If someone wanted to add text to such a scroll, they would continue until they filled the recto, and then turn it over and write on the “verso” side. The inscription of this and other papyrus scrolls started on the “recto” side of the scroll, where the fibers run parallel to the text. Revision by extension was also used for adding addenda to the main text. We must remember that both papyrus and parchment were expensive and required extensive treatment before they could be written on, and thus scribes preferred to use whatever blank space they had before attempting to acquire new scrolls. In Egypt, we see the example of Papyrus Chester Beatty I, where a scribe (or scribes) successively added unrelated texts to the same scroll over time the scribe probably didn’t own these scrolls, so he copied them from an archive onto the blank part of the papyrus he owned. Revision by ExtensionĪdding new material to the end of a composition on a scroll-a phenomenon I call “revision by extension” -is easy to execute, and is well-attested in ancient examples. We will look at two of these implications below. These documents bear directly on questions regarding the composition history of biblical texts. We now have a wealth of information from scholarship on existing, preserved scrolls from Egypt (Hieratic, Demotic, Jewish-Aramaic, early Greco-Roman literary scrolls), Levantine sites like Deir ʿAlla, and the scrolls found near the Dead Sea. Īrchaeological finds, however, offer another important entry point to this discussion. These early studies, however, focused primarily on limited data found in the Bible itself and rabbinic literature. Some previous scholars, such as Lajos (Ludwig) Blau (1861–1936) and Menahem Haran (1924–2015), tried to think through the implications of writing specifically on scrolls. In contrast, scrolls, whether made of papyrus reeds or of treated leather skins, provided a larger writing surface on which longer texts could be written. Pottery sherds were used for letters and other sorts of compact records and exercises, and writing boards were used to record somewhat larger texts, at least temporarily. Biblical ScrollsĪncient Israelites and their neighbors utilized multiple media for writing, depending on the type of composition. Nevertheless, I would suggest that we need to look at a more ancient set of data, specifically the material dimension of ancient reading and writing. The increased popularity of this model in recent times may result from the fact that this model of multi-layer revision of an existing text is reminiscent of the mechanics of contemporary computer word-processing, where an author, or multiple authors, can add new materials to an otherwise unchanged earlier computer file.Įach model illuminates important aspects of the literary development of the Pentateuch and other biblical books. Over the past few decades, an older idea that Pentateuchal texts were formed through the accretion of layer upon layer of scribal supplements (now often termed “redactions”), has become extremely popular. This approach was inspired by how historians understood the transmission-history of Icelandic and other European cycles of oral traditions. In the mid-twentieth century, the possibility that the Pentateuchal stories have oral traditions at their core took strong hold among Bible scholars. For instance, the first generations of source-critical scholars in the 19 th century focused on the idea that the Pentateuch may have begun as independent texts which were then combined by an editor acting as a modern publisher to produce a unified document. When trying to understand how biblical texts were produced, Bible scholars have long been influenced by the publication media familiar to them.
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