Who Cared What Scribes Wrote?

O believers, when you contract a debt
one upon another for a stated term,
write it down, and let a writer
write it down between you justly,
and let not any writer refuse
to write it down, as God taught him;
so let him write, and let the debtor
dictate, and let him fear God his Lord
and not diminish aught of it. And if
the debtor be a fool, or weak, or unable
to dictate himself, then let his guardian
dictate justly. And call in to witness
two witnesses, men; or if the two
be not men, then one man and two women…

And be not loth to write it down,
whether it be small or great, with its term;
that is more equitable in God’s sight…

Qur’an 2 tr. Arberry, cited in Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society

The Qur’an presents a divine mandate to use written economic documents in the everyday life of a male-dominated, majority-nonliterate society. Brinkley Messick cites this command and the long history of discussion around it in his account of why documents were both disputed and politically central in medieval Islamic states.

By contrast, we are a bit more vague on what documentary texts–let alone literature–meant to most people in the Hellenistic Near East and earlier. Indeed, when it comes to ancient Near Eastern literary texts many suspect nobody except the writers and their colleagues really read them. “Scribes wrote for scribes,” in the pithy line of Karel van der Toorn, whose Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible argues that it is largely the product of a scholarly bubble.

Yet biblical and Second Temple studies has seen a ‘scribal turn’ in scholarship of the past 20 years in response to the lack of direct social contexts for most of the Bible and early Jewish literature. Placing these divine speeches and related narratives in the immediate circle of their writers and transmitters seemed to be a safer bet than the whole peoples of Israel and Judah that scholars reconstructed 50 years ago, even if the texts claim to be addressing those peoples. After all, we can be sure the copyist was reading the text even if nobody else was. But sticking to such minimal assumptions leaves open the important questions of who this material was really speaking to and how much explanatory power a closed “scribal culture” has.

Indeed, the equally vigorous recent scholarly move to apply Halbwachs’ old concept of “collective memory” to the literary texts of the Hebrew Bible may be an attempt to swing the pendulum in the opposite, communal, direction. The Hebrew Bible’s writers may have presented it as the Memoirs of God, as Mark Smith put it, or perhaps not the memory of God himself so much as a prosthetic memory of ancient Israel, with the scribes understood as its guardians and technicians. As Philip K. Dick titled the story that became the basis of Verhoven and Schwartznegger’s dystopian action movie Total Recall, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.”

The most ambitious contemporary claim to the political significance of ancient Mediterranean scribal culture is Paul Kosmin’s Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire because it argues that this culture was quite literally epoch-making. When the Seleucid rulers began dating their documents to year 1 of their empire they were asserting that real, universal history began with Seleucid rule and pushing all other claimants into dusty, faded local pasts or marginal, minority chronologies. In reaction, local cultures created their own claims to be the protagonists of universal history, for example in the Aramaic Apocalypse of Weeks found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and transmitted as part of the books of Enoch.

Because of the way Time and Its Adversaries reinscribes the universality and dominance of a Greek culture, it may not be a coincidence that its warmest reception has been in Classics departments, while people whose focus is outside the Western Mediterranean have had more questions. Despite its great attention to detail, historians versed in the eastern Mediterranean like Sylvia Honigmann have argued that this flattens out local understandings and chronologies.

Do we know if anyone other than the scribes was really listening? The cultural anthropologist Shannon Lee Dawdy raises the questions of social difference and uptake:

one of the impressions that I started to develop is that the Seleucid state depended upon the “rule of scribes,” and maybe a few accountants. If we are to accept Kosmin’s argument, then writing—the stories that scribes recorded and the dates that they stamped on all sorts of mundane transactions—was the core technology holding together the Seleucid Empire. Yet, we learn little about the scribes, their training, their relationship to the state, or—most importantly—whether anyone cared about all the documents that they were date-stamping and recording, or indeed whether anyone could read them. What if the corpus of Seleucid dated material was just the busywork of academicians and bureaucrats that helped them to reproduce their own institutions, but had little impact on the lives of others?…

Dawdy points out that people typically live in more than one chronology at once, as everyone who follows the Jewish, Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, academic, or financial calendars today knows. “As has been observed by scholars of temporality, most cultures, including our own, actually run on multiple time-reckoning systems. [I]mperial time was likely only one of many that operated in the towns and fields under the Seleucid flag, and it may not have been a very important one in lived life, or even in day-to-day politics.” Honigmann confirms this for the Hellenistic Near East, noting instead that “historical works from the Uruk library composed under the Seleucids exhibit a pointed interest in the last kings of previous Babylonian dynasties, and they come across as meditations on the collapse of the Persian empire, implying that this event was perceived as the major turning point.” And “[d]espite Kosmin’s sweeping statement to the contrary (84), the narrative in 1 Maccabees is not structured by the ongoing Seleucid Era, but is organized according to the ‘lives’ of leaders in imitation of the traditional form of the royal chronicles.”

What impact did the scribes’ reckoning of official time by the Seleucid Era (SE) have on their subjects’ imaginations? How can we compare it, for example, to the lived experience of economic or physical coercion? Dawdy raises this question, drawing on the way state violence is recounted in Maccabees (though it would hold true for any demand backed by violence):

One then wonders whether the fact that the calendar started over at 1 se really mattered all that much to people who were forced to commit acts of desecration against their gods and ancestors upon the pain of death, or at least having their tongues cut out.

Another way to look at what these texts were for: of course neither writing nor the act of creating or reading it are the same in every time and place. So we could ask: what kind of event was the reading of texts, even bureaucratic ones–in the first millennium Near East: were the participants limited to a single writer and reader? Does the medium and event help create certain kinds of writers and readers? Years ago the Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock showed that the choice to write down a local language, on the one hand, or to create a whole literature in it on the other, can be ways of asserting a community or audience that actually help call them into being. And in the ancient Near East, I have suggested that creating an official language and a literature in the local vernacular of Hebrew helped invoke a local audience that was culturally predisposed to hear the call. Because “to read,” qr’ in most ancient West Semitic varieties, also encompassed “to call out to, to summon,” and is part of a cultural ideal in which each act of qr’ entails an event with collective participation. Indeed, the word is cognate with Arabic qur’ān and Hebrew miqra’, in both cases “what is recited, called out; scripture.”

In other words, what mattered was not just time but who inscribed it, in whose story.