Were the BIblical Authors "Elites"?
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I just happened to come across an essay by Yonatan Adler entitled “Were the BIblical Authors ‘Elites’?” It was a great piece to get me thinking and inspired me to add to the conversation.
Let’s start with his definition of “elite”. He offers a few definitions but hones in on one of them for the purpose of his essay:
“It also includes in its definition: “(d) a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence.” This last definition is important for our purposes, as in speaking of an author as a member of an “elite,” one would seem to imply that the writer wields a certain degree of influence upon the general society within which he or she lives and works.”
However, I think there were a couple of assumptions derived from that definition that are not necessarily true. They are:
One who is elite must also be well known.
If a writing has influence then it must mean that the writer has influence.
Let’s tackle #1 first. Although it may be largely true today that those who exert influence are also well known (thanks to modern media), I don’t think that was necessarily true during the time of the Biblical authors. This focus on popularity shows up in two of Adler’s examples, which mention a celebrity with 10 million followers posting on X/Twitter, and the spiritual head of a large, established religion delivering a televised sermon. A third example is more analogous to the Biblical authors, which I’ll get to in a bit. Furthermore, his conclusion seems to make the same false equivalence when referring to the Biblical author as “little known”:
“If we regard a text as imparting sacred wisdom, beauty, and timeless truths, then the possibility that the author of such a text was little known in his own time should hardly imply that the text is any less sacred, wise, beautiful or true. ”
So why would a writing become influential if the writer was not? Let’s move on to assumption #2: If a writing has influence then it must mean that the writer has influence. This is where that 3rd example comes into play:
“A New York Times staff writer publishing a news item in this newspaper would be an “elite”; a random reader posting a comment below this item in the online edition of the newspaper would be a “non-elite.””
Sure, the NYT writer may be more elite than the common commenter, but he’s not as elite as the New York Times itself. A staff writer's influence in writing typically drops significantly when it’s not written in the NYT. And this is what I propose was the status of the Biblical authors. They may not have been powerful or well known but the institution they wrote for was.
Various biblical authors wrote for various institutions over the ages (see my video on multiple Elohists), but the final institution, the one with the defining hand, was the Yahwist cult.
We can see this in the Biblical text itself, since it was written as propaganda that promoted the agenda of the author’s institution. With this in mind, we can take a different perspective on the development of influential text. Let’s take a look at one of Alder’s scenarios.
“It is easy to imagine an arcane manuscript being tucked away on a shelf in some archive, like a temple library, and gathering dust there for decades or even centuries before it is rediscovered and publicized widely. The fact that precisely such a scenario is described in the narrative about the high priest Hilkiah discovering a long-forgotten scroll “in the house of YHWH” (2 Kgs 22:8; 2 Chr 34:15) suggests that ancient storytellers did not regard such a storyline as a farfetched possibility.”
Indeed, it’s the plausibility of the scenario that makes it good propaganda and a great cover story to inject a text that didn’t exist into the history preceding it. (It also wasn’t the house of YHWH).
Adler mentions using a spectrum when it comes to categorizing the elite:
““Elite status should not be judged as a binary—i.e., one either has it or not—but rather as falling along a broad continuum.””
I agree with that, but would place the Biblical authors a bit higher on it. Simply having the ability to write, automatically put one in the upper echelons of a largely illiterate society. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they were well known.
So to recap, I disagree that the Biblical authors were not “Elites” (they were), but I agree that they were not well known… but their institutions were and therefore, so were their writings.