Ear­ly on in his thought­ful explo­ration of bib­li­cal his­to­ry, Jacob Wright makes the bold claim that while numer­ous works explain ​“how” the Bible began, few try to answer the ques­tion of ​“why.” On every page of Why the Bible Began, Wright does just that, method­i­cal­ly explor­ing the ori­gins and moti­va­tions behind some of Judais­m’s most cher­ished texts.

Although Wright’s book is steeped in bib­li­cal schol­ar­ship — source crit­i­cism, the lat­est find­ings in bib­li­cal arche­ol­o­gy, com­par­a­tive stud­ies of oth­er Near East peo­ples — it is not a sim­ple digest of well-tread mate­r­i­al. True, Wright spends time catch­ing his read­ers up on the lat­est schol­ar­ly find­ings and approach­es, giv­ing the book an air of author­i­ty and the feel of a self-con­tained text­book. Yet Wright also asks many ques­tions that could be bet­ter cat­e­go­rized as the­o­log­i­cal or philo­soph­i­cal. These include: Why does the Bible dwell so much on fail­ure and oppres­sion? Why does the Torah begin with a uni­ver­sal vision of human­i­ty rather than an account of the Jew­ish peo­ple? Why does the Torah include the book of Leviti­cus, with all its priest­ly minutiae? 

To give one exam­ple of Wright’s insight­ful­ness, the book explores the prophet Haggai’s con­dem­na­tion of the peo­ple when, fol­low­ing their return from exile in Baby­lo­nia in the sixth cen­tu­ry BCE, they were reluc­tant to rebuild the Tem­ple. Under­stand­ing the Bible as a moti­vat­ing tool, Wright pro­pos­es that large sec­tions of the taber­na­cle nar­ra­tive at the end of the Book of Exo­dus were like­ly writ­ten to con­vince the peo­ple of Haggai’s day to begin their own build­ing project in Jerusalem. If the peo­ple in the Bible enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly con­struct­ed the Mishkan while wan­der­ing in the desert, it would poten­tial­ly encour­age the peo­ple dur­ing the post-exil­ic peri­od to engage in their own con­struc­tion work. Many stu­dents of Torah have scratched their heads over why the Bible would give so much real estate to the dry archi­tec­tur­al ren­der­ings of the taber­na­cle; but seen through this lens, the tedious account of the con­struc­tion of the Mishkan sud­den­ly makes sense as pro­pa­gan­da to get the peo­ple to invest in the Sec­ond Temple. 

As a con­sum­mate teacher, Wright does not treat his book as if it is the end of any con­ver­sa­tion on bib­li­cal schol­ar­ship. Each chap­ter con­cludes with thought­ful sug­ges­tions about where to read more. As such, Why the Bible Began feels less like the lat­est offer­ing in the field of bib­li­cal schol­ar­ship and more like its cap­stone. This book will not only leave read­ers with an appre­ci­a­tion for aca­d­e­m­ic approach­es to the Bible, but it will also serve as an impor­tant mark­er of where think­ing about the sub­ject is today. Wright’s work deserves to be in the canon of bib­li­cal studies.