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The Materiality of the Prophetic Literature
At the heart of the Bible’s prophetic literature is a long-​standing puzzle.
While neither prophecy nor prophetic literature is unique to Israel in the ancient world, the prophetic books as books are without precedent in the ancient Middle East.1 Written prophecy is known in Mesopotamia in both the
Mari letters (ca. eighteenth cent. BCE) and the Neo-​Assyrian archives (ca.
seventh cent. BCE). In each case, the oracles are relatively brief and isolated.
Of these, the closest in form to the Judean prophetic book are several Neo-​
Assyrian tablets containing collections of handfuls of oracles with minor editing. Closer to home on a literary level is the Balaam inscription from Deir
‘Alla (ca. eighth/​seventh cents. BCE), a literary prophetic work written in ink
on plaster.2 By contrast, the sheer length of the prophetic books with their
extended collections of oracles—​not to mention narrative elements and a
unique focus on the prophetic persona—​puts them in a class by themselves.
Jonathan Stökl’s appraisal is representative: “. . . in response to the initial
questions of whether Israelite prophecy was unique, I have a twofold answer: on the one hand, prophecy in Israel and Judah was probably very similar to prophecy in the ancient Near East. On the other hand, however, the
literary traces that biblical and nonbiblical prophecy left are very different indeed.”3 Martti Nissinen puts it this way: “the Hebrew Bible constitutes a special case in the documentation of ancient Eastern Mediterranean prophecy
because it includes the only extant collection of prophetic books.”4 The puzzle
of the prophetic book is simply this: how do we explain the otherwise unique
existence of these sorts of books in the ancient world?
It is unsurprising, therefore, that significant scholarly energy has been put
to work to describe how these prophetic books came to be. Early critical work
1 See Martti Nissinen, Ancient Prophecy: Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 150.
2 Jo Ann Hackett, The Balaam Text from Deir ‘Allā, HSM 31 (Chico: Scholars Press, 1980), 18–​19.
3 Jonathan Stökl, “How Unique Was Israelite Prophecy?,” in Wiley-​Blackewell History of Jews and
Judaism, ed. Alan T. Levenson (Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2012), 64, cited by Nissinen, Ancient
Prophecy, 144.
4 Nissinen, Ancient Prophecy, 146 (original emphasis).
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Before the Scrolls
focused on the compositional history of the books. Some of the conclusions
from these efforts have achieved a kind of consensus. The Deuteronomistic
redaction of Jeremiah and the division of Isaiah into First, Second, and Third
Isaiahs, for instance, stand out as scholarly achievements and are laid out as
such in standard introductions. More recently, attention has shifted from
how the prophetic books were written to why they were formed in the first
place. Attempts are generally made to locate the production of prophetic
books in particular social milieus and to isolate the reasons for the shift from
oral to written modes of prophecy. For Ehud Ben Zvi, for instance, prophetic
books are products of a close-​knit Persian period literati seeking to identify their own written word with the word of YHWH.5 For Diana Edelman,
the prophetic literature is the result of the efforts of a priestly intelligentsia
attempting to consolidate authoritative teaching on emergent monotheistic
Judaism.6 For Erhard S. Gerstenberger, the spiritual climate of the Persian
period, and possibly even contact with traditions about Zoroaster, led the
Judean communities to generate these prophetic books and commit them
to writing.7 These scholars give compelling answers to the questions of why
prophetic traditions were translated from the oral to the written sphere and
what social settings and actors might have been behind those efforts.
As important and helpful as these studies are, we can push the question still further. The field of Book History has drawn attention to the nature of books as culturally embedded objects. Books are not neutral vehicles
delivering texts to readers but are themselves socially constructed objects.
The strange uniqueness of the prophetic books as books draws attention to
their material nature. Scholars are generally content to describe the material
form of the book as a scroll and discuss its composition with little regard for
the material forms and formats of scrolls. But the question of the material
form brings us into the heart of the puzzle of the prophetic book itself. One
of the distinguishing features of the prophetic literature is the sheer length of
these prophetic books. Length is a feature of the physical space and format
of a written textual object. The puzzle of the prophetic book, therefore, leads
5 See for example Ehud Ben Zvi, “Toward and Integrative Study of the Production of Authoritative
Books in Ancient Israel,” in The Production of Prophecy: Constructing Prophecy and Prophets in
Yehud, ed. Diana V. Edelman and Ehud Ben Zvi (London: Equinox, 2009), 16–​18.
6 Diana V. Edelman, “From Prophets to Prophetic Books: The Fixing of the Divine Word,” in The
Production of Prophecy: Constructing Prophecy and Prophets in Yehud, ed. Diana V. Edelman and
Ehud Ben Zvi (London: Equinox, 2009), 41–​48.
7 Erhard S. Gerstenberger, “Persian-​Empire Spirituality and the Genesis of Prophetic Books,” in
The Production of Prophecy: Constructing Prophecy and Prophets in Yehud, ed. Diana V. Edelman and
Ehud Ben Zvi (London: Equinox, 2009), 111–​26.
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The Materiality of the Prophetic Literature
3
directly into the often-​unasked questions of the contours of the prophetic
scroll. What were the books of the prophets likely written on? Can we know
anything about their format? These questions lead to still others that are likewise seldom asked in discussions of the prophetic books: how does the material format of the prophetic literature affect its meaning? What kinds of
interactions between reader and textual object did the makers of these scrolls
have in mind?
Book History and the Prophetic Literature
In recent decades, scholars in various fields have emphasized the importance
of attention to a text’s materiality. For D. F. McKenzie, the question is basic to
the field of bibliography:
. . . the particular inquiry I wish to pursue is whether or not the material
forms of books, the non-​verbal elements of the typographic notations
within them, the very disposition of space itself, have an expressive function in conveying meaning, and whether or not it is, properly, a bibliographical task to discuss it.8
As McKenzie argues at length, the answer is yes on both counts. The non-​
verbal elements of the book are expressive. This expressive function calls for,
as McKenzie puts it, a “sociology of texts” that takes into account all recoverable social practices surrounding the creation and use of books, especially
the nexus between their readers and producers: “What writers thought they
were doing in writing texts, or printers and booksellers in designing and publishing them, or readers in making sense of them are issues which no history
of the book can evade.”9 The question for the prophetic literature, therefore,
does not simply concern the material of writing, but the ways that the material of writing is a part of the expressive functions of the text.
Historians of the book have taken up McKenzie’s call for recognizing the
book as an expressive form in a variety of ways. For some, this has meant a
kind of material determinism. In The Printing Press as an Agent of Change,
8 D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 17.
9 McKenzie, Bibliography, 19.
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Before the Scrolls
Elizabeth Eisenstein argued that the invention of the printing press was a
media revolution that fundamentally changed European culture.10 In contrast to the fluidity and mutability of manuscript culture, the printing press
was able to produce multiple identical copies of a fixed, standardized text. For
Eisenstein, it was the potency of the technology of print itself—​particularly
its introduction of fixity—​that was the agent driving dramatic cultural
movements like the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation.
The idea that the printing press was culturally transformative is intuitively
appealing. As Adrian Johns shows, however, the reality was far more complex. The print culture that arises from the printing press is not an inherent
quality of the technology but an emergent one.11 In Eisenstein’s view, the
printing press inevitably produces identical copies of a book, and this technological reality establishes the fixity that she saw as the decisive and transformative feature of print culture. But as Johns shows in his painstakingly
detailed study, the reality was that during the first centuries of print, the practice of editing during the printing process meant that in many cases no two
copies of a printed book were in fact identical. Compounding the problem
was the enormous proliferation of book piracy that the printing press itself
facilitated.12 Rather than producing an immediate confidence in a text’s fixity,
the technology of print facilitated practices that rendered its productions
highly suspect. Ultimately, Johns argues that it was not until the nineteenth
century that the notion of fixity was strongly associated with the culture of
print. This idea was attached to print books not as the result of improvements
in technology, but rather through a culture of civility that led to the acceptance of the claims of booksellers, printers, and binders. Johns likens it to the
conventions of trust that underlie modern banks.13 The achievement that led
to the notion of the fixity of print books was not the technological capacities
of the press itself, but the ability of these bookmakers and sellers to convince
their customers that their product was trustworthy. The notion of the printed
book as essentially fixed is not a technological inevitability but a “hard-​won
and brittle achievement.”14
10 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural
Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979),
esp. 1:233.
11 Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1998), 19–​20.
12 Johns, The Nature of the Book, 33, 91.
13 Johns, The Nature of the Book, 624–​33.
14 Johns, The Nature of the Book, 623.
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The Materiality of the Prophetic Literature
5
The material medium of the text, therefore, needs be considered as an expressive object, but its expressiveness comes from ideas conferred on the
medium by the reading cultures that make use of it. In the study of ancient
literatures, these insights have been taken up and applied in the field of New
Philology, which insists on studying ancient literatures, including biblical
texts, via actual manuscripts rather than the often abstracted text of critical
editions. As the New Philologists rightly insist, until modernity these texts
were not encountered as abstractions, but as specific tangible manuscripts.
While biblical scholars have traditionally been fixated on restoring the supposed original text, the fluidity of the textual tradition makes this search
elusive and potentially impossible. Even worse, it removes the biblical text
from its context in a material manuscript culture. Rather than studying
abstracted texts, New Philologists study the actual manuscripts not as evidence for the supposed Urtext but as the cultural products that they are. In so
doing, they are able to attend to the expressive yet non-​verbal features of the
text that these manuscripts contain. As Hugo Lundhaug and Liv Ingeborg
Lied put it, “Rather than speculating regarding hypothetical original texts
and their contexts, the emphasis is on the production, use, and historical
context of each individual copy.”15 The material manuscript context, rather
than the reconstructed hypothetical earlier contexts, are the concerns of the
New Philology. This turn to the study of actual manuscripts acknowledges
the critical importance of texts as physical objects embedded in particular
cultures. Manuscripts are produced in particular times and places using particular practices, materials, and formats. To exclude these realities and treat
the text as abstract or functionally non-​material is to inadvertently take as
the object of study a text that no one in the ancient world produced or read.
The problem, of course, is that by any reckoning, most biblical texts were
written centuries before any manuscript evidence appears for them. The fact
that biblical scholars tend to ignore the materiality of the text when treating
its early periods of composition could be taken to simply reflect the unfortunate state of the available evidence. Since we simply do not have manuscripts
from the times of composition, perhaps we can simply ignore the materiality
of those texts and leave the study of manuscripts to New Philology and reception history. Tempting as this solution may seem, ideas associated with
15 Hugo Lundhaug and Liv Ingeborg Lied, “Studying Snapshots: On Manuscript Culture, Textual
Fluidity, and New Philology,” in Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript
Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology, ed. Liv Ingeborg Lied and Hugo Lundhaug (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2017), 7 (original emphasis).
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Before the Scrolls
the material format of a text are nearly unavoidable. Even when ostensibly
treating a text as an abstraction—​itself a misleading error—​scholars often
end up importing ideas associated with their own book culture.
Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker highlight this potential problem in
the study of Book History more generally. It is not enough simply to describe
the physical characteristics of a book. We must also ask how books were understood socially: “What did people imagine a book was? What was it for?”16
The problem becomes acute when attempting to describe books produced
and used in book cultures prior to the modern period: “The modern tendency is to assume that a book was what it is now, a tool.”17 Adams and
Barker’s point is that we tend to operate with implicit models of the “book”
that are derived from our own literary cultures and easily read into other
literary cultures. The potential for misunderstanding in attempts to understand a foreign literary culture—​such as the one that produced the prophetic
books—​increases in proportion to the differences between the implicit
book-​model of the scholar and the actual book culture being studied.
What implicit model of the book do modern scholars tend to work with?
Roger Chartier finds in the modern idea of the book a constellation of three
notions: in the modern imagination, the book brings together a distinct material object with a textual work and an author.18 This constellation of ideas
associated with the book is not an inevitability of book culture. As Chartier
shows, it is rather a contingent historical and cultural development of specific
media technologies, namely, the codex, the libro unitario, and the printing
press. Single-​volume works written by single authors existed prior to these
technologies. But it is only this particular constellation of technologies and
the cultural ideas associated with them that led to the emergence of an intuitive understanding of the modern book. The point is also not that every
modern book fits this model, but rather that as a result of these technologies,
modern people tend to default to thinking of a book as a single work by a
single author bound in a single volume.
16 Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, “A New Model for the Study of the Book,” in A Potencie of
Life: Books in Society, the Clark Lectures 1986–​1987, ed. Nicolas Barker (London: The British Library,
1993), 8.
17 Adams and Barker, “A New Model for the Study of the Book,” 8.
18 Roger Chartier, “Languages, Books, and Reading from the Printed Word to the Digital Age,”
trans. Teresa L. Fagan, Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 141–​42, cited by Eva Mroczek, The Literary
Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 10. See my discussion in
Nathan Mastnjak, “Jeremiah as Collection: Scrolls, Sheets, and the Problem of Textual Arrangement,”
CBQ 80 (2018): 32–​33.
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The Materiality of the Prophetic Literature
7
The contingency of this distinctly modern model of the book is easy to
illustrate. In late antique and early medieval Western Europe, for example,
the dominant model of a book appears to have been a compendium of miscellaneous textual materials; this form was widespread in the sixth century.
Fourteenth-​and fifteenth-​century private collections in Italy were similarly
dominated by hodge-​podges of vernacular texts ranging from poetry to lists
of exchange rates.19 In neither case was unity between the various parts a
guiding principle. Later, partially spurred on by the printing press and a
shift in cultural practice, it became standard practice to bind a single work
of a single author into a single volume. Though these variant models are all
housed in a codex, the organizational principles, the fixity of the text, and
its basic linearity are imagined in very different ways. The point is worth repeating: how media technology is used and conceptualized is contingent. In
some times and places the book was a container to be crammed full of unorganized miscellaneous materials; at other times it became synonymous with
the work of an author. These points may be obvious, but they highlight the
potential danger of imposing anachronistic models of the book on ancient
texts that must have differed from modern books in more than technology.
Our research into ancient texts must, therefore, address both their material
forms and the cultural values and practices connected to these forms. And
this research must proceed without anachronistically imposing modern
models of the book—​namely, the modern union of author, single textual object, and work—​on ancient textual cultures.20
Since Biblical Studies is constantly engaged with textual cultures far
removed from the cultures of print, the persistence of unexamined models
of the book would appear to be a distinct danger. In fact, as Eva Mroczek has
shown, the imposition of implicit models of the book is not a merely theoretical danger for Biblical Studies. It is a pervasive problem in the field. One
lucid example she presents is the role played by anachronistic models of the
book in the classification of the Dead Sea Scrolls.21 Some manuscripts, for example, contain psalms and Pentateuch-​like material that differ significantly
from the forms of the books we are familiar with and call “biblical.” Rather
than recognizing these documents as unique compositions, scholars tend
19 See Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1995), 1–​18, 187–​89.
20 See also my discussion in Mastnjak, “Jeremiah as Collection,” 30–​33.
21 Eva Mroczek, “Thinking Digitally about the Dead Sea Scrolls: Book History Before and Beyond
the Book,” Book History 14 (2011): 248–​50; Mroczek, The Literary Imagination, 9–​11.
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8
Before the Scrolls
to shoehorn these documents into the category of “biblical book.” Mroczek
argues assumptions derived from print-​culture can be observed lurking behind this approach to the scrolls. As she puts it, “literary evidence suggests
that the way textuality was imagined was not in terms of specific ‘books,’
but of larger, looser traditions of divinely revealed writing.”22 According to
Mroczek, the idea of the book is not merely anachronistic, it functions in
scholarship as an invisible “root metaphor.” It forms the unexamined basis
for how scholars tend to ask questions of the ancient texts and conceptualize
possible answers.23 Mroczek’s discussion of the Qumran psalms manuscripts
makes these problems particularly obvious. It is the unexamined assumption of the “book of Psalms” that lies behind the classification of these
manuscripts.24
Karel van der Toorn has also voiced caution about describing biblical
compositions as books. Van der Toorn rightly emphasizes the fact that
modern notions of a book as a single work by a single author simply do
not apply to the so-​called books of the Hebrew Bible.25 As we will see in
Chapter 4, “The Prophetic Library,” Van der Toorn’s concept of the biblical
books remains captive to Chartier’s third element in the modern model of
the book: that it is written on a single material object. In particular, Van
der Toorn’s discussion of Jeremiah 36 and the book of Deuteronomy on the
basis of a model of successive editions shows him to still be wedded to this
notion of the “book” as a single object.26 As promising as Van der Toorn’s attempt to describe scribal culture was, it also fell prey to the limitations of its
own methodology. Given a lack of native evidence for scribalism, he turned
to the scribal cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia to fill the gaps.27 As Seth
Sanders points out, this attempt at description of Israelite scribal culture by
way of the better-​attested culture of Israel’s neighbors is highly suspect: “this
direct application is problematic on its face: we know Mesopotamia and
Egypt so well precisely because they were so different from Israel.”28 The
models of Mesopotamian and Egyptian scribalism appear all the more inapplicable given Sanders’s conclusions about the West Semitic epigraphic
22 Mroczek, “Thinking Digitally about the Dead Sea Scrolls,” 250.
23 Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 10–​11.
24 Mroczek, Literary Imagination, 25–​38; see also Eva Mroczek, “The Hegemony of the Biblical in
the Study of Second Temple Literature,” JAJ 6 (2015): 6–​17.
25 See Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007), 9–​26.
26 See especially van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, 148–​66, 173–​204.
27 Van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, 52–​53.
28 Seth L. Sanders, The Invention of Hebrew (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 8.
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The Materiality of the Prophetic Literature
9
record. In pointed contrast to the scribal products of these empires, texts
like Siloam and Deir ‘Alla show a remarkable independence from royal
concerns and royal control. They reveal a scribal culture producing texts
whose viewpoints are notably not predominantly the viewpoints of king and
kingdom.29
Turning his attention to similar issues, David Carr finds similar implicit
book-​oriented assumptions underlying and influencing generations of biblical scholarship. Scholarly models of biblical composition, as Carr points
out, tend to adhere suspiciously close to the media cultures inhabited by the
scholars: “An earlier era of source-​critical biblical scholarship, originating in
a context of European print culture of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries,
worked with assumptions of print-​like sources and publisher-​like redactor-​
editors.”30 Suspicion grows when comparing more recent trends, particularly
the Fortschreibung model, to digital technologies:
More recent literary histories of the late twentieth and early twenty-​first
centuries increasingly have posited layer upon layer of scribal editorial
revisions added onto unchanged earlier Vorlagen, a Fortschreibung model
that bears an uncanny resemblance to the mechanics of computer word-​
processing, where an author, or multiple authors, adds new materials to an
otherwise unchanged earlier computer file.31
What Carr hints at here is that models of media culture in which scholars
are themselves embedded form part of the unexamined commonsense of
Biblical Studies. Notions of what a “book” is are accepted as obvious and
self-​evident. Rather than examining the category of “book,” questions about
the composition of the prophetic book take “book” as a given category that
governs the kinds of questions that are available to ask. In other words, the
implicit model of the book belongs to the field of what Pierre Bourdieu refers
to as doxa: conceptual categories that govern a discourse and are so basic that
they are nearly invisible to its participants.32
29 Sanders, The Invention of Hebrew, 161, 169–​70.
30 David M. Carr, “Rethinking the Materiality of Biblical Texts: From Source, Tradition and
Redaction to a Scroll Approach,” ZAW 132 (2020): 594–​95.
31 Carr, “Rethinking the Materiality of Biblical Texts,” 595.
32 See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice , trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), 165–​71. See also the recent discussion of doxa in New Testament studies
by Stephen Young, “‘Let’s Take the Text Seriously’: The Protectionist Doxa of Mainstream New
Testament Studies,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 32 (2020): 330, 356.
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10
Before the Scrolls
If we are to think about the composition of biblical literature at all, therefore, grappling with its materiality is necessary. To fail to do so is to invite
unexamined and potentially misleading conceptions of the book to direct
scholarly discourse. This leaves us in something of a quandary. We cannot
avoid grappling with the texts’ materiality, but we also do not have any actual manuscripts of most biblical texts that are even remotely close to the
time of their composition. The most ancient manuscripts that we do have—​
mostly from the Dead Sea Scrolls—​are already hundreds of years removed
from the literary cultures that produced the biblical literature. The solution
to the quandary is twofold. First, using the data available to us, we need to
build explicit models of material textuality that reach back into the period
of biblical composition. And second, we need to interrogate biblical scholarship for ways that its very questions are shaped by anachronistic models
of the book.
A History of the Prophetic Scroll
While these approaches are needed for all the literature of the Hebrew Bible,
the present study will apply this approach to the unique histories of the prophetic books: Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve. These books are
unique in the ancient world, and an adequate description of the nature of the
prophetic book will require a description of the prophetic book as a material
object arising out of specific literary cultures and imbued with specific ideas.
What is needed, but has so far not been written, is a history of the prophetic
scroll. It is this history that the present book endeavors to provide.
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