Letters, Paragraphs, and Prophets

In more advanced elementary education, scribes learned to write typical formulaic documents, such as letters. After making lists and receipts, writing letters was the most common type of ancient scribal activity. These model documents are known in the cuneiform school tradition, which served as a model in the development of the early alphabetic school tradition. The earliest alphabetic examples of model letters were excavated in Ras Shamra, that is, ancient Ugarit. They illustrate both aspects of borrowing from the cuneiform tradition as well as creative adaptation. Letter writing followed a formal template, but this template was made to be adapted. One of the most important adaptations of this scribal learning was in the prophetic messenger formula of biblical prophecy. The genre was also adapted for biblical storytelling. And, some of the technical and formal aspects, such as the use of “and now” as a new paragraph marker, were adapted and applied by scribes more generally to the writing of literature.

Hebrew Prose and Stories of an Early Iron Age Past

Chapter 1 examines two crucial theoretical questions for the study that follows: when did the writing of Hebrew prose emerge in the ancient world, and what type of knowledge informed the creation of prose texts that recounted past occurrences? This chapter begins by addressing the historical question of when? by drawing on recent epigraphic evidence from the Iron Age period and connecting this evidence to considerations surrounding the rise of vernacular writing and its interface with older, oral forms of discourse. After establishing a rough terminus post quem for the emergence of written Hebrew prose, this chapter then transitions into a study of the type of knowledge that would have been available to those scribes who created these prose writings. Drawing on the insights of Foucault, this chapter concludes by drawing attention to what is termed an episteme of memory that informed biblical storytelling.

Conclusion

Chapter 5 concludes this investigation by returning to the question of epistemology. What comes to light through the previous studies, it is argued, is that the stories told by the biblical scribes were rooted in not one type of memory but multiple instantiations of it that would have often worked simultaneously to shape the material transmitted to them over time. The conclusions reached through this investigation would thus urge caution when likening biblical storytelling with a form of history, or at least an understanding of history that has been practiced and developed during the modern period. What these considerations also indicate is that drawing on the referential claims of biblical narrative for historical reconstructive pursuits requires some sensitivity toward these ancient narratives’ specific epistemic underpinnings.

Memory in a Time of Prose

Memory in a Time of Prose investigates a deceptively straightforward question: what did the biblical scribes know about times previous to their own? To address this question, the following study focuses on matters pertaining to epistemology, or the sources, limits, and conditions of knowing that would have shaped biblical stories told about a past that preceded the composition of these writings by a generation or more. The investigation that unfolds with these interests in mind consists of a series of case studies that compare biblical references to an early Iron Age world (ca. 1175–830 BCE) with a wider constellation of archaeological and historical evidence unearthed from the era in which these stories are set. What this approach affords is the opportunity to examine the relationship between the past disclosed through these historical traces and that past represented within the biblical narrative, thus bringing to light meaningful details concerning the information drawn on by Hebrew scribes for the prose narratives they created. The results of this comparative endeavor are insights into an ancient world of oral, living speech that informed biblical storytelling, where knowledge about the past was elicited more through memory and word of mouth than through a corpus of older narrative documents. For those Hebrew scribes who first set down these stories in prose writing, the means for knowing a past and the significance attached to it were, in short, wed foremost to the faculty of remembrance.