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Reviewed by:
  • Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible
  • Lauren Monroe
Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, by Karel van der Toorn. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007. 401 pp. $35.00.

In Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, Karel van der Toorn seeks the origins of the Bible in the scribal culture of ancient Israel. As he acknowledges, what sets his study apart from other contributions on the subject is its extensive use of the comparative method (p. 3).

The author describes his work as a book in four stages (p. 4). First, he conducts a reconnaissance of the roles of writing and authorship and the place of written texts in the ancient Near East (Chapters 1 and 2). He concludes that a "book culture" did not exist; rather the author in Israel and Mesopotamia was a craftsman, whose talent "was not an instrument to express the private and the personal but was a way to attain the pinnacle of collective art" (pp. 46–47).

In the second phase, van der Toorn explores the scribal milieu and its modes of production (Chapters 3, 4, and 5). He argues that the cosmopolitan spirit of scribal culture made it open to influences from the outside world (p [End Page 185] 53); thus a study of Israelite scribal culture naturally lends itself to the use of comparative data. Inasmuch as the author takes his methodological cues from the nature of the evidence itself, his work provides a superb model for the use of the comparative method. However, it bears considering that oral culture may have had a stronger foothold in Israel than it did in Mesopotamia and Egypt (as witness the vast difference in the numbers of texts that have come down to us from Israel and its vicinity as compared with Egypt and Mesopota-mia—a fact that perhaps should not be explained on the basis of preservation alone). If indeed Israel differed from its distant neighbors in this regard, this may have affected a distinct set of Israelite attitudes towards scribalism itself, a possibility that van der Toorn does not address.

In the third phase of his work he applies his conclusions to two biblical case studies: the book of Deuteronomy (Chapter 6) and the book of Jeremiah (Chapter 7). While both books contain illuminating references to the production and transmission of texts, scholars widely recognize that these books share a common outlook and vocabulary that suggests close temporal and institutional connections. Van der Toorn admits this, speculating that the scribes behind Jeremiah had the same background as, or were even identical with, the scribes behind Deuteronomy (p. 199). These books then, probably should not be regarded as representative of "the making of the Bible as a whole" (p. 7), as van der Toorn suggests. His analysis may provide a more limited picture of Israelite scribal culture than he acknowledges.

The author's choice of Deuteronomy as a sample of scribal culture is dependent on the 1889 work of Karl Marti, who identified the tôrat yhwh attributed to the "deceitful pen of the scribes," in Jeremiah 8:8, as the book of Deuteronomy. Van der Toorn explains, "In view of the obvious connection between Deuteronomy and the 'book of the Teaching,' underlying the religious reform carried out by King Josiah in 622, it makes sense to think that it was indeed an early edition of Deuteronomy that provoked Jeremiah's criticism. On the assumption that Deuteronomy is a product of the 'pen of the scribes' then, it can be read as a mirror in which scribal culture is reflected" (p. 143). Van der Toorn's logic here reflects an array of unsubstantiated assumptions. First, while it is clear that at some point in the composition of the Kings history someone drew a connection between Josiah's cult reforms and the laws of centralization set forth in Deuteronomy, de Wette's notion of a real historical connection between Josiah's reform and Deuteronomy has been forcefully called into question in scholarship that van der Toorn does not engage. Second, he assumes that the tôrat yhwh of Jeremiah was a...

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