Before the Scrolls

Book excerpt: "Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel's Prophetic Library traces the media history of the biblical prophetic corpus in order to propose a material approach to biblical literature. Though often ignored, the realia of a text's form, format, production, and material substance have profound influence on the meaning of the text. The literature of the Bible was not initially written as discrete books with determined beginnings, middles, and ends. Before the Scrolls argues instead that biblical compositions of length, such as the great prophetic books Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, were initially written on loosely organized collections of multiple short papyrus scrolls. Only later in the Hellenistic era were these compositions edited, organized, and copied into the longer book-scrolls known from the Dead Sea. The shift from prophetic library to linear prophetic book-scroll represents a transformation in material medium that had significant effects on that literature. This material approach to the prophetic corpus suggests novel solutions to classic problems in the field such as the relationship between the MT and LXX of Jeremiah and the between First and Second Isaiah. The failure to account for the materiality of the prophetic corpus has led scholarship to occasionally ask the wrong questions of these compositions and has blinded it to the vital role that Hellenistic bookmakers played in the creation of the Bible as we know it"--