For any study of the Bible as an ancient body of writing, whether that antiquity is understood as Iron Age or Hellenistic, literary history becomes a methodological necessity. Even if the ultimate interest lies elsewhere – in interpretation of ideas, in religion, in society, in history – the need to know whose world we are examining drives us to probe the settings of biblical writing and revision. The problem is that the Bible remains to some degree a black box, impossible to penetrate and therefore requiring analysis entirely by external means, because the earliest manuscripts and translations already date to the period after its completion. By the time of these earliest textual versions, Israel and Judah have passed from the scene, and the descendants who maintain the Bible have constituted themselves as Jews – under various names – in a social and political landscape radically different from those of the probable writers. If we insist on reading the early manuscripts as the literature of Roman-period Judaism and beyond, it is obvious that we are far from the society and intellectual world of the Bible's creation.

Along with the chronological distance between the settings of writing and revision and those of our first copies, it is clear that the Bible was not composed at one time and place. Most parts of the Bible present themselves as clear compilations, and more than two centuries of modern scholarship have been occupied with untangling the evolution of each finished text. Generations of specialists have tried to date the layers of textual transformation, often to specific events and actors. With such a complex product and manuscripts from long after its completion, however, the more precise the chronological solution, the more fragile may be its persuasive power. In order to read the Bible for its intellectual world, its society, its religion, and for history, I seek more lasting solutions that are less dependent on narrow definitions of time and place.