How the Bible Became a Book

Editorial Reviews

• Product Description

  How the Bible Became a Book combines recent archaeological discoveries in the Middle East with insights culled from the history of writing to address how the Bible was written and evolved into sacred Scripture. Written for general readers as well as scholars, the book provides rich insight into how these texts came to possess the authority of Scripture and explores why Ancient Israel, an oral culture, began to write literature. It describes an emerging literate society in ancient Israel that challenges the assertion that literacy first arose in Greece during the fifth century BCE. Hb ISBN (2004) 0-521-82946-1

• Book Description

  Combines recent archaeological discoveries in the Middle East with insights culled from the history of writing to address how the Bible first came to be written down and then sacred Scripture. The author relies on anthropologists and archaeologists to date the writing of biblical literature to the late-Iron Age, well before the Persian and Hellenistic periods as was previously assumed, thus challenging the assertion that widespread literacy first arose in Greece during the fifth century BCE.