The concept of inspiration is part and parcel of the theological tradition in several religious confessions, but it has largely receded to the background, if not vanished altogether, in the discussions of biblical scholars. The question "Do we still need inspiration?" might well reflect the perplexity of many exegetes today. Systematic theologians, for their part, often further their own reflections on the subject independently of developments in the field of exegesis, with the risk of remaining purely theoretical. Biblical research in the last decades has been marked by new insights about...