Before the Bible

Datos Bibliográficos

ID24006343
AutoresJudith H Newman (0000-0002-9181-918X)
Año2018
Fecha de publicación2018-08-23
Open AccessNo
TipoBOOK
RevistaBefore the Bible (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/oso/9780190212216.001.0001
ISBN9780190212216
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7

This book reveals the landscape of scripture in an era prior to the crystallization of the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, and before the canonization of the Christian Bible. Most accounts of the formation of the Hebrew Bible trace the origins of scripture through source-critical excavation of the archaeological “tell” of the Bible or the text-critical analysis of the scribal hand on manuscripts, but the discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls have transformed our understanding of scripture formation. The book focuses not on the putative origins and closure of the Bible but on the reasons scriptures remained open, with pluriform growth in the Hellenistic-Roman period. Drawing on new methods from cognitive neuroscience and the social sciences as well as traditional philological and literary analysis, the book argues that the key to understanding the formation of scripture is the widespread practice of individual and communal prayer in early Judaism. The figure of the teacher as a learned and pious sage capable of interpreting and embodying the tradition is central to understanding this revelatory phenomenon. The volume considers the entwinement of prayer and scriptural formation in five books reflecting the diversity of early Judaism: Ben Sira, Daniel, Jeremiah/Baruch, 2 Corinthians, and the Qumran Hodayot (Thanksgiving Hymns). While not a complete taxonomy of scripture formation, the book illuminates performative dynamics that have been largely ignored as well as the generative role of interpretive tradition in understanding how the Bible came to be.