Of one thing about the Bible we can be certain. It was not brought into being by a contingent of Samuel Smileses and Grub Street hacks pounding at keyboards and watching their output take shape on a screen in front of them. We can be almost as certain that it was not the work of clerks with frayed cuffs, inkpot and quill, not to mention red-tape and sealing-wax, on the desk, and scrolls of paper to hand. And we can be more or less secure in the belief that it was not monks in a scriptorium writing deathless prose with illuminations on vellum or a less expensive parchment under the supervision of the novice-master.
So if regular modes of literary labour did not bring into existence the Bible as we know it, what procedures did take place? How did words gain a place on writing material in days that preceded sophisticated production of prose and verse?
The answer is, of course, that we just don’t know. But that does not stop us speculating. It is likely, for instance, that law codes were assembled by legal eagles who knew their stuff but did not know that what they wrote had a future beyond that which the civil service mandarins had in mind. It is also probable that chroniclers took existing material such as the book of Jashar and incorporated it into the story they were putting together. As is customary in all cultures, riddles and proverbs circulated by word of mouth amongst old and young before being roped in for inclusion in collected folk productions.
And so we could go on. In one sense it doesn’t matter how we answer the question. The issue is, as always, what do we make of the text in front of us|? And yet it does matter. If we take no interest in how the text of the Bible came into being, we shall bring unrecognised and untested assumptions to our reading of it. We may see the hand of God in the writing of it in such a way that we regard every sentence, every figure of speech, every trope being immediately intelligible, as though it were a bus time-table or a telephone directory with a prosaic meaning needing no interpretation. We shall as a result find ourselves encumbered with all sorts of impossible conundrums. We may even resort to reading the Bible through from Genesis to Revelation as though it were one continuous composition.
Unless we believe that inquiring minds are not part of God’s design, we shall avoid such pitfalls and snares. We do well to approach the Bible with some sense of how it came to us. We may need help from those to whom is committed a ministry of the Word. The Bible is more than a book of recipes or a commonplace anthology.
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