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I came across two items on writing and the Hebrew Bible.
On pages 361-362 of Early Israel, Niels Peter Lemche refers to A. Soggins' view that "it was most likely in periods of crisis in which scribes attempted to preserve their heritage by committing ancient oral traditions to writing." Regarding ancient Israel, Soggins regards such times of crisis as 1200-900 B.C.E., the exile, and the second century B.C.E.
On page 154 of A History of Prophecy in Israel, Joseph Blenkinsopp states:
"Given the close association of all forms of prophecy with the monarchy, either for or against, it is odd that the loss of royal patronage has been so seldom acknowledged as a basic factor in creating a situation fatal to the exercise of the kinds of prophecy attested while the monarchy was still in existence. A closely related factor is the dominance of the priestly and scribal classes during the Babylonian and early Persian periods. Contact with Babylonian scholarship favored the written word over oral delivery and the wisdom of the past over intermittent inspiration in the present. The priestly classes who edited and expanded existing narrative traditions, and who we may also presume were familiar with the Sumero-Akkadian scribal-intellectual tradition, elaborated a theology in which the prophetic functions of revelation and intercession were subsumed in and reabsorbed by the cult. And, not least important, the Persian imperial authorities supported the Jerusalem cult and its leaders, a policy tending to inhibit the kind of public dissent characteristic of some forms of prophecy under the monarchy."
As I do the work of formulating my own views about who wrote the biblical writings and when they were written, a piece of the puzzle that has baffled me is the issue of writing. A professor of mine has said that people in the ancient world needed a sponsor in order to write major documents. When I asked him to explain that, his response was that, in the ancient world, people didn't have their own blog where they could write their feelings. Rather, if they wanted to make a living as scribes, then they needed somebody to support them in doing so.
Where can that insight be relevant in determining who wrote biblical writings, and when they wrote them? When Richard Elliott Friedman presents the authors of the E source as a poor and alienated group of priests from Shiloh, a question that enters my mind is: Could a poor and marginalized community devote their time to scribal activity, without somebody supporting them? When I read prophetic books that denounce the monarchy, can I assume that these books were written in the time of the monarchy? Would the monarchy tolerate the production of books that oppose it? Then I remember one viewpoint that I read: that the monarchy actually supported the prophets criticizing it, for the prophets upheld monarchic authority. In saying that the king should enforce justice, the prophets were affirming that the king should have the power to enforce justice---over the wealthy, unjust private interests.
Then there is another question: Why write anything down, when stories can get passed on through oral tradition? That's where Soggins' view enters the picture: It's during a crisis, when the traditions are in danger of being lost, that they are committed to writing. Scholars in rabbinics have held that this was why the rabbinic writings were committed to writing: to preserve the tradition as Christianity cracked down on Judaism.
I have a couple of questions, and I may ask my professor this, or look up the answers for myself:
1. Did scribes need a sponsor? Did the Qumran community have a sponsor out in the desert? Could the Levites at Shiloh make some sort of living, while they wrote their traditions down? Could they have farmed a little? I'm aware that the Bible says that the Levites had no land, but they obviously dwelt on something! Moreover, Robert Wilson said that there were people who made their living as scribes---as people paid them to create official documents---and they could have been the ones who wrote some of the biblical writings (see here)---even writings critical of the authorities, such as Second Isaiah's attack on Babylon. Or, alternatively, could the pre-exilic prophecies critical of the establishment have been written down in Israel's post-exilic period---they would have been pre-exilic, but they were written down when pious Jews had the authority to commit their version of history to writing?
2. Does a community need to be in danger to write things down? In Ancient Israel, Lemche distinguishes between oral tradition and written tradition by saying that oral tradition is more from non-elites, whereas written tradition is from elites. The elites don't necessarily have to be endangered to write their traditions down, it appears! Moreover, many nations have written traditions---perhaps to give the traditions a sense of permanence for posterity, or maybe because oral tradition can change the traditions, or maybe to make them official---and yet they don't appear to be in immediate danger, as far as I can tell.
