About

William Schniedewind is a Professor of Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitic Languages in the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He earned his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1992. Schniedewind has held significant academic positions including serving as a Research Fellow and later as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research. He also held the Kershaw Term Chair of Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies from 2007 to 2017. His research interests focus on the social history of the ancient eastern Mediterranean world, the sociolinguistics of Classical Hebrew, and ancient biblical interpretation. He was the Director of the Qumran Virtual Reality Project and has served on editorial boards for several prestigious journals including the Journal of Biblical Literature, Tel Aviv, Writings of the Ancient World, and the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Schniedewind has authored five books that contribute to the understanding of biblical texts and ancient languages, including titles such as The Word of God in Transition, Society and the Promise to David, How the Bible Became a Book, A Primer on Ugaritic, and A Social History of Hebrew: Its Origins Through the Rabbinic Period. He also edited the Brill edition of the El-Amarna Correspondence by Anson F. Rainey. His scholarly work explores the development of Hebrew language and literature, the process of textualization and scripturalization in ancient Israel, and the educational practices of ancient scribes. His research provides insights into the cultural and linguistic contexts of biblical texts and the historical processes that shaped their formation and transmission.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• History
• Philosophy
• Art
• Linguistics
• Political Science
• Literature
• Aesthetics
• Law
• Ancient history

Selected publications

• Who Really Wrote the Bible

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2024-06-18

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• Who Really Wrote the Bible

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2024-04-10 · 1 citations

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  A groundbreaking new account of the writing of the Hebrew Bible Who wrote the Bible? Its books have no bylines. Tradition long identified Moses as the author of the Pentateuch, with Ezra as editor. Ancient readers also suggested that David wrote the psalms and Solomon wrote Proverbs and Qohelet. Although the Hebrew Bible rarely speaks of its authors, people have been fascinated by the question of its authorship since ancient times. In Who Really Wrote the Bible , William Schniedewind offers a bold new answer: the Bible was not written by a single author, or by a series of single authors, but by communities of scribes. The Bible does not name its authors because authorship itself was an idea enshrined in a later era by the ancient Greeks. In the pre-Hellenistic world of ancient Near Eastern literature, books were produced, preserved, and passed on by scribal communities. Schniedewind draws on ancient inscriptions, archaeology, and anthropology, as well as a close reading of the biblical text itself, to trace the communal origin of biblical literature. Scribes were educated through apprenticeship rather than in schools. The prophet Isaiah, for example, has his “disciples”; Elisha has his “apprentice.” This mode of learning emphasized the need to pass along the traditions of a community of practice rather than to individuate and invent. Schniedewind shows that it is anachronistic to impose our ideas about individual authorship and authors on the writing of the Bible. Ancient Israelites didn’t live in books, he writes, but along dusty highways and byways. Who Really Wrote the Bible describes how scribes and their apprentices actually worked in ancient Jerusalem and Judah.

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• Who Really Wrote the Bible

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

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• Northern Refugees in Jerusalem: The Case of Menaḥem, Son of Yawbana

  2023-06-29

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• 4. The Isaiah Bulla, Jeremiah the Priest/Prophet, and Reinterpreting the Prophet (nby’) in the Persian Scribal Community

  Academic Studies Press eBooks · 2023-11-24

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• Ancient Israelite Scribal Apprenticeships

  Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok · 2023-12-18

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  This article applies the anthropological model of apprenticeship learning as articulated by Jean Lave and Etienne Wegner to the study of ancient Israelite scribalism. Apprenticeship learning created scribal “communities of practice,” and this can be identified in the ancient Hebrew inscriptional record as well as biblical texts. The main Hebrew term for an “apprentice” is naʿar, and this term appears on Hebrew seals and seal impressions. Scribal skills were learned in a variety of professions such as administrators, soldiers, merchants, prophets, and priests, and each of these professions would have had their own “community of practice.” The close-knit relationships forged by apprenticeship learning is reflected in the use of familial language such as “son of” to express different professional scribal communities.

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• The Isaiah Bulla, Jeremiah the Priest/Prophet, and Reinterpreting the Prophet (nby’) in the Persian Scribal Community

  Academic Studies Press eBooks · 2023-10-31

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• Diversity and Development of tôrâ in the Hebrew Bible

  SBL Press eBooks · 2022-03-11 · 1 citations

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• Solomon from Archival Sources to Collective Memory

  BRILL eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

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  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
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• Adaptation in Scribal Curriculum: Examples from the Letter Writing Genre

  2022-11-21

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Frequent coauthors

• David M. Carr

  Claremont Graduate University

  17 shared

• Joel H. Hunt

  12 shared

• Christine Mitchell

  8 shared

• Tamara Cohn Eskenazi

  5 shared

• Gary N. Knoppers

  University of Alberta

  5 shared

• Alan Dundes

  1 shared

• Gary A. Rendsburg

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  1 shared

• Christine Mitchell

  1 shared