Review by P. H. Deal
Newsletter Editor, American Humanist Association, New Mexico Chapter  

In The Bible Through the Eyes of its Authors, Frederic March takes his readers on a studied journey through the ancient Hebrew texts that comprise for Christians the Old Testament of the Bible and for Jews the foundational scripture of their religion. March, unlike countless other authors, does not undertake his journey to support or reject the religions based upon them, but rather to understand them as the product of centuries of political development, as a people transition from a primitive, scattered, semi-nomadic life style into a highly structured, landed civilization. He tackles his journey in three ways: through analysis of the text itself, through modern archeological and historical research, and by reconstructing and analyzing the authorship of the Bible. In all of these, he draws upon the works of many other writers, historians, and researchers, ultimately creating a compendium of the latest thinking in biblical research, leavened with his own fascinating insights.

With my predilection to think in evolutionary terms (my background is in biological science), I was most struck by March's insights into the evolutionary nature of the texts. In reviewing the authorship of the various texts, he rejects the traditional teaching that they were written by their principals—that is, Moses wrote the Torah, Court scribes wrote Kings and Chronicles, prophets wrote the books that bear their names, and so on—in favor of the more evidence-based proposals of religiously liberal and secular scholars. In these latter views, the grand chronology from creation to Ezra's time, was the work of five principal authors (whose actual identities remain unknown but who can be inferred from the biblical text) to each of whom is assigned a letter. Four, E, P, D, and R are thought to have been priests. March accepts the somewhat controversial position that the fifth, identified as J, was most likely a woman, this because many of the passages ascribed to her are at odds with those attributed to the other writers, and because she placed much stronger female characters in her writing. (She also loved to lambaste male leaders, as when she made Samson the weak-minded dupe of Delilah.)

If you accept his reasoning, March provides a powerful explanation for the obvious inconsistencies in many Biblical stories. The writers used their textual manipulations to adjust their religion to serve their current needs, a process that continues to this day. (Of course, as March observes, current theologians do not have the liberty to actually change the text, but must content themselves with creative reinterpretations of the preserved text to give their religion modern relevance.) Interestingly, biblical evolution appears to share with biological evolution a tendency to never throw anything away, but merely to rework that which already exists to serve new purposes. Just as earlier biological forms can sometimes be inferred from comparative anatomy, older texts—even the oral tradition—can sometimes be recovered through comparative study of existing texts. Hey, it might be that Intelligent Design is no more relevant to the Bible than it is to biology.

March has performed a valuable service to anyone, layman or serious scholar, who is interested in the historical origins of the Bible and the motivations of its writers. Of necessity, this is a long book, because it treats an immense topic, but March writes clearly, with a minimum of jargon, and I found his commentaries easy to follow. They were adequately detailed without, in spite of the book's length, becoming tiresome, and I found the case he makes for his thesis, that the writers were often politically motivated, persuasive and not easily dismissed. This is a book well worth reading.