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June 28, 2008 - Saturday
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The Authorship of the Rest of the Old Testament
Category: Religion and Philosophy
What about the rest of the books in the Old Testament? Are the authors all unknown to us? The answer can be found in the table below. This table summarizes the results of critical (i.e. without any theological presuppositions) and scientific scrutiny of the Bible. The principles used here are no different from those used in other fields of documentary research. The document is scrutinized to find evidences of time of composition, the identity of the author and their general reliability. It is unfortunate to lay Christians, that this field is known by the ugly name: Higher Criticism. The choice of name was most unfortunate, for it gives one the impression of snobbish, ivory tower intellectuals who look down on the Bible to criticize it. With a name like that, it is easy for fundamentalists to launch their attacks on it. It is also significant that the results of this field of research is not normally made known to Christians. 
Comparison between the traditional attribution of authorship of Old Testament books and the results of critical research [1] What does Higher Criticism tells us? Firstly that the books from Genesis to Esther have anonymous authors. Thus, all the books that purports to narrate about the history of the Jewish nation and their relationship with God have unknown authors. It is precisely with this kind of books that the knowledge of the author's identity is needed to enable a forthright assessment of their reliability. The books attributed to kings David and Solomon were not written or compiled by them. It is only in the book of the prophets that there exists some truths in the traditional attribution of authorship. These books however, are generally just essays on the views and opinions of the individual prophets. The question naturally arises: why would tradition assign the authorship to people who did not write them? The answer is simple. The books in the Bible, especially the historical books and the Pentateuch, as we have mentioned earlier, are books of testimony. To give it's incredible stories some sort of credibility, the early believers concocted the fiction of Mosaic authorship for Pentateuch, Davidic authorship of the Psalms and so on. In other words, the traditional attribution originated by fraudulent means. References 1. Anderson, A Critical Introduction to the Old Testament
Asimov, Guide to the Bible
Paine, The Age of Reason
Riedel et.al., The Book of the Bible
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