William M. Schniedewind is professor of biblical studies and the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was the inaugural holder of the Kershaw Chair of Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies. He is the author of How the Bible Became a Book, A Social History of Hebrew: Its Origins Through the Rabbinic Period, The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible, and other books.