther.

He says a lot of the Biblical narrative was backdated by the Judah court. During the divided kingdom days, he says that Israel was always the real power center. Wright even says that the line of Ahab was among the first to really support YHWH. There was a King David before, but he may not have been that powerful.

The later books in the Bible were to expand on the sense of peoplehood. For those who had doubts on YHWH, well - check out Joab and Ecclesiastes. Those books are designed to keep the sceptics in the community by giving them their say. Wright calls Esther the most Biblical book in the Bible because it's all about keeping a sense of people, divorced from a specific location, theology, or even God. It's often noted what a weird book it is to put in the Bible as it never even mentions God, but for Wright, it makes a lot of sense to put it in there for just that reason. Oh, and there is some archeology indicating that for a while there was not just YHWH, but a corresponding female diety, possible wife.

It's got some good material, but at times it felt like it argues more by assertion, especially in the early going when it discusses the patriarchs and the improtance of Ahab's family in the promotion of YHWH. The latter parts did sometimes drag, as it felt like Wright had already made his points and was just beating a dead horse for another 100 pages.

Interesting nugget: there was a Jewish colony in Egypt at a place called Elephantine around 540 BC. We have a ton of documents from there, as they wrote to Jerusalem on proper ways to pray and go about the religion. It's the same era as Ezra and Nehemiah. They do many things that seem wrong: they work on the Sabbath, do intermarriage with others, make contributions to other gods, but in their letters to Jerusalem on how to do things, they were never told not to do any of the above. They didn't have a problem with it, even at that late stage.