Knowledge of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

By contemporary accounts, the traditional Jewish Bible is an anthology of Hebrew pieces of literature from ancient Israel, Judea, and Babylon. Its materials—compositions, collections, collated fragments, and more—span the ninth to second centuries BCE, from the period of Assyrian domination, through the Babylonian and Persian, and into the Hellenistic. Sociological and technological developments in the late sixth century BCE made large, durable parchment scrolls available to Judean text-professionals, andprompted their idea to use them to store the valued contents of the smaller, less durable papyrus ones that had long served and predominated, in particular papyri featuring the nation’s god and heroes. Over several centuries, text-professionals gathered the papyrus remains of earlier periods and contemporary works too, collating and editing them. The literary record from the fifth century BCE to the first century CE, in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, shows that this concentrated, controlled storage—ancient “big data”— went beyond aiding preservation to facilitate a vibrant culture of mastering thecontents,hermeneuticengagement, adaptation innewworks, public reading events, literal and political applications, text-centered