The Role of Scribes in Antiquity: An evaluation of our first two readings

This book caught my attention from page three on.  I want to focus on how Crawford challenges what professor Satlow argued last week—which was—that scribes were creative in their rewriting process and were ONLY doing it for their own purpose; I was not entirely convinced of this. Therefore, I was delighted to read what Crawford had to say…

            Crawford disagrees with Professor Satlow by stating, “The purpose of the revision is exegetical, that is, to explain or interpret the original text for a new (presumably later) audience” (3). The books that scholars claim to have been rewritten, like, Exodus and Numbers in Deuteronomy, are called the “inner biblical exegesis”.  Crawford claims that, “Inner biblical exegesis was carried out by scribes, who were not mere copyists but learned professionals whose task was ‘the transmission and reinterpretation of received texts and traditions’ for later generations (3). Scholars argue that Deuteronomy gives more religious explanation compared to Exodus; therefore, we can see that the scribe/s were reworking the text to make it more applicable to the general public. Professor Satlow and Crawford do agree that the scribes first copy books of Scripture as practice but then, Crawford reasons that scribes secondly, “needed to make the text of Scripture adaptable and relevant to the contemporary situation” (3). Crawford uses the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch to prove his arguments on scribal activity. It would be ignorant to think that there were no scribes due to the amount of proof that Crawford gives with the book of Jubilee and the Genesis Aprocryphon drawing from past texts. Thus, the question to ask is what was the true purpose of scribes in antiquity?

            Here we have two scholars within the first two weeks disagreeing with each other on a—I think—very important aspect of the developing Bible. I think this will be an ongoing theme of this course because of the uncertainty commonly found in antiquity. I really wonder what Professor Satlow’s response to Crawford’s book, “Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple times”, would be. I am fascinated with this topic and wish to explore it more in my perhaps research paper. This was only one interesting part of Crawford’s book—I was also intrigued in the book I had never heard of, Jubilees, and its blatant comparison to Exodus, Deuteronomy and Psalms.