Before the Scrolls: Ancient Scribal Cultures and the Formation of Sacred Scripture

People today access Scripture primarily through printed bibles and, increasingly, electronic media. It goes without saying that before the technologies that made print and electronic bibles possible, people encountered the sacred text in much different ways. The same can be said, of course, for the authors responsible for composing the texts themselves. The sacred authors did not write for the medium of print. In the language of Dei Verbum, they composed the sacred texts under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit according to “the situation of their own time and culture” (§§11–12). These sacred authors are rooted in a variety of ancient cultural contexts, including ancient media cultures that operated with materials and practices far removed from those of the modern world. Attention to the cultural situation of the sacred authors must include attention to ancient scribal practices as well as ideas and expectations about various forms of ancient media. In my recent book, Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel’s Prophetic Library,[1] I make the case for the importance of repopulating our readerly imaginations with ancient rather than modern ideas about textual media.

This approach is important because the material forms of literature are not simply value-free containers for a text; they are objects imbued with cultural meaning. Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “the medium is the message” might be an exaggeration, but the basic insight holds true. The materiality and format of a book have expressive functions.[2] Consider the difference between a cheaply made mass market paperback and a large, leatherbound edition by a famous author. Before you even read a word, you have expectations about the nature of each book and how to approach reading them. The material forms of these books, including their size, type of paper, font, etc., are all thick with cultural meanings that play important roles for both authors and readers. It is crucial to recognize that the meanings and values that accrue to particular media are culturally determined and subject to cultural factors that change over time. Adrian Johns, for instance, has shown that the idea of the printing press as ensuring stability was not an inevitability of the technology of print. Instead, the mass production capabilities of the printing press enabled the multiplication of pirated copies of often low quality that actually undermined confidence in the text’s stability. The association of the idea of stability with the printed text was instead an achievement of a culture of print that was eventually able to foster a shared sense of trust between printers, binders, booksellers, and a reading public.[3]

Giving due consideration to the material forms of biblical compositions, therefore, gives us potential insight into easily overlooked dimensions of the sacred text. What ideas and expectations surrounded the cultures of media production in which the sacred texts were written? How might ancient expectations for ancient forms of media have informed the practices of the sacred authors of Scripture and influenced their works? Answering these questions has the potential to provide crucial insights on the Scriptures as the products of particular human cultures.

But gaining these new potential insights is only one side of the story. The other side is that to neglect to consider factors relating to media culture opens the door for unexamined ideas about textual cultures to govern how we think about them. To fail to consider the ancient media culture, or to fail to even consider that forms of media are imbued with contingent cultural meanings, is to invite ourselves to read our own unexamined assumptions about media into the text. In the modern period, we have distinct ideas about the nature of the book as an expressive object. Unless we are careful, it would be easy to simply assume that the “books” of the Bible were written according to the ideas and standards of our modern notion of the book.

As Roger Chartier has argued, the modern idea of the book combines three notions: a single material object (i.e. the codex), a single textual work, and a single author.[4] As he shows, this particular constellation of ideas arose as a set of practices and expectations in a media culture defined by the codex, the printing press, and the practice of printing single volume works by single authors. The point is not that single author, single volume, single work books were non-existent prior to these technologies. Nor is the point that all modern books conform to these expectations. The point, rather, is that in the modern period the implicit model of the “book” becomes a single work by a single author printed on a single volume codex. When most modern people are asked what their favorite book is, the answer will likely correspond to these expectations. The danger comes when we imagine books from other media cultures that may have conceptual models that partially—or even significantly—diverge from this modern model of the book. In premodern Western Europe from late antiquity through to the fifteenth century, for example, some of the dominant forms of the book included miscellanies and hodge-podges in which jumbles of disparate texts were collected and haphazardly juxtaposed in a single volume.[5]

These considerations raise the possibility that anachronistic ideas about books could be imported into our reading of biblical texts. Seeking insight into the media cultures of Sacred Scripture, therefore, will require a measure of humility about our own assumptions. What seems obvious at first might turn out to be features of our own media culture that are foreign to the cultures of the ancient text. An example from each of the three great prophetic books, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, will demonstrate this point and show the interpretive potential for thinking culturally about ancient media.

Paratexts and the Author of Isaiah

The imposition of the modern conception of the book as the union of a single author, work, and object can be seen in certain seemingly common-sense ideas about biblical books. Most contemporary scholars hold that the book of Isaiah, for instance, was the work of at least three distinct prophets, some of whom are separated by nearly two centuries. Some readers, however, consider the book’s own apparent claim to single authorship to outweigh these arguments.[6] Centuries after the composition of Isaiah, other ancient authors also seem to have assumed that a single prophet was responsible for the whole book as, for example, John 12:38–41, which attributes Isa 6:10 and 53:1 to the same prophet. That the book of Isaiah itself seems to claim single authorship would appear to be the straightforward way to read the opening words of the book: “The vision of Isaiah ben Amoz . . .” (Isa 1:1). Given our expectations for what a book is, it would seem obvious that this heading was intended not only to identify Isaiah as an author but to attribute to him the entire book that follows. Our modern media context would seem to make this conclusion inevitable. The media culture behind the author of the Gospel of John, written roughly 600 years after the final stages of the book of Isaiah, seems to have produced similar assumptions. What makes this understanding seem like common sense is a set of cultural expectations about how headings work within a book. But what if Isa 1:1 was written in a media culture that had a different set of expectations for the use and meaning of headings?

One hint that this might be the case comes in considering how paratexts function elsewhere in the Old Testament. Paratexts are textual elements such as titles, headings, colophons, etc., that stand outside the work and guide the reader in one way or another. How paratexts function, however, is not a cultural universal. Like other elements of media culture, the function of paratexts is hashed out in cultures of writers and readers. The meanings of paratexts, therefore, are in flux and can function quite differently in different contexts. From our media perspective, Isa 1:1 appears immediately recognizable as a paratext that seems like it ought to apply to the book as a whole, associating all of Isa 1–66 with Isaiah son of Amoz.

When we look elsewhere in the Old Testament, however, we can see that paratexts can function in ways that violate our expectations. A lucid example appears in Proverbs 1:1: “The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel.” This heading seems to attribute the entire book to a single figure, but a glance elsewhere in the book shows that this is not the case. Proverbs 24:23 opens a collection of proverbs that are said to belong not to Solomon, but simply to “the wise.” Proverbs 30:1 attributes a collection to “Agur son of Jakeh,” and the final chapter bears the heading “The words of Lemuel, the king. An oracle his mother taught him” (Prov 25:1). There are complexities here surrounding the meaning of a heading like Prov 1:1,[7] but at least one thing is fairly clear: in the final form of the book, Prov 1:1 cannot be understood as claiming Solomonic authorship or origins for the entire book.

Another interesting—though complex—example involves a different kind of paratext that appears in Ps 72:20: “The prayers of David son of Jesse are completed.” This brief notice is not part of any particular psalm and appears to be an example of a colophon, a type of authorial and titular paratext that comes at an ending or transition of a text rather than its beginning. This passage would appear to be as clearly a colophonic ending as Isa 1:1 was an authorial beginning, but in fact the Psalter contains quite a few psalms attributed to David after Ps 72:20 has apparently declared the sequence of Davidic psalms complete (Pss 108–110, 138–145). The Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament, retains this colophon and adds yet further Davidic ascriptions following Ps 72: Pss 91, 93–99, 104, 137.[8] The paratextual indication of an end to the Davidic psalms in Psalm 72:20, therefore, does not apply to the book of Psalms as a whole either in the Hebrew or Greek versions. Instead, it was likely a colophon that originally concluded an earlier scroll of the Psalms and was retained by the scribes responsible for what became the expanded, canonical book of Psalms.[9]

The fact that the scribes retained this colophon even when it no longer accurately described the contents of the book is an important clue about the ancient book culture that produced the Psalter. It indicates that the producers of this book did not assume paratexts like colophons needed to be read as applying to the book as a whole. Instead, the scribes were free to include a paratextual element that applied to a previous stage of composition but no longer strictly applies to the work. If the authors of the current book of Psalms were free to do so with this paratextual colophon, nothing precludes the possibility of a similar phenomenon in a paratextual heading like Isa 1:1. Though the authorial ascription appears as the first line of the book of Isaiah, it is entirely possible that the original creators of the book did not intend it to refer to the whole composition. Much more, of course, would need to be said to substantiate this possibility,[10] but the colophon in Ps 72:20 should at least caution us to the possibility that the ancient media culture that produced the Scriptures might operate with different values, principles, and practices than those that are commonplace in our own. That it seems initially obvious to us that Isa 1:1, Prov 1:1, and Ps 72:20 ought to apply to their books as a whole is a matter of cultural expectations about media that may simply not have been shared by the producers of the sacred texts.

The Jeremian Library

The problem of anachronistic models of media culture also plays out in biblical scholarship’s preoccupation with recovering the supposed original versions of books. A parade example is the book of Jeremiah. While all biblical books attest differences among manuscripts, these differences are particularly pronounced for Jeremiah. The Hebrew version of the Masoretic Text (hereafter MT), which is the basis for most modern translations, is about 1/8 longer than the Greek version known as the Septuagint (hereafter, by convention, LXX). In addition to the difference in length, these books also contain significant differences in the internal arrangement of materials. This difference in the arrangement of the book has led many scholars to ask two basic questions: 1) which order of the book is more original? and 2) why did the other version rearrange the book? Scholars have proposed a variety of solutions to these questions, but seldom have they questioned the assumption that the book of Jeremiah had an original order at all. As I argue in my recent book, the material conditions of writing at the time meant that Jeremiah was likely originally written on multiple short scrolls rather than a single long scroll. Given this culture of short scrolls, the two distinct arrangements of the book strongly suggest that the original “book” of Jeremiah was not a book at all but a collection of scrolls.[11] The Jeremiah literature, in other words, was most likely more like a library than a book. Just as books on a bookshelf can be organized and reorganized in any number of arrangements, so also the Jeremiah library was not restricted to a single determined order. The differing orders in the LXX and MT, therefore, can be understood as independent acts of bookmaking that took place potentially centuries after the textual material of Jeremiah was more or less finalized.[12]

The scholarly preoccupation with recovering the supposed original order of Jeremiah is plausibly related to ideas that arise in modern print culture. Jan-Dirk Müller, for instance, traces an important shift in the conceptualization of books from the medieval culture of manuscripts to the modern culture of print.[13] Medieval manuscript culture tended to imbue every manuscript of a work with a high degree of authority and to construe the copying of manuscripts on the metaphor of familial generation. One manuscript (a father) begets a copy (a son). The printing press, however, greatly multiplied the sheer number of manuscripts and disrupted this notion of familial generation. Reading communities quickly realized that the abundance of texts did not mean that printers always printed the best text. As a result, authority was conceptually removed from the individual manuscript and reinvested in the abstract concept of the “ideal text” that could theoretically be reconstructed but which resides in no particular manuscript. This situation contributes to what Brennan Breed has called an “essentialist ontology” of texts that insists on the existence of a supposed original text even in the face of cultural and material conditions that make deciding what text is original impossible.[14] In the case of the book(s) of Jeremiah, in fact, the differing versions of the work point rather to a situation in which there was no original order because the original form of the book was an unordered collection of scrolls, a Jeremian library rather than a book of Jeremiah.

Papyrus 967 and the Holy Spirit in Ezekiel

A particular textual phenomenon in the book of Ezekiel brings into further relief the strange and wonderful world of ancient literary cultures through which God, in his wisdom, was pleased to inspire the sacred text. Like the books of Jeremiah, the manuscript history of Ezekiel attests different arrangements. In this case, the MT and the LXX agree, but another non-Septuagint early Greek version of Ezekiel called Papyrus 967 (hereafter p967) contains a different order. Using the conventional chapter numbers, the order of chapters in p967 is 1–36, 38–39, 37, 40–48. Another significant variant in this manuscript is the complete absence of a significant chunk of text: Ezek 36:23c–38. As it happens, this manuscript is likely of Christian origins, and reflects the early Christian adoption of the codex as a literary medium.[15] This papyrus dates to the late second century AD and represents the oldest witness to the nearly complete text of Ezekiel in any language.[16]

Given the tendency for scholars to think in terms of their own book cultures, it is not surprising that modern scholars would propose that one these versions is original and the other a later revised edition.[17] As with Jeremiah, however, the material conditions of writing when the Ezekiel literature was being written favor a collection/library model rather than a single-scroll model. Ezekiel was likely written in a culture that collected short compositions in a library or archive of literary Ezekiel traditions that were not definitively ordered.

This brings us to Ezek 36:23c–38, the substantial block of text that is present in the MT and LXX but notably absent in p967. The first question is whether this text was originally a part of Ezek 36. Though the initial reaction to the discovery of p967 was to dismiss it as secondary, subsequent work has tended to recognize the likelihood that p967 witnesses to an earlier version of Ezek 36. Ezekiel 36:23c–38, therefore, is likely a later scribal addition.[18] Indeed, it is hard to explain how a passage as extensive as Ezek 36:23c–38 could have been omitted by scribal error or why a scribe would have intentionally removed it.

The answer to the first question leads immediately to a second. If Ezek 36:23c–38 was a later scribal addition, what prompted it? A provisional answer is suggested by recognizing that the passage in question appears precisely at the juncture where MT Ezekiel deviates from the arrangement of p967. In p967, Ezek 36:23b is followed immediately by Ezek 38:1. In MT Ezekiel, it is followed by this substantial plus and then, of course, by ch. 37. If Ezekiel was originally a collection of scrolls rather than a single scroll, the differences in organization of the two versions suggest hypothetically one scroll containing 1:1-36:23b, another scroll containing just Ezek 37, another containing Ezekiel 38–39, and a final scroll containing the temple vision of Ezekiel 40–48. This suggests that Ezek 36:23c–38 was added to join Ezek 36 to Ezek 37 and the rest of the Ezekiel traditions by scribes making a single volume book-scroll out of the Ezekiel library.

This possibility finds corroboration in the content of this addition, which produces a kind of synthesis in the theologies and concepts of the individual scrolls. Most salient in this regard is the synthesis Ezek 36:23c–38 accomplishes concerning the divine Spirit and its role in redemption between Ezek 1:1–36:23b on the one side and Ezek 37, 38–39 on the other. A key passage in the first scroll is Ezek 11:19–20a:

I will give to them a single heart and a new spirit I will set in your midst, and I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and I will give to them a heart of flesh in order that they may walk in my statutes and keep my judgments and do them.

The restoration promised here involves a divinely initiated transformation that enables obedience to divine law. The same concept appears elsewhere as part of a threat to the residents of Judah: “Cast out all your sins in which you have sinned and get yourself a new heart and a new spirit. Why should you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezek 18:31).

In both passages, Ezekiel addresses the Judeans in exile and anticipates a future restoration centered on a new heart and a new spirit. The term “heart” in Hebrew encompasses the entirety of human interiority; it is the seat not just of emotions, but of thought, understanding, memory, and the will. To envision a “new heart,” therefore, is to anticipate a transformation of the inner human. Slightly more elusive is the meaning of “spirit.” Does the promise of a “new spirit” refer to the same human interiority or to something else? The possibility that the new spirit is in fact the divine spirit is raised by several descriptions of the prophet Ezekiel being imbued with and empowered by the divine spirit (Ezek 2:1–2; 3:12, 14, 24, 8:3, 11:1, 5, 24).[19] The “new spirit” of Ezek 11:19 and 18:31, however, should be understood as once again describing human interiority and thus as a synonym to “new heart.” This understanding is corroborated in Ezek 20:32 where it simply refers to the human mind: “That which has come upon your spirit [i.e. mind] will certainly not come about.” Or consider similar usage in Ps 32:2 “Blessed is the man against whom Yahweh does not account iniquity, and in whose spirit is no deceit.” This sense is a near-synonym with “heart” and the two terms occasionally appear in poetic parallelism, as in Ps 51:10: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew an upright spirit within me.” The similar pairing of “spirit” and “heart” in Ezek 11:19 and 18:31 confirms that “spirit” in these contexts is similarly an anthropological category, another way of referring to the inner human in need of renewal and reform.

Ezek 38–39 and 37 take up and extend this theme of spiritual renewal. These two sections, however, now construe the spirit-renewal in such a way that the “new spirit” entails a transformation enacted by the divine spirit itself. In ch. 37, Ezekiel sees a vision that depicts the exiled people of Israel as scattered bones. At the prophetic word, however, the bones put on flesh and are vivified through the inhalation of the divine Spirit: “I will set my spirit in you and you will live, and I will place you in your land, and you will know that I Yahweh have spoken and I will act declares Yahweh” (Ezek 37:14). Ezek 39:29 again refers to a future impartation to the people of the divine Spirit: “I will not hide my face from you anymore when I pour out my Spirit upon the house of Israel declares the lord Yahweh.” In Ezek 1:1–36:23b, the endowment of the divine Spirit was the unique privilege of the prophet. Ezek 37–39 universalize this Spirit endowment in the eschatological future.

Ezek 11:19/18:31 address the need for humans to receive a new human spirit parallel to the new heart. Ezek 37:14 and 39:29, by contrast, hold out the prospect of nothing less than a gift of the divine Spirit. It is remarkable to note, therefore, that the addition in Ezek 36:23c–38 accomplishes an explicit synthesis between these two conceptions of spiritual renewal through a reworking of the language of Ezek 11:17–20:[20]

Ezekiel 11:17–20 I will gather you from the nations, and I will bring you together from the lands where you were scattered, and I will give to you the land of Israel. And they will enter there and remove from it all its detestable idols and all its abominations. And I will give to them a single heart, and a new spirit I will put in your midst, and I will remove the stone heart from their flesh and give to them a heart of flesh   in order that they might walk in my statutes and keep my commandments and practice them.   and you will be my people and I will be your God

Ezekiel 36:24–28 And I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the lands and from you to your land. And I will sprinkle pure water on you; and you will be purified from all your impurities; and from all your idols I will purify you. And I will give to you a new heart and a new spirit I will put in your midst, and I will remove the stone heart from your flesh and give to you a heart of flesh. My own spirit I will put in your midst, and I will make you walk in my statutes, and you will keep my commandments and practice them. And you will dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you will be my people and I will be your God.

Read in parallel, the dependence of Ezek 36:24–28 on 11:17–20 is clear. At the crucial moment concerning the gift of a new heart and spirit, however, Ezek 36:27a (bolded above) expresses something not expressed in the source. The new spirit is now interpreted as the divine Spirit.

What is so telling is that this interpretive move accomplishes a synthesis between different parts of the Ezekiel collection: the first scroll, which holds out the prospect of an inner-transformation of heart and spirit, and the scrolls of Ezek 38–39 and 37 that depict future redemption as nothing less than the impartation of the divine spirit to all God’s people. The addition of Ezek 36:23c–38 directly serves the purpose of creating a unified book of Ezekiel out of Ezekiel traditions that had not yet been fully coordinated and synthesized on this point. It is therefore plausibly associated with the creation of a unified book of Ezekiel out of the Ezekiel library.[21]

A third question, which cannot be addressed here, is when did this addition happen? In Before the Scrolls, I argue that a variety of ideological, scribal, and even economic conditions make the Hellenistic period the most likely context for the transformation of prophetic libraries into prophetic books.[22] Whether or not that explanation is correct, Ezek 36:23c–38 appears to be a probable example of a text that was composed by a scribe in the interest of extending and synthesizing the theology of the Ezekiel literature. In so doing, the scribe, writing likely long after the time of Ezekiel, simply adopted the voice of the prophet to authorize an addition to the Ezekiel tradition. Nevertheless, it is a part of the canonical book of Ezekiel. It is, in fact, a particularly beloved part that plays an important role in Catholic liturgy where it serves as the seventh reading in the Easter Vigil, one of the optional readings for the rites of baptism and confirmation, and features in several places in the liturgy of the hours. Though we tend to think of books as authored by an individual, the ancient literary cultures behind much of the Bible did not seem to work with that value or expectation. Scribes did not understand their task as simply passing on an unaltered tradition, but in many cases understood their task to include expanding, synthesizing, and recontextualizing the sacred text.

Inspiration and Ancient Media Cultures

Considering the materiality and media culture of biblical literature represents an opportunity to populate our imaginations with richer, more complex ideas about the very earthly, human processes by which Sacred Scripture has come down to us. Considering the texts in their material concreteness helps us uncover ancient ideas about what books are and, therefore, how they function as vehicles of divine revelation. For Christian readers, this approach has an inherently theological resonance. The humanity of the text—including, we can now say, the humanity of the media cultures that produced the text—strikes a chord with the theology of incarnation. As Dei Verbum puts it, “For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the word of the eternal Father, when He took to Himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men” (DV § 13).

These observations point us back to the crucial truth that inspiration embraced human culture. Quoting St. Augustine, Dei Verbum asserts that “God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion” (§12). Thanks to the efforts of scores of faithful and curious biblical scholars, it has become customary to take ancient cultural contexts into account in reading Scripture. Often this means giving consideration to archaeology, material culture, history, and literary parallels between biblical texts and other ancient literatures. Giving consideration to the human fashion of Sacred Scripture requires now also giving due attention to ancient media cultures. This is especially the case when there is a danger of reading our own media expectations into the ancient text. The use of something as seemingly straightforward as an authorial heading might not have as obvious a meaning as we thought. The assumption that the biblical books were always books may obscure more complex ancient realities. In some cases, even the apparently obvious idea that there must have been an original version of a book might turn out to be anachronistic. What made sense to scribes operating within ancient literary cultures may be counter-intuitive according to our own expectations. Attending to these elements of ancient media culture can help us both to avoid anachronistic pitfalls and to gain greater understanding of how the producers of these texts thought about them. Above all, it gives us a glimpse into the marvelous condescension of the God whose mode of inspiration did not override cultures but rather inhabited them.

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