LAI- Scribes and Schools Review

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(More customer reviews)Philip Davies has a reputation as one of the more extreme members of the recent school of Biblical minimalists/revisionists. However, in "Scribes and Schools" he keeps himself fairly well restrained and highly referenced. The result is a book that, while not conclusively definitive, intrigues the reader with a wealth of possibilities about how the canon of the Bible grew into the one we are familiar with today.
He starts by introducing us to the idea of canons generally, moves to those who controlled the technology of writing in the ancient world, a hereditary international class of scribes attached to palaces and temples, and how they operated in the fairly well-documented societies of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece. He then reviews various approaches taken by scholars regarding these issues in Judaism, and summarizes Israelite and Judean history from the monarchic to the Roman periods. The remainder of the book is devoted to specific divisions of the Bible: the Torah, Prophets, Widsom Literature and Apocryphal writings, taking into account the libraries at and around Qumran. The final chapter considers the final form: the transition of canonical collections of literature into Holy Books as we now know them.
The book is fairly short, written in a rather dry, academic style, and good enough to recommend to anyone thinking about the Bible's growth into its present form. Sometimes Davies is insightful, as when he suggests a Persian period date for the composition of Deuteronomy on the basis of its diminished notion of the role of the king, which would have been unsuitable for a monarchic state but well-adapted to a colonial one. Other times he is less so, as when he suggests that the oldest parts of 1Enoch were composed at the same time as the oldest parts of Genesis, since it is quite clear in comparing these texts that they come from totally different literary and conceptual universes! Davies also refers to obscure sources which is very interesting, at least to me.

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