Abstract
The paper illustrates how scribal education shaped and influenced biblical literature. It discusses how educational curriculum can be reconstructed from Hebrew inscriptions and comparative examples in cuneiform literature. The Hebrew educational curriculum was adapted from cuneiform models in the 12th century BCE. These models were known in Canaan, and then used by early alphabetic scribes. The best repository of ancient Hebrew scribal practice comes from the desert fortress of Kuntillet ʿAjrud where all the categories of elementary scribal education are known. Perhaps the most important of these was letter writing, which was a basic part of a scribe’s everyday duties. Not surprisingly, letter writing was also one of the foundations of scribal education, and it was adapted and used for writing biblical literature in ways both mundane and profound. This included both the structuring of biblical narrative and the genre of writing prophets.
Highlights
What can we know about how the Bible came to be written? Can we trace some tangible indications of how scribes learned to write? In my book, The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible,1 I reconstruct early scribal education in ancient Israel by examining ancient inscriptions and their historical contexts and by comparing other ancient near eastern education paradigms
The content of a letter, must be completely flexible. This opens up the possibility of attaching a playful student exercise as we find in Keilschrift Texte aus Ugarit (KTU) 5.9, or adding a pious proverbial saying as we find in the KuntilletAjrud example
Scribal education was the foundation upon which biblical literature was written
Summary
What can we know about how the Bible came to be written? Can we trace some tangible indications of how scribes learned to write? In my book, The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible, I reconstruct early scribal education in ancient Israel by examining ancient inscriptions and their historical contexts and by comparing other ancient near eastern education paradigms ( from cuneiform). Letter exercises from the Mesopotamian curriculum were adopted, adapted, and used in the alphabetic cuneiform of the ancient city-state of Ugarit This common ancient near eastern letter writing tradition influenced the early Israelite scribal curriculum, where letters likely served as one of the primary school exercises. Messengers, messages, and messenger formulae carry the narrative thread, and the technical terminology used is known from both actual letters and practice letters—namely, “message (tḥm) of Sender” and “speak (rgm) to Recipient.” This again illustrates how the letter genre influences other types of literature. After spending the night there, Jacob took from what was at hand and sent presents for his brother Esau In this narrative, this story illustrates the oral setting from which the written genre of letters arises. “ says your servant Jacob” is an oral convention that ceases to be “oral” when it becomes part of learned scribal curriculum and practice
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