The Unknown Authors of the Bible

           I have never previously read works from the Bible, so being able to read Friedman’s analysis along side Genesis allowed me to consider much as I was reading it. Friedman lists some of the discrepancies as people traveling to cities before their construction, characters knowing information they could not have possibly known, and characters acting in conflicting ways. I could easily spot some of these in Genesis, which definitely supports that there were more than one authors to the work.

            It is interesting how several cultures that studied the Bible throughout the centuries attempted to explain away these discrepancies, and that these explanations may have been worked into different versions of the Bible. It is unfortunate that we cannot read and study the original version of the Bible without modification from these different cultures. The best way to come close to this is to understand the different authors, and understand how they may have modified different versions of the Biblical texts.