This book is fantastic in that it is fairly short but dense read and encapsulates centuries of church history surrounding how the biblical canon was shaped and transmitted. There's no fundamentalist agenda here and Sailhamer's language is conspicuously devoid of spiritualizing. The structure of the book is very simple and clear: phases of composition, canon, and consolidation. Sailhamer gives a high-level overview of what was happening in each phase and is able to do so in a very clear way - milestones such as Babylonian exile in 586 BC and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD are key markers in biblical development. Towards the end, Sailhamer even devotes some text to addressing the radical transformation of te English language in terms of inclusive gender pronouns and how that has shifted how we translate the Bible as well.