Who Wrote the Bible? The Concept of Authorship in the Old Testament and Ancient Near East - Dr Mark Chavalas - Friday Night Lectures - September 9, 2026

Who Wrote the Bible?

The Concept of Authorship in the

Old Testament and Ancient Near East

Have you ever wondered why so many of the books of the Old Testament appear to be written by 'anonymous'? For example, Samuel died about halfway through the first book named after himself. Surely he did not write 2 Samuel! Did a Moabite peasant girl write the book of Ruth? Did Jonah write an unflattering story about himself as the anti-hero? How about the end of the book of Deuteronomy; did Moses write about his own death? Who collected the oracles of the prophet Jeremiah, or the oracles of Isaiah?

From our modern perspective, we think of a book as written by an individual author. We even copyright our work so it cannot be reproduced. It becomes the author's intellectual property. But this is not how 'authorship' was viewed in the world of the Old Testament. In viewing literary works from Mesopotamia, for example, we find that the authors are almost never named. In fact, authority was located in the text, not the author(s), who was either anonymous, or at best, deemphasized. When a person is named, it is unclear whether he or she is the 'first one' (i.e., the originator), or the copyist, or editor, or all of these things (the term used for this is 'tradent'). At best, authorship was considered a collective enterprise, with the content handed down (and sometimes updated or modified) to succeeding generations.

With this in mind, for Bible believing Christians, my goal in this presentation is to show that we can still believe in the divine inspiration of Scripture, even if the concept of individual authorship in the biblical world was different than our own.

Mark Chavalas is Emeritus Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, where he taught ancient Near Eastern and Biblical history for thirty-five years. He is the author or editor of a number of works on Mesopotamia and Israel, including Mesopotamia and the Bible, and the IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament. Currently, Mark does a podcast on Bible backgrounds with Keagan Walz. https://www.youtube.com/@BuriedBiblePodcast. He and his wife Kimberlee live in La Crosse, WI and have six adult children and four grandchildren.

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