The contributors include James Bos (Ole Miss), David Carr (Columbia), André Lemaire (Sorbonne), Robert Miller (Catholic University), Nadav Na’aman (Tel Aviv), Raymond Person Jr. (Northern Ohio), Frank H. Polak (Tel Aviv), Christopher A. Rollston (George Washington), Seth Sanders (UC Davis), Joachim Schaper (Edinburgh), Brian Schmidt (Michigan), William Schniedewind (UCLA), Elsie Stern (Reconstructionist College) and Jessica Whisenant (Independent Scholar).

Situated historically between the invention of the alphabet, on the one hand, and the creation of ancient Israel’s sacred writings, on the other, is the emergence of literary production in the ancient Levant. In this timely collection of essays by an international cadre of scholars entitled Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings, contributors explore the dialectic between the oral and the written, the intersection of orality with literacy, and the advent of literary compositions as a prelude to the emergence of Israel’s biblical writings and their sources. Contributors also examine a range of related topics including scripturalization, the compositional dimensions of orality and textuality as they engage biblical poetry, prophecy, and narrative along with their antecedents, and the ultimate autonomy of ‘the written’ in early Israel.

Brian B. Schmidt (volume editor and contributor), Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings: Ancient Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production. Ancient Israel and Its Literature 22. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015. 358 Pages. ISBN-10: 1628371188; ISBN-13: 978-1628371185.