How the Bible Became Holy by Michael L. Satlow (review)

This is a highly informative guide to the origins of the Bible (both Old and New Testaments, though with a greater concentration on the Hebrew Bible). More than in most similar works, Satlow provides quite a detailed history of ancient Israel and of the early Church as the setting for the composition and transmission of the biblical books. Also quite unusually, he adopts a somewhat minimalist approach to the importance of sacred books in both Judaism and Christianity, arguing that in both cases authoritative scripture arrived much later on the scene than is often supposed. The result is a more innovative book than the casual reader might think, because the style is understated and makes no strident claims to originality. It can certainly be recommended to anyone interested in the whole sweep of the Bible’s formation.

Satlow begins the story of the Bible in the northern kingdom of Israel in the ninth century b.c.e., where he thinks a literate class of scribes existed for the first time in Israel; he doubts whether any texts in the Hebrew Bible are older than this. He then traces a fairly standard historical account of the end of the northern kingdom, which led to such scribes seeking refuge in the southern kingdom of Judah, where they started to formulate works such as Deuteronomy, here ascribed to the time of Hezekiah (eighth century) rather than, as more commonly, Josiah (seventh century). He offers an (again traditional) account of the writing down of prophecies, and of the writing of the history of Israel (Joshua-Kings), following (as usual in the USA) the “Cross” theory that there was a first edition in the reign of Josiah and a second one during the Exile.

So far many scholars would agree in broad outline. More controversial is the suggestion that even in post-exilic times, written texts were generally rather unimportant. The work of Ezra is not seen as having established the authority of the Torah or Pentateuch, but as concerned with a much smaller corpus, and that of interest only to a learned elite. Custom and tradition were more important than texts.

This remains true, for Satlow, even into the Common Era, when it was only the Sadducees who cared very much about texts, while the Pharisees focused on (oral) traditions. Controversially, he sees Sadducees—rather than Essenes—at the root of the Qumran community, among the first groups for whom written scripture really started to matter. They read it for the most part in an oracular mode, concerning themselves with the fulfilment of prophecy rather than with halakah. The same would be true of Paul and of early Christians influenced by him, for whom the Hebrew Bible was little known in detail, but seen chiefly as a collection of oracles. Jesus, Satlow suggests, knew only a few bits of the Hebrew Bible, such as Isaiah and Psalms—the same texts that were central at Qumran.

Another controversial and intriguing idea is that the origins of a real interest in scripture lie not in the land of Israel but in the diaspora, and particularly in Egypt. The Septuagint is the first evidence, in the third century, of a concern with sacred texts, and it was in Egyptian synagogues that the custom of reading the Pentateuch aloud to the assembled people originated. (I have a query here: How did it occur to Egyptian Jews to translate precisely these books, if they were so unimportant in Judaism at the time?) Palestinian Jews did not pick up this custom until much later, it is argued. And even in the first and second centuries c.e., most Jews were focused on custom and tradition, on what came to be known as the Oral Torah rather than on the Written Torah—so that the Mishnah, in the second century c.e., cites the Hebrew Bible rather little and is not organized with attention to the biblical order of books, but according to major themes of rabbinic...