Bible Authorship question

[YankeyMCC]

Hi,

I saw this quote today.

"It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible." -George W. Foote

I know the quote could be seen as provocative, I don't post it here to show support or disagreement with the statement about who should or should not feel proud.

I just have a question about the assumption. I will take the position that I suppose some fundamental Christians would call provocative that being the Bible was written by humans not gods.

My question is that from what I know and what seems like is that the statement is true that no women contributed to the actual writing down of the stories (seems to me they were almost certainly some of the early story tellers but maybe I'm wrong there too).

Does anyone know if there is any evidence of women doing any of the early writing of the Bible stories?

Just curious.

[Warpy]

1. He's never read the book of Deborah

They were forced to include her because she was their greatest poet as well as a major player. Women are also quoted throughout the whole thing.

I would imagine there are vast stretches of the bible he never read, something he's got in common with most of the people who hold that book in a nearly idolatrous regard.

[dmallind]

6. Oh Irony. Deborah appears in Judges, not a separate book

And has no claim of female authorship. It simply includes some old Hebrew poetry about a woman, written by an anonymous author whose gender is not known.

[Warpy]

9. Well, "booklet."

It's been a long time since I sat down and read the whole thing.

The point is that some of her verse was included. Women weren't written out of the bible, although their roles were diminished over time and translation.

The only thing they know for sure about biblical authorship is that it was done by committee, several different writing styles represented within most books. If it was written by god, he's got dissociative identity disorder.

[GodlessBiker]

2. I believe there were books purportedly written by women, but early church leaders, ...

all sexist asshats I would imagine, excluded them when they determined which books would constitute the Bible.

[lumpy]

7. Of course it would be assumed that ,if indeed ,women had

written anything about anything in those days long gone, surely women's writings would have been surpressed. In most areas of the world, women didn't even have the right to vote or hold property. Women didn't have anywhere near full rights in this country until the 20th century.

[LiberalFighter]

3. They need to prove that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

were actually written by the disciples of Jesus.

They need to prove that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible.

[Glorfindel]

4. There have been interesting speculations about the epistle to the Hebrews

http://www.godswordtowomen.org/hoppin.htm

[okasha]

8. There's a good deal of support for this.

I would suspect, also, that some of the psalms were composed by women and that possibly Luke's "L" source was a woman.

[dmallind]

5. While most of the original authorship is speculative, women are not prime suspects.

The silly notions that Moses wrote the Torah and that the Gospels are named after their disciple authors are long since discarded. There are at least 4 traditions in the Torah - writers from different peoples even, let alone people. It's interesting that two of the names translated in the OT with the same word "Lord" are the names of two entirely separate and distinct deities from different tribes - Yahweh and El being Canaanite sky god and Edomite war god (not sure I recall which was which).

But neither tradition nor modern scholarship assigns female authors to any stories. Ruth for excample, where a female author might be imagined, is assigned to Samuel by traditionalists. Like several other books in the Bible. it was probably a fictional morality tale popular in the Hellenized Middle East. Modern people tend to forget that fiction was not invented by Cervantes, and that potboilers were quite common in the 1st Century. It's plausible some were written by women, even though they were less likely to be literate or engaged in business like selling "books" than men, but none have been identified in scripture AFAIK.

[Igel]

11. So you're saying that the Pentateuch wasn't ever edited?

That the various narratives just kind of all plopped onto the reader's desk in a scriptorium and accidentally got merged?

No. You're saying that somebody edited them but didn't compose them from nothing at a single time (or even from nothing over a longer period of time, as Muhammed "wrote" the Qur'aan). And that person couldn't have been Moses because, well, that's silly.

However, saying somebody "edited" the narratives together might be exactly the same as saying that somebody "wrote" the Penteteuch. The distinction between edited and wrote is large now, not so large even a few hundred years ago. Bach "wrote" a harpsichord concerto that is mostly a transcription, reworking, and editing of a Vivaldi vln concerto. Handel "wrote" stuff that he freely copied from others, but with new harmonization, edited and amended.

All that's left is to decide when it was first assembled, first written in its final form. Ezra, c 600 BC? Did he first assemble the texts into the 5 books we have now or just edit them (some more)? Were they already assembled? If already assembled, when were they assembled?

Yeah. The first disagreement occurred in the 19th century, when it was argued that the primitive, backward Hebrews couldn't possibly have had any writing as far back as 1000 BC, so the very idea of an early date for anything was absurd. It wasn't (just?) anti-Semitism--they said the same thing about lots of other peoples, even the Greeks. But it was the first wave of Enlightment thought ruling in schools of theology.

[dmallind]

12. If you accept that Campbell "wrote" the Greek myths, and if you imagine that

you can guess blindly at a name centuries earlier than textual criticism can go and believe that Moses not only invented the autobiography, but invented the highly stylized third-person autobiography with prequel episodes approximately 1000 and 3000 years respectively before anyone else, then go nuts. It'd be a short trip after all.

[On the Road]

10. It's Been Speculated

that Priscilla (of the early church members Priscilla and Aquilla) wrote Hebrews, but there's really not that much to suggest that.

If you follow the JEDP multiple authorship school of thought on the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), the J source has a somewhat more feminist position than most other documents of that time. It has led to speculation that J was a woman. But again, there is not much other than the general viewpoint to suggest that.

Given that few women in those times were able to write, it is more likely that all the authors were men.

[okasha]

13. Very few men were able to write, either. But either a man or a woman

could dictate to a scribe.

[On the Road]

14. That is True -- Some of the Prophets Probably Couldn't Write

On the other hand, there are still no compelling argument why a woman wrote any particular book of the Old or New Testament.

[dmallind]

15. Which no woman had the money to hire.

Since property vested in men then (and mostly still does). Scribes were skilled and valuable. More germane, these stories were oral folk tales for a long time before anyone wrote them down.