Who Wrote the Bible?

If you have any interest in the history of the near east, or the content of Old Testament's Pentateuch you owe it to yourself to read Richard Friedman's "Who Wrote the Bible". This book is a bit of a miracle in that it 1) grounds the reader in the history and scope of biblical scholarship, 2) logically builds the arguments for the documentary hypothesis from source material in a logically transparent way, 3) achieves the... Read Full Review

Considering the academic nature of the topic, Mr. Friedman does an incredible job at keeping the topic matter approachable and engaging. As a Christian raised with a conservative protestant background, I found the information Mr. Friedman presents to be both fascinating and very disturbing. Disturbing in the sense that he describes a `story' of the creation of the first 5 books of the old testament in a way that differs... Read Full Review

Friedman keeps to a very narrow, but clearly defined, path in assessing biblical origins. He goes to some effort to restrict his thesis to identifying authors and their likely locations. The validity of events nor theology never enter the picture. Contention over inconsistencies in what has come down to us as "the" bible have raged for centuries. Scholars in the Middle Ages, he reminds us, readily noted how styles varied,... Read Full Review

Have you ever noticed that the story of the Creation is told twice in Genesis, in different ways? Or that at one point in Genesis Noah releases a dove from the ark, but just a few verses away, it says he released a raven? Scholars have found dozens of such "doublets," bits of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) that cover the same ground, often differing in the details or the words used.Richard Friedman,... Read Full Review

I had read several books that purported to explain the origins of the Old Testament, but they tended to make assertions without explanations. Perhaps they were too advanced for me. This book, however, explains in great detail how it arrives at its conclusions.It is great fun to read parts of the book and ask yourself: Whodunit? For example, there's one place where you are compelled to predict who wrote about the Golden... Read Full Review