What are the major concerns of literary and historical studies of the biblical text?

Answer 1

1. Knowing the actual date of authorship of a text helps scholars to understand the cultural context in which it was written. This in turn helps them understand the historicity of events if they took place centuries earlier.
2. Knowing something about the actual author of a book helps establish the level of authenticity or inauthenticity of the text. Many texts are either anonymous or have superscriptions that provide incorrect credits to historical persons.
3. All texts change over time, through copying errors and for theological or political reasons. Recognising evident or likely interpolations or changes to the text helps understand what was originally written.
4. Literary and historical studies of the biblical texts can not be carried out effectively without a good knowledge of the literature of surrounding cultures and of the evidence of Near Eastern Archaeology. Archaeology has provided good evidence that has in some cases provided support for the biblical record, and in other cases shown it to be unhistorical.
5. In the course of literary and historical studies, scholars have to be careful of reading modern assumptions and beliefs into ancient texts.

Answer 2

Literary and historical studies of the biblical text involve attempting to establish when individual texts were written and in what context, what message the original author intended to convey and to what extent the original Autographs have been altered. The Bible used to be regarded as a primary source for historical study, but is now generally regarded as a secondary source - in other words, it can help confirm an extra-biblical primary source but is not usually accepted as sufficiently reliable to be a primary historical source in its own right.