I’m reading Randall Heskett and Brian Irwin’s The Bible as a Human Witness to Divine Revelation off-and-on, and I thoroughly enjoyed Robert Wilson’s article in it, “Scribal Culture and the Book of Isaiah.” It tied together a lot of loose ends.
One thing that I have to know for my Hebrew Bible comp is Philip Davies’ view on Israel’s scribal culture. Wilson summarizes that. According to Wilson, Davies believes that not many people in ancient Israel could read, but that there were small scribal elites that were associated with the political and the religious establishments. Wilson states on page 99, as he describes Davies’ position:
“This relatively small arena for scribal activity in turn delayed the production of written biblical texts until the Persian period or later. Even then, writing was a monopoly of scribal elites, who created texts to support their own interests as well as the interests of the government and the religious establishment.”
In the case of prophetic literature, Davies believes that letters containing divine oracles were preserved in the royal archives, but that “these oracle collections would not have resembled the Bible’s prophetic books as they now exist.” In Israel’s post-exilic period, the Israelites became interested in composing a national history, and Davies believes that was the time when “the oracle collections [were] supplied with historical and cultural contexts of the sort now found in Jeremiah and Ezekiel.” Moreover, for Davies, “some of the oracles from the collections found their way into the historical narratives themselves, creating the prophetic stories now found in Samuel and Kings.”
This echoes some things that the professor giving my comp has said: that prophetic literature is not really historical, but was a literary exercise, and that the alleged historical contexts of the prophetic writings were attached to the text at a post-exilic date. At least that sounds like what Davies is saying. When Davies says that the oracle collections were “supplied with historical and cultural contexts” (to use Wilson’s summary of Davies), does that mean the historical and cultural contexts were artificially attached to anonymous oracles, whose historical setting the scribes did not know? Or does it mean that the scribes knew these oracles’ historical setting, and simply made that clear in their formulation of prophetic literature?
In addition to Wilson’s summary of Davies, I appreciated his discussion of how biblical texts could have been composed in exile. I asked in a class if a certain text was exilic, and the professor asked me how people could compose texts in exile, without a sponsor. I had just assumed that the Jews could compose texts in exile, and that biblical scholars had some way to account for that. After all, didn’t many of them date P to the exile? I was sure they wouldn’t do that if writing in the exile was impossible.
But Wilson discusses how it could have been possible, even when Israel lacked a political establishment and a temple. He states that there were scribes whom people approached whenever they needed something written, whether that be “certifying economic transactions, writing wills and marriage documents, and generally doing any writing that private citizens wanted done.” And so you had Jews in exile who could write, and who did so as part of their business. Some of them could have come together to produce a document such as, say, Second Isaiah. And we see in Scripture that small religious groups—circles around a prophet—wrote and preserved the prophet’s words. This was the case for First Isaiah (Isaiah 8:16; 30:8), and also Jeremiah.