Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The Afterword highlights four A’s in this book’s biblical stories about leaders. First, the authorship of these narratives spans the greater part of Israel’s history. These stories set in Israel’s ancient past developed in ways that could speak to later times. The Hebrew Bible appears as a literary whole tracking leaders and the challenges that they faced across the centuries. Second, the literary attractiveness of these biblical stories is remarkable, infused as they are with trauma and loss, suspense and mystery. These literary dimensions made biblical leaders all the more engaging. Third, these stories gained in authority as textual vessels of ancient Israel’s cultural memory about itself. Biblical leaders could serve as both literary monuments to Israel’s past and ongoing models in subsequent times. This authority was also a function of perceived authorship, as the accounts of the likes of Moses, David, or the major prophets came to be viewed as also authored by them. As a result, these figures seemed even more important. Fourth and finally, the Bible’s fashioning of pseudonymous authorship corresponded with the anonymity of the stories’ composers. The biblical God could emerge as a divine author or co-author, as the voices of the human composers were mute and the signs of their hands receded. They worked as textual ventriloquists who at once preserved and generated a world of leaders emblematic in many ways. These four aspects deeply shaped the Bible’s representations of leaders and leadership, as well as perceptions of them ever since.</jats:p>