Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible

4. Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible by Karel van der Toorn (2007, 366 pages, read Dec 25 – Jan 28)

The biblical world was an illiterate one. The original written biblical stories were merely there to assist in oral presentations. They were an archive of sorts. Within this world was a small group of literate professional scribes who wrote down these archives and copied and preserved them. Over time the written reference became authoritative; and an accidental power shift occurred within the religious order. Those who controlled the text, and who could find a way to change the text as they saw fit, became, for time, the powerful voice in the religious development. This was a strange era of powerful scribes.

That is an overly simplified summary of van der Toorn’s book, which tries to work out the world and method the biblical scribes. He looks in every possible way he can, including the scribal evidence around the regions, and covering ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian records. Along the way he accumulates an extensive list of sources. Citations commonly are found five or six per paragraph, for paragraph after paragraph; and if you look these up the languages of these sources all over the place, as are the dates, which can be anywhere in the last 200 years. I guess it’s possible that all biblical research is like this, but this book does not read like a jargon-stuffed research text, it actually feels geared toward a wider audience.

If this interests you there are endless fascinating details inside. Deuteronomy can be divided into four different editions. There is an original core that apparently dates to Judean King Josiah’s reforms in 622 b.c.e. Then two different beginnings and ends are added, each with their own very different intent, and each representing a fundamental change in the nature of the religion. A fourth editor added a few key chapters. At the same time, and preserved in the same bible, in the book of Jeremiah, is a denunciation of Deuteronomy (identified as the “book of the Torah”) as a fraud. Of course, as van der Toorn makes an effort to prove, Jeremiah had very little to do with his book. A scribe, possibly self identified as Baruch, simply wrote what he thought Jeremiah said, probably long after it was said…and, of course, that was edited too. The culmination of scribal power and influence was when a scribe named Ezra was mandated by the Persian authorities, in 450 b.c.e, to come up with a Judean constitution of sorts. He presented the Torah, or the Pentatuech, today the first five books of the bible, and called it the law. This was his own creation. Empowered by the Persians, he had the authority to select what texts to collect, to stitch them together how he saw fit and to freely edit in any way he was willing and felt necessary. We’ll never know what his sources were, but the resulting text is in our bible.

I read this as a prep for my bible read. But, it was slow going, especially since I was so fascinated with his sources that I keep looking up each citation in the endnotes. So, it dragged on longer than expected. But there is fascinating stuff here. ( )