Review/Discuss: "Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture"

Review and Discuss the first half of:

Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins
October 2023
by Jacob Wright
Cambridge University Press
472 pages plus endnotes (for 2 months)
17:37 audio
https://a.co/d/gOGQrVQ

"With a bold new thesis about the discovery of 'peoplehood,' this book revolutionizes our understanding of the Bible and its historical achievement.

Why did no other ancient society produce something like the Bible? That a tiny, out of the way community could have created a literary corpus so determinative for peoples across the globe seems improbable.

For Jacob Wright, the Bible is not only a testimony of survival, but also an unparalleled achievement in human history. Forged after Babylon's devastation of Jerusalem, it makes not victory but total humiliation the foundation of a new idea of belonging. Lamenting the destruction of their homeland, scribes who composed the Bible imagined a promise-filled past while reflecting deeply on abject failure.

More than just religious scripture, the Bible began as a trailblazing blueprint for a new form of political community. Its response to catastrophe offers a powerful message of hope and restoration that is unique in the Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman worlds. Wright's Bible is thus a social, political, and even economic roadmap - one that enabled a small and obscure community located on the periphery of leading civilizations and empires not just to come back from the brink, but ultimately to shape the world's destiny."

-- from the Publisher

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NOTE:
In fairness to everyone attending who expects to have a meaningful discussion and a productive learning experience, you must have read or listened to the first half of this book (to Part III, page 239) in order to attend this meeting.

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About the Author

Professor Jacob L. Wright teaches Hebrew Bible at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. His first book, Rebuilding Identity: The Nehemiah Memoir and its Earliest Readers (de Gruyter, 2004), won the 2008 Templeton prize for a first book in the field of religion. He is also the author of David, King of Israel, and Caleb in Biblical Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which won The Nancy Lapp Popular Book Award from the American Schools of Oriental Research, and most recently, War, Memory, and National Identity in the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Book Reviews

"Wright demonstrates how ancient Israel and Judah developed the resources to construct a resilient nationhood not in spite of but, paradoxically, because of the experience of military defeat, economic devastation, and diaspora. No other kingdom of the ancient Near East was able to do so.

Wright's book provides a fascinating and incisively argued case study of how one people drew upon its cultural resources not simply to survive but to generate a vibrantly creative intellectual and spiritual tradition."
—Carol A. Newsom, Candler Professor Emerita of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, Emory University

"By one of the brightest minds in the field, this is a book on the Bible that all will want to read: an exquisitely written and innovative tribute to the nameless scribes who responded to destruction and defeat by building a powerful new form of community that no army could conquer."
—Professor and Rabbi Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, President of the Society of Biblical Literature, 2024

"At the heart of the Hebrew Bible is, as Wright shows, not a creed but a question: What does it mean to be a people? In our time of deepening divisions, both this question and the ways in which these ancient writers addressed it deserve renewed, and serious, attention."
—Robert M. Franklin, President Emeritus, Morehouse College