In his recent book, Who Really Wrote the Bible, Schniedewind traces the history of ancient scribal communities. In this talk, he brings this story up to the end of the Second Temple period and the Dead Sea Scrolls, where scribes become professionals who write, copy, and produce biblical literature and scrolls for early synagogues.

William Schniedewind is professor of Biblical studies at UCLA, and the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. He received his doctoral degree in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University, has been a Visiting Scholar at the Hebrew University and a Research Fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, and is the Associate Director of the excavations at Tell Shaddud. He served for many years as the Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He is the author of numerous articles and seven books including How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge University Press, 2004), A Social History of Hebrew (Yale University Press, 2013), The Finger of the Scribe (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Who Really Wrote the Bible: the Story of the Scribes (Princeton University Press, 2024).