Award-winning scholar David Lambert questions whether the Bible ever became scripture, tracing its ongoing formation and offering a new way to tell its global history
Standard histories of the Bible tell a common story: a collection of ancient Israelite texts, at some point in time, became scripture—a fixed textual entity with a stable identity—and was subsequently interpreted by Jewish and Christian readers. Yet scholars have never agreed on when or how this transformation occurred, why it happened, or even what scripture means, exposing persistent anomalies within the current paradigm.
In this pathbreaking work, David Lambert returns to the Bible’s supposed origins as scripture in ancient Judaism and argues that none of the features commonly understood to define it—authority, revelation, moral instruction, and interpretation—were necessarily present as universal rules. Instead, what the Bible is and what it can do is configured by the local situations in which it is used. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from the Hebrew Bible to rabbinic midrash, Lambert shows how the biblical—not only texts, but also themes, language, figures, landscapes, and stories related to the Bible—is continually produced by the networks of people, institutions, and media with which it circulates.
Beyond Scripture offers a new way to tell the Bible’s ongoing, global history—one without a single origin, fixed identity, or final form.