Jacob L. Wright is an American biblical scholar currently serving as professor of Hebrew Bible at Emory University. Prior to this, Wright taught at the University of Heidelberg (Germany). His areas of expertise include Biblical Archaeology.
In "Why The Bible Began", he explains the need for the weak tribes living between the superpowers of Mesopotamia and Egypt to build strength by uniting what was not united, a mixture of tribes fighting each other on the small land bridge between Asia and Africa. Judah in the south and Israel in the north needed a narrative that would give them a single story, as if they all descended from the same family genealogy, and as a result even today still family. Both states saw benefits in this, and consecutively they wrote what is now the Bible, adding other myths and legends, poetry and moral stories about how to live. By claiming this historical fiction, they invented a new nation, while at the same time writing a text that for the first time ever, integrated myths into a historical context. In this way they created a narrative that created unity and could mobilise the people behind a common agenda.
"The answer is simple: even if the biblical authors had some of way of knowing about what happened centuries earlter, an account of those events would have had hardly been relevant to their purposes. They lived during, and especially after, the demise of the territorial states that emerged during the Iron Age, and what they needed was a new way of thinking about themselves. By affirming a direct relationship between a singular deity and the nation's diverse members, and by removing the institution of the monarchy from the nation's formative past, their work provided a blueprint for a new form of peoplehood, one that had the potential to unite rival populations after the downfall of their kingdoms.Many of the historical factors that shaped Israel's and Judah's formation find no mention in the Bible, while much of what the Bible portrays in considerable detail is far removed from history. Thus, the book of Exodus depicts how the Hebrew slaves became a nation during their liberation, and especially after entering a covenant at Sinai - long before the reign of their kings. That account runs counter to what we know today about the origins of the ''Israelites,'' and many scholars today are convinced that the Bible has little, if any, historical value. Yet rather than summarily dismissing the biblical narrative as a witness to the past, we will be focusing on the divergence of history and story. Only then will we be able to appreciate the creativity, and groundbreaking contributions, of the generations of scribes who shaped the biblical corpus." (p. 49)
"The Bible's project of peoplehood grew out of the will to admit defeat, yet also the refusal to allow it to be the final word. In Lamentations and the important works that preceded it, we witness how generations of anonymous scribes denied that military might was all-determinative in world affairs, and how their denial laid the foundation for a new kind of political community". (p. 152)
"Thanks to this revolutionary new concept of covenant, Yhwh could now survive the destruction of his people, and that destruction could now be understood to be a consequence of the nation's collective behavior. What emerges in this new conception of covenant is a legal-rational cosmic order, with a written, public document determining the nation's fate and a transcendent deity governing history." (p. 347)
"In the end, these final generations of biblical writers made a surprising move: they incorporated books and texts that encourage their readers to challenge the teachings that they and their predecessors had developed over centuries.These circles, who shaped the final form of the canon, were convinced that pushback and testing make a system more flexible and resilient. Only when their communities questioned and evaluated their teachings would they fully appreciate both their value and their limitations. (p. 354)
"The pervasive presence of defeat is an important clue to the enigma of the Bible's existence. It suggests that the most formative time for biblical literature was the period following the destruction of the kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, the decades leading up to the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE, and especially the centuries thereafter, during which new communities re-emerged in both the North and the South.
The flourishing of two kingdoms was, to be sure, a necessary precondition for the development of biblical literature. By consolidating disparate groups with unified calendars, festivals, music, law, cult, and language, the palace created new occasions for writing. But if the kingdoms of Israel and Judah had continued to grow and expand, and their members had not suffered long and painful experiences of political weakness and subjugation, scribes would have never produced a body of writings capable of creating and sustaining a new nation.By reminding their audience of the destruction and suffering that their ancestors witnessed - especially after things had started to take a turn for the better - Lamentations and other biblical writings issue a warning: place your hope not in ephemeral kingdoms but in something more enduring. That something is not heaven or a new earth but belonging to a people whose members are committed to each other and to the deity who dwells in their midst. In the coming chapters, we examine how this project of peoplehood took shape in the centuries after Judah's defeat. (p. 151)
This not only results in the story as collected and written by Judean scribes or as developed by Israeli scribes, two other narrative traditions also emerge: the people's story that focuses on the collective of the nation, and the palace story, which focuses on the genealogy of power and the rights to rule the nation. These four elements to a large extent explain the many contradictions in the Bible, because they were all assembled with different perspectives and agendas.
The whole concept of superiority as a people keeps conflicting with their military losses against neighbouring tribes. From God's perspective, this could be the externalisation of their weakness, of worldly forces versus cosmic power. The moral weakness of the ancestors, including their lack of faith and loyalty to their God, is demonstrated by their real earthly weakness now. If this is their own fault, it means that they can also gain control over their own fate by being faithful to their god and its religion, turning away from their weakness as a people. In this way, weakness becomes a foundation for superiority, to be seen as the "chosen people" by God.
Absolutely essential reading for anybody with an interest in the Bible.
