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Did Scripturalization Take Place

in Second Temple Judaism?
K.L. Noll

Brandon University , 270- 18th Street, Brandon, MB,

R7A 6A9, Canada
Published online: 08 Dec 2011.

To cite this article: K.L. Noll (2011) Did Scripturalization Take Place in Second Temple
Judaism?, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament: An International Journal of Nordic
Theology, 25:2, 201-216, DOI: 10.1080/09018328.2011.608541
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Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament

Vol. 25, No. 2, 201-216, 2011

Did Scripturalization Take Place in Second

Temple Judaism?
K.L. Noll

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Brandon University, 270- 18th Street, Brandon, MB R7A 6A9 Canada

Email: nollk@brandonu.ca
ABSTRACT: Endemic to biblical scholarship is the presumption that the
documents later included in Tanak were widely disseminated among Jews in
Second Temple times. Given the largely illiterate population of those centuries, it remains an open question as to how such dissemination could have
taken place. Using recent research from cognitive studies and social anthropology as a model for the discussion, this paper reexamines the ancient data
and argues that neither the scrolls nor the content of the scrolls had been disseminated prior to the Hellenistic era. From Ptolemaic times into the early
Hasmonean period, some limited dissemination of texts began, but widespread Jewish familiarity with themes, tales, and poetry we know as biblical
emerged only gradually from Hasmonean to Roman times.

During the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in November

2010, several researchers addressed the question in my title.1 Although the
four of us arrived at a general consensus that, I believe, genuinely surprised
all participants, substantial differences remained. In particular, a number of
participants, both at the podium and during the open forum that followed
formal presentation of papers, continued to make unfounded assumptions
about the historical processes taking place during the late Iron Age and the
Persian era. For that reason, I have decided to publish my contribution to that
days lively discussion, because this essay stresses aspects of our guilds
study in which, I believe, seriously flawed presuppositions continue to guide
mainstream research.

1. The session was sponsored by the group, Orality, Textuality, and the Formation
of the Hebrew Bible, at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature,
November 21, 2010, with Jon Berquist, presiding. Participants included William
Schniedewind, Nascent Scripturalization in the Neo-Assyrian Period; James W.
Watts, The Scripturalization of Torah in the Persian Period; Charlotte Hempel,
The Social Matrix that Gave Rise to the Hebrew Bible and the Scrolls; and, of
course, the essay you are now reading. I thank the organizers of this forum, especially David M. Carr, for honoring me with an invitation to participate on a panel of such
distinguished scholars.
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Did scripturalization take place in Second Temple Judaism? The short

answer to this question is yes butit was late to develop, and not at all widespread. The longer answer requires careful definition of two key terms.
First, there is the term Second Temple. This does not name any specific
Persian-period building. The archaeological data are clear. Persian Jerusalem
was not inhabited prior to the mid-fifth century.2 Moreover, any temple in
Jerusalem was certainly not the Second Temple. We have evidence for at
least two other Yahweh temples in Persian Palestine, one at Khirbet el-Qom
and another at Gerizim.3 In fact, Gerizim was a major Yahweh cult center at
least as long as any Persian-era Jerusalem Temple. Also, the Elephantine
community does not betray any awareness of a special status for Jerusalem.4
2. For recent discussion and useful bibliography, see Oded Lipschits and Oren Tal,
The Settlement Archaeology of the Province of Judah: A Case Study, in Judah and
the Judeans in the Fourth Century B.C.E. (eds. O. Lipschits, G. N. Knoppers, and R.
Albertz; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2007), pp. 33-52. See also, Oded Lipschits,
Achaemenid Imperial Policy, Settlement Processes in Palestine, and the Status of
Jerusalem in the Middle of the Fifth Century B.C.E., in Judah and the Judeans in
the Persian Period (eds. O. Lipschits and M. Oeming; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns,
2006), pp. 19-52; idem, The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem: Judah under Babylonian
Rule (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2005); idem, Demographic Changes in Judah
between the Seventh and Fifth Centuries B.C.E., in Judah and the Judeans in the
Neo-Babylonian Period (eds. O. Lipschits and J. Blenkinsopp; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2004), pp. 323-76. See also David Ussishkin, The Borders and De Facto
Size of Jerusalem in the Persian Period, in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian
Period, pp. 147-66.
3. For the Khirbet el-Qom temple, see Andr Lemaire, New Aramaic Ostraca from
Idumea and their Historical Interpretation, in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian
Period, pp. 413-56 (especially pp. 416-17). For Mount Gerizims temple, see Yitzhak
Magen, The Dating of the First Phase of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim
in Light of the Archaeological Evidence, in Judah and the Judeans in the Fourth
Century B.C.E., pp. 157-211. If one were to interpret these temples as subordinate in
some sense to Jerusalem (in spite of the possible non-existence of a Jerusalem temple
prior to about the 410s BCE), ones hypothesis runs aground on the fact that Persian
imperial policy is unlikely to have favored the claim that one Yahweh temple wields
hegemony over other geographical regions. See, for example, Amlie Kuhrt, The
Problem of Achaemenid Religious Policy, in Die Welt der Gtterbilder (eds. B.
Groneberg and H. Spieckermann; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 117-42; Lester L.
Grabbe, The Law of Moses in the Ezra Tradition: More Virtual that Real? in Persia and Torah: The Theory of Imperial Authorization of the Pentateuch (ed. J. W.
Watts; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001), pp. 91-113; Donald B. Redford,
The So-Called Codification of Egyptian Law under Darius I, in Persia and Torah, pp. 135-59.
4 Bezalel Porten in collaboration with Jonas C. Greenfield, Jews of Elephantine and
Arameans of Syene (Fifth Century B.C.E.): Fifty Aramaic Texts with Hebrew and
English Translations (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1974), pp. 75-102; James M.
Lindenberger, Ancient Aramaic and Hebrew Letters (Second edition; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), pp. 61-79. Reinhard Kratz correctly observes that
Elephantine has more in common with living Judeans of the Persian era than does the

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Given available evidence, I now abandon my previous hypothesis that

Deuteronomy 12 and related texts date as early as the Persian era.5 Prior to
the Hasmoneans, it is unlikely that either Gerizim or Jerusalem defended its
sacred status by appealing to a text that declared Yahweh had chosen a single
place for his name to dwell. Many researchers believe that the origins of a
distinct Samaritan religious sect emerged only after the collapse of the Gerizim Temple, circa 110 BCE.6 It is a matter of debate whether the two temples
were in dialogue with a shared set of texts (i.e., the proto-Samaritan Torah, as
evidenced among the Dead Sea Scrolls) prior to the destruction of Gerizim,
but any shared texts were known only to a small circle of priests or scribes, as
will be clear from the following discussion. And it does not surprise me when
redaction critics relegate most of Nehemiahs Memoir and the book of Ezra
to Hellenistic, even late Hellenistic, times.7
literary portrait of Israel in biblical narratives. The Bible is the exception, not Elephantine, writes Kratz, in The Second Temple of Jeb and of Jerusalem, in Judah
and the Judeans in the Persian Period, pp. 247-64 (quotation p. 248).
5. I have held that thesis since the mid-1990s, and it was reiterated most recently in
K. L. Noll, Deuteronomistic History or Deuteronomic Debate? (A Thought Experiment), Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 31 (2007), pp. 311-45 (327-33).
6. That the schism between Judeans and Samaritans was very late seems certain from
the data. For example, the Wadi ed-Daliyeh papyri do not suggest any sectarianism
and the proto-Samaritan Torah texts among the Qumran manuscripts suggest that no
break took place until well into the second century BCE. See also the bibliography of
earlier scholarship in Christophe Nihan, The Torah between Samaria and Judah:
Shechem and Gerizim in Deuteronomy and Joshua, in The Pentateuch as Torah:
New Models for Understanding its Promulgation and Acceptance (eds. G. N. Knoppers and B. M. Levison; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2007), pp. 187-223 (p. 190, n.
9). Compare Nihans stimulating essay to that of Nadav Naaman, The Law of the
Altar in Deuteronomy and the Cultic Site Near Shechem, in Rethinking the Foundations: Historiography in the Ancient World and in the Bible (Essays in Honour of
John Van Seters) (Eds. S. L. McKenzie and T. Rmer; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
2000), pp. 141-162.
7. It is no surprise that researchers are unable to agree on how to carve up the literature into layers or stages of composition, but the consensus rightly rejects the allegedly official documents as authentic to the Persian era, and many have, for various
reasons, brought significant portions of Ezra and Nehemiah into the Hellenistic period. Among the many studies, these several recent publications are particularly interesting: Lester L. Grabbe, The Persian Documents in the Book of Ezra: Are
They Authentic? in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, pp. 531-70; Reinhard Kratz, The Second Temple of Jeb and of Jerusalem, in Judah and the Judeans
in the Persian Period, pp. 247-64; Sebastian Grtz, Die aramische Chronik des
Esrabuches und die Rolle der ltesten in Esr 5-6, Zeitschrift fr die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 118 (2006), pp. 405-22; Jacob L. Wright, Rebuilding Identity:
The Nehemiah-Memoir and its Earliest Readers (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004); idem, A
New Model for the Composition of Ezra-Nehemiah, in Judah and the Judeans in
the Persian Period, pp. 333-48; Diana V. Edelman, The Origins of the Second Temple: Persian Imperial Policy and the Rebuilding of Jerusalem (London: Equinox,
2005).

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In my view, the Second Temple is a term that designates the Jerusalem

Temple only from the Hasmonean era, even though a Jerusalem Temple
existed earlier.
The second preliminary question of definition is this: What does scripturalization mean? Researchers who use this word often confuse rather than
clarify. For example, Judith Newman presumes that Hebrew scrolls enjoyed
religiously authoritative status already by the Persian period. Then Newman
defines scripturalization as scribal re-use of these so-called scriptures.8 In
my view, by defining her terms this way, Newman begs her own question.9
Moreover, Newman is content to identify scripturalization with scribal re-use,
but this is a scribal activity that was common throughout the ancient world.
As David Carr and Thomas Thompson have both stressed, scribes routinely
made creative re-use of pre-existing literature.10 The Hebrew scrolls are
chock full of such re-use. Consider Psalm 20s re-use of a Canaanite hymn
attested in Papyrus Amherst 63.11 Was that Canaanite hymn sacred scripture
for the Hebrew psalmist? I doubt it. Or consider the scribe who cited sepher
ha-yashar in several late biblical glosses. This scribe might have thought
sepher ha-yashar was sacred scripture, but how would we know this?
Another example: the Hasmonean-era scribes who created new Torah codes
from earlier Torah codes might have deemed their source-texts to be sacred
scripture.12 But Ezekiels remark (in Ezek 20,25) about Torah statutes that
were not good gives one pause, does it not? Re-written Torah codes can
suggest attempts to replace, not supplement, earlier Torah codes. The mere
re-use of a text does not logically entail that the source-text was a sacred
scripture in the scribes mind. It often implies the opposite. For example, the
Quran re-uses Jewish and Christian traditions but wishes to replace, not
supplement, Jewish and Christian scriptures. And I have no doubt that the
Gospel of Luke was an attempt to replace, not supplement, the Gospel of
Mark (e.g., Luke 1,1-4).

8. Judith H. Newman, Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in

Second Temple Judaism (Atlanta: Scholars, 1999), pp. 11-13.
9. Newman begs her own question when she concludes that scribal re-use of Hebrew
literature demonstrates what she presumed at the start, namely that the source-texts
were sacred scriptures in religious communities. See Newman, Praying by the Book,
pp. 218-219; and see 102-108, 114-116, 201-218.
10. David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 38-39, and passim; Thomas L.
Thompson, The Early History of the Israelite People from the Written and Archaeological Sources (Leiden: Brill, 1992), pp. 353-99.
11. For recent discussion and useful bibliography, see Ziony Zevit, The Religions of
Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches (London: Continuum, 2001),
pp. 669-74.
12. Recent research has focused on this phenomenon. For example, see Sidnie White
Crawford, Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2008).

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In my view, a proper definition of scripturalization avoids the suggestion

that later scribes venerated earlier texts as sacred authorities.13 Philip Davies
reminds us that scribes wrote for a living and for recreation, which means
that they often wrote literature that they did not believe.14 In Judahs sparsely
populated, illiterate agrarian society, the number of Hebrew-writing scribes in
any given human generation was tiny, perhaps only a handful of people.15
Ergo, a handful of people were producing, preserving, and transmitting a
wide variety of texts that clearly expressed variant religious viewpoints. The
implication is clear. A scribe may have regarded his source-text as religiously
useful, but in all probability, he did not.16 His source-text was, quite simply, a
textone text that happened to be available for manipulation in the routine
ways that scribes were inclined to manipulate their texts. This scribal activity
has nothing to do with scripturalization.
In the 1990s, I introduced a research method that stresses an ancient readers idea and not a scribes activity.17 If this approach is applied to the question asked by our seminar, scripturalization is best defined as the ancient
readers idea that a text has moved beyond the status of religiously useful and
has reached the status of religiously authoritative. When this idea has replicated in a critical mass of human brains so that it leaves a measurable level of
archaeological and textual evidence, then we can say that scripturalization
13. I am in sympathy with the cautious remarks made by James W. Watts with respect to scripturalization as a matter of social function during his oral presentation
titled, The Scripturalization of Torah in the Persian Period. During that presentation, Watts stressed that the content of a text does not determine its status as scripture, but the use of the text does. He identified three dimensions of this process: the
transformation of the physical scroll into an icon, the ritualized reading of the text,
and the ritualized teaching of the texts content. As will be seen in my discussion, the
data for such uses triangulates on the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods, thus
undermining the thesis Watts had hoped to advance, namely that this process was
well underway by the fifth century BCE. A modified version of the paper by James
W. Watts will appear under the title, Using Ezras Time as a Methodological Pivot
for Understanding the Rhetoric and Functions of the Pentateuch (in press). I wish to
thank Dr. Watts for making a copy of this modified version available to me prior to
publication.
14. Philip R. Davies, The Jewish Scriptural Canon in Cultural Perspective, in The
Canon Debate (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002), pp 36-52.
15. Illiteracy remained the norm well into the early medieval era, when the existence
of a sacred scripture eventually motivated rising literacy rates. For entry into this
complex discussion, see Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine
(Tbingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2001).
16. This was my conclusion in Noll, The Kaleidoscopic Nature of Divine Personality in the Hebrew Bible, Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 9 (2001), pp. 1-24.
17. K. L. Noll, Is There a Text in This Tradition? Readers Response and the Taming of Samuels God, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 83 (1999), pp. 3151.

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has begun. It is imperative to underline one significant implication of this

definition. On the one hand, scripturalization requires that the texts, or the
contents of the texts, have been disseminated to a wide population. On the
other hand, evidence for dissemination is not evidence for scripturalization.
Rather, evidence for dissemination is the necessary condition that precedes
any possibility of scripturalization.
Using this definition and its implication to survey the data, it is apparent
that all available evidence triangulate on the Hellenistic era. This essay is too
brief to detail the data, but consider a wide variety of recent research related
to the issue of when and how texts became both disseminated and religiously
authoritative in the minds of readers. First, Liz Fried has argued that, even if
a Persian emperor commissioned a Yehud Torah, such a text would not have
functioned as an authoritative legal code.18 Second, Karel van der Toorn and
I, independently of one another, concluded that the pre-Ptolemaic era did not
see dissemination of any Hebrew scrolls beyond a small group of scribes.19
Third, Reinhard Kratz has argued that the five books we now know as the
Torah of Moses enjoyed neither legal nor religious authority until after
Ptolemaic times.20 Fourth, Arie van der Kooij suggests that Jesus Ben Sira
was not yet dealing with something that Ben Sira could have conceptualized
18. Lisbeth Fried, You shall appoint judges: Ezras Mission and the Rescript of
Artaxerxes, in Persia and Torah, pp. 63-89 (83-84).
19. K. L. Noll, Deuteronomistic History or Deuteronomic Debate? pp. 311-45;
Karel van der Toon, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). In his version of the hypothesis, Van der
Toorn identifies two stages for public dissemination. The first was a Persian-era dissemination of the Torahs content (not the texts), and the second was a Ptolemaic-era
dissemination of various texts. He has provided data to support the second of these
hypothetical stages, but not the first. See van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, pp. 23-25,
146-49, 248-62, and passim.
20. Reinhard Kratz, Temple and Torah: Reflections on the Legal Status of the Pentateuch between Elephantine and Qumran, in The Pentateuch as Torah, pp. 77-103.
During the open forum of our seminar, Anneli Aejmelaeus took issue with
this point. She argued that the early Greek manuscripts of Torah suggest that the
scribes who produced these translations sought religious utility in the text; also, Aejmelaeus is skeptical of the information about the motivations of elites for the translation of the Septuagint (LXX) in the Letter of Aristeas. I have no objection to either of
these two concerns. However, even if the Greek texts suggest religious utility as
Aejmelaeus suggests, they do not provide evidence for the texts status as religious
authority among a critical mass of Jewish readers or hearers. That will require much
more than the evidence of scribal practice. Moreover, if the Letter of Aristeas sheds
no light on the process by which the Greek texts were produced (and there is, of
course, the problem of external control for this narrative), then we should refrain
from using the term Septuagint (LXX), for no evidence supports the hypothesis
that such a document ever existed. The earliest extant Greek manuscripts date to the
second century BCE, not the third, and do not support a hypothesis of an organized
production of a Greek translation of the Torah.

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as authoritative Jewish scripture; that idea did not yet exist.21 Fifth, Martin
Jaffee notes that evidence for the functional application of written Torah texts
appears only toward the end of the Second Temple era.22 Sixth, Seth
Schwartz remarks on evidence for the lack of textual influence among Jews
even as late as Roman times.23 Seventh, James VanderKam and Eugene
Ulrich have demonstrated that the very word Torah was not yet associated
with any specific body of literature until after the Roman destruction of
Jerusalem.24 Eighth, we are all aware that any technological capacity for
widespread dissemination of literature among mostly illiterate people was
severely limited. We are also all aware that the one institution that could
begin to do this effectivelyI refer of course to the synagogueonly begins
to emerge in Alexandria in the third century BCE.25 Ninth, in a prior publication, I have cited data that demonstrate an interesting phenomenon, namely
that no one really had a clear idea of how to render the old Hebrew scrolls
religiously authoritative even as late as Qumran and the early Christians.26
That is why this era is marked by the kind of experimentation one usually
associates with the formative period for an innovatively new movement. And,
tenth, my thesis could have predicted precisely what Julio Trebolle had, in

21. Arie van der Kooij, Canonization of Ancient Hebrew Books and Hasmonean
Politics, in The Biblical Canons (eds J.-M. Auwers and H. J. de Jonge; Leuven:
Leuven University Press, 2003), pp. 27-38.
22. Martin S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian
Judaism, 200 BCE-400 CE (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 79-83,
cf. pp. 98, 124.
23. Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 68-71 and passim. Schwartz characterizes
the Torah of the Roman era as a series of negotiations between an authoritative
but opaque text and various sets of traditional but not fully authorized practice
(p. 68).
24. James C. VanderKam, Questions of Canon Viewed through the Dead Sea
Scrolls in The Canon Debate (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002) pp. 91-109. Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Hebrew Scriptural Texts, The Bible and
the Dead Sea Scrolls, vol. 1, Scripture and the Scrolls (ed. J. H. Charlesworth; Waco,
TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), pp. 77-99.
25. For recent discussion and bibliography on this era, see: D. Urman and P.V.M.
Flesher (eds.), Ancient Synagogues: Historical Analysis and Archaeological Discovery (two volumes; Leiden: Brill, 1995); S. Fine (ed.), Jews, Christians and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue: Cultural Interaction during the Greco-Roman Period
(London: Routledge, 1999); A. Runesson, The Origins of the Synagogue: A SocioHistorical Study (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2001); B. Olsson
and M. Zetterholm (eds.), The Ancient Synagogue from Its Origin until 200 CE: Papers Presented at an International Conference at Lund University, October 14-17,
2001 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2003).
26. Noll, The Evolution of Genre in the Hebrew Anthology, in Early Christian
Literature and Intertextuality. Pt.1, Thematic Studies (edited by Craig A. Evans and
H. Daniel Zacharias. London: T&T Clark International, 2009), pp. 10-23.

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fact, demonstratednamely that many of the scrolls now contained in Tanak

were not widely available even in the early centuries of the Common Era.27
In sum, then, scripturalization, defined by me as the widespread idea that
texts are able to exert religious authority, had reached only its earliest stages
when the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans. Note that this thesis
rests on a convergence of many data and does not rest on the exegesis of a
Bible story.
Nevertheless, many researchers continue to seek scripturalization in the
Persian period.28 This is a mistake. It ought to be a mistake easily dismissed
because it requires a grossly implausible historical reconstruction. One would
have to suggest that scripturalization took place in the Persian period but left
not a trace in the external data. Then scripturalization was crushed by
unknown causes by Ptolemaic times. Finally it only began to reappear in
Hasmonean times. In addition, one is forced to explain away all data that
positively demonstrate the non-centrality of Jerusalem and the nondissemination of any Hebrew scrolls in Persian times.29
The one and only source for a hypothesis of widespread textual religious
authority in pre-Hellenistic times is Tanak. Every time I encounter the hypothesis, the evidence cited is a small collection of passages, such as Deuteronomy 31 and Nehemiah 8. Even if one ignores the frequent tendency of redaction scholarship to relegate these passages to late stages of fictional accretion,
one must realize that Bible stories can be misleading. For example, First
Maccabees chapter one describes sacred texts in its persecution narrative, but
Second Maccabees chapter six tells that same story without reference to
sacred texts.30 Obviously one of the two is misleading. The historian must
27. Julio Trebolle, A Canon within a Canon: Two Series of Old Testament Books
Differently Transmitted, Interpreted, and Authorized, Revue de Qumran 19 (19992000), pp. 383-99.
28. This viewpoint is endemic to biblical research and citation of specific examples
would be pointless. Biblical texts that are routinely cited as evidence of Persian-era
scripturalization include: Deuteronomy 31,(9)10-13; Joshua 8,32-35; 2 Kings 23,1-3;
Nehemiah 7,22b-8,18; and a variety of passages in which the Levites are portrayed as
teachers, such as Deuteronomy 17,9-12; 33,10; 2 Chronicles 17,7-9; 19,8-11; cf. Hosea 4,6.
29. On occasion, my argument has been misconstrued as an argument from silence,
as though the argument merely claimed an absence of evidence. If my argument were
based on silence, it would remain a sound argument. An argument from silence is
sound when it is the only viable alternative to a thesis that logically predicts a great
deal of noise (i.e., data in the ground), which is what a thesis for scripturalization
predicts, no matter when it is said to have taken place. However, my argument is not
an argument from silence. All available archaeological and epigraphic data from the
Iron Age II through the late Persian era support a thesis that Jerusalem did not yet
enjoy widespread public status as the central location of Yahwism, and that Hebrew scrolls emanating from this center had not yet circulated sufficiently to have
exerted any widespread influence on people who identified themselves as Judean/Jewish.
30. Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, p. 59.

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adjudicate. But adjudication of Bible stories logically requires external control. Therefore, any hypothesis built on Bible stories alone is likely to be a
house of cards.
Permit me to elaborate on two points about the process by which we adjudicate Bible stories. Neither point bodes well for the Bible stories. My first
point deals with epigraphic data, and the second with the social sciences.
First, if one observes the epigraphic data, it is clear that proto-biblical
scrolls, even if they existed as early as the Iron Age II, were not influential.
On the contrary, any influence moved in the opposite direction, from local
custom (such as Ketef Hinnom amulets) into literary anthology (such as
Numbers and Deuteronomy).31 Consider the Yabneh Yamm ostracon. This
text suggests a legal situation that a biblical text attempts to legislate, but it
does not suggest that any biblical text was functionally operative in daily
life.32 More significantly, ritual observances later to be identified as biblical
began as local customs unrelated to any proto-biblical document. For example, Late-Bronze-Age Ugarit observed a ritual that seems quite similar to
Yom Kippur.33 This demonstrates that common Canaanite customs later gave
rise to the earliest Hebrew texts commanding these observances. But the texts
were merely elitist conceptualizations of what hoi polloi were already doing.
James Watts has advanced a plausible thesis that ritual represents the first
step for the elevation of texts to scripture.34 He believes the ritual use of the
scrolls reinforced their authority. I have a hunch that Watts is correct. But if
Watts is correct, then this first ritualized step toward scripturalization clearly
did not take place until the Hellenistic period.

31. G. Barkay, M. J. Lundberg, A. G. Vaughn, B. Zuckerman, The Amulets from

Ketef Hinnom: A New Edition and Evaluation, Bulletin of the American Schools of
Oriental Research 334 (2004), pp. 41-71.
32. J. Naveh, A Hebrew Letter from the Seventh Century B.C., Israel Exploration
Journal 10 (1960), pp. 129-39 and plate 17. Naveh suggests that the ostracon presupposes the kind of situation also presupposed in Exodus 22,25-27 and Deuteronomy
24,10-13, as well as Amos 2,8 and Proverbs 20,16 and 27,13 (Naveh, pp. 135-36).
The biblical passages are not as clearly parallel as Naveh suggests. In any case, Torah presents a utopian solution to these kinds of situations, and the utopian legislation, regardless of compositional date, played no role in daily life.
33. Dennis Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature,
2002), pp. 77-83; G. del Olmo Lete, Canaanite Religion: According to the Liturgical
Texts of Ugarit (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2004), p. 154.
34. James W. Watts, Ritual and Rhetoric in Leviticus: From Sacrifice to Scripture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 193-217. In my view, Watts is
too credulous in the face of Bible narratives, and he seems to be aware that both the
Elephantine documents and Josephus, Antiq. 11.8 (the Gerizim Temple) do not fit his
thesis. Occams Razor applies: the ritual use of Torah is a Hellenistic phenomenon.

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My second, last, and longest point deals with the light that social sciences
can shed on these Bible stories.35 I refer to those passages routinely invoked
by researchers who want to believe that scripturalization took place prior to
Hellenistic times. Deuteronomys provision for a seventh-year public reading
seems to be a favorite proof-text. But also, Ezras public recitation before the
people in Nehemiah chapter 8 is mentioned frequently. Sometimes the account of King Jehoshaphats circuit-riding Torah-teachers in 2 Chronicles 17
has been mentioned as a possible Persian-era policy. Exegetical treatment of
these stories is irrelevant, for the problem lies with the researchers a priori
assumptions and not with the texts.
My point is this: if one were to accept, purely for the sake of argument,
that these and similar Bible stories are accurate accounts of real events, then
they cannot provide evidence for the thesis that scripturalization began with
these events. Quite the contrary, social science research demonstrates that
these events would be insufficient to generate the inculcation of religious
authority, textual or otherwise.36
35. The remainder of this essay elaborates on the thesis advanced in K. L. Noll, Was
There Doctrinal Dissemination in Early Yahweh Religion? Biblical Interpretation:
A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 16 (2008), pp. 395-427.
36. I refer to the school of research associated with studies in human cognition, including: Pascal Boyer, Religious Thought and Behaviour as By-Products of Brain
Function, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (2003), pp. 119-24; Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic, 2001).
See also, Justin L. Barrett, Cognitive Science of Religion: What Is It and Why Is
It? Religion Compass 1/6 (2007), pp. 768-86; Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe In
God? (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004); Ilkka Pyysiinen, Supernatural
Agents: Why We Believe in Souls, Gods, and Buddhas (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009); Pyysiinen, How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of
Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Also see the following for critical evaluation of this
research and a variety of supplemental considerations: M. Afzal Upal, Lauren Owsianiecki, D. Jason Slone, and Ryan Tweney, Contextualizing Counterintuitiveness:
How Context Affects Comprehension and Memorability of Counterintuitive Concepts, Cognitive Science 31 (2007), pp. 1-25; Thomas E. Tremlin, Minds and Gods:
The Cognitive Foundations of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006);
Ryan D. Tweney, M. Afzal Upal, Lauren O. Gonce, D. Jason Slone, and Katie Edwards, The Creative Structuring of Counterintuitive Worlds, Journal of Cognition
and Culture 6 (2006), pp. 483-98; Ara Norenzayan, Scott Atran, Jason Faulkner, and
Mark Schaller, Memory and Mystery: The Cultural Selection of Minimally Counterintuitive Narratives, Cognitive Science 30 (2006), pp. 531-53; Scott Atran, In Gods
We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002). This older volume remains quite useful: Stuart E. Guthrie, Faces in the
Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Justin L.
Barrett recently provided a model for the coding of agent concepts, so that greater
nuance in this research can be achieved: Barrett, Coding and Quantifying Counterintuitiveness in Religious Concepts: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections,
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008), pp. 308-38.

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Data from social anthropology and cognitive psychology demonstrate that

dissemination of religious teaching is difficult because it differs from the dissemination of other kinds of instruction (such as skills for tool-making).37
The cognitive capacity that the human species has evolved as part of its
survival strategy produces a universal form of belief in agency, a structure
of belief that has been labeled the cognitive optimum.38 This optimal cognition is our capacity to seek agents everywhere. Once detectedthat is to say,
once invented by the human mindwe grant an agent its own human-like
mind, and we try to interact with each of these invented agents through our
intuitive understanding of moral obligation and reciprocal exchange. This
natural brain function manifests itself more often than not as a fleeting personification of an object that stands in our way (such as the stubborn door
that will not open or the shrewd laptop that seems to have a mind of its
own). Nevertheless, the worlds many gods, angels, demons, saints, bodhisattvas, and ghosts are by-products of this cognitive process, just as is the
childs invention of an imaginary friend or the universal appeal of a fanciful
character such as Count Dracula, Santa Claus, or Mickey Mouse.
Because the cognitive optimum is not a dramatic departure from, but a
predictable by-product of, ordinary cognitive function, the minimally counterintuitive supernatural agents it is able to produce compel any organized
religious tradition or self-styled religious orthodoxy to compete for
survival.39 The key demographic for successful religious competition is the
adult of average cognitive capacity, whose instinctive tendency is to reduce
received doctrines about any supernatural agent to a set of minimally counterintuitive concepts that are personally useful. If a religious doctrine is
complex or sophisticated, that is to say, if the religious doctrine is intellectually taxing, it must find a way to remain useful to this person of average
cognition, so that she or he will be motivated to try to understand, retain, and
transmit this doctrine. Survival of a religion that claims to be distinct from, or
superior to, all other religious ideas or behaviors hangs in this balance,
because a religion is really nothing more than the critical mass within a
human population of shared ideas (sometimes called memes) about agency.
All religious behavior above the level of the cognitive optimum is constrained by limitations in three ways: the social context and its imposed
needs, the technological capacity for the dissemination of doctrine within that
37. Dissemination of religious teaching is the focus of the important volume by Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission
(Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004); cf. H. Whitehouse and L.H. Martin
(eds.), Theorizing Religions Past: Archaeology, History and Cognition (Walnut
Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004).
38. Boyer, Religion Explained, 51-91, 137-67, and passim.
39. Quotation is from Boyer, Religious Thought and Behaviour, p. 119. For an
example of religious competition produced by the cognitive optimum, see Noll, Investigating Earliest Christianity Without Jesus, in Is This Not the Carpenter? The
Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus (eds T.L. Thompson and T.S. Verenna; London: Equinox, in press).

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social context and, above all, the average persons cognitive capacity.40
Viewed from this Darwinian perspective, [t]o explain religion we must explain how human minds, constantly faced with lots of potential religious
stuff, constantly reduce it to much less stuff.41 The dynamics of religious
social interaction are wholly determined by the interchange of, and competition generated by, each individuals use of the cognitive optimum.
In light of these considerations, every sophisticated religious doctrine
faces a perpetual threat of extinction because few in the population possess
the intellectual capacity for working with maximally counterintuitive ideas,
and fewer still possess the motivation to bother. The majority are evertempted to regress to the cognitive optimum. Moreover, even many seemingly sophisticated religious concepts cluster around, or travel not distant from,
the cognitive optimum, for that is the most efficient way to avoid extinction.
For example, Jesus Christ exists on the same cognitive level as common
folklore about a vampire. Each is an ordinary human who has been tagged
by a finite cluster of counterintuitive ideas. By the power of a greater supernatural agency, a dead human has risen to enjoy a level of power over
ordinary humans. On this minimally counterintuitive framework, any number
of doctrines that require little intellectual effort can be hung. One agent embodies evil while the other embodies good, but these relative values are irrelevant to the capacity of a minimally counterintuitive agent to maintain its
grip on the human imagination. More significantly, each agent is able to perform tasks that cluster into the universal human category of miracle. The
specific attributes associated with each agent come and go with the whims or
needs of those who conceptualize them, and even the literary models for each
figure have little impact on this free-wheeling cognitive process. Many early
Christians conceived Jesus as an angel, so much so that the New Testament
must warn against this heretical Christology (Hebrews 1-2).42 From the
perspective of cognitive studies, this was inevitable. As soon as the name of
Jesus had been equated with something supernatural, the human mind was
able to experiment with just about any variation of a minimally counterintuitive, supernatural agent. Anthropologists and cognitive psychologists have
presented a number of valuable studies that illustrate how this universal
40. Noll, Investigating Earliest Christianity; cf. Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity,
p. 23.
41. Quotation from Boyer, Religion Explained, p. 32. See Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity, pp. 15-17, 23-24, 64, 76, 129-31. Pyysiinen notes that even an intensive
intervention by elites to impose a structured religious doctrine will never produce the
level of orthodoxy that the elites desire. See Pyysiinen, Corrupt Doctrine and Doctrinal Revival: On the Nature and Limits of the Modes Theory, in Theorizing Religions Past, pp. 173-94 (186, 189).
42. Angelic Christologies survived for centuries, as is attested by this fourth-century
inscription: First I shall sing a hymn of praise for God, the one who sees all; second
I shall sing a hymn for the first angel, Jesus Christ. See Stephen Mitchell, Anatolia:
Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor (Volume 2; Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993), p. 46.

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process of quite simplistic cognition operates even among those who consider
themselves to be philosophically sophisticated theologians or experts in the
esoteric aspects of a religions doctrine and rituals.43
Tanak is singularly incapable of competing in this Darwinian arena, and
therefore requires constant defense and promotion by an organized group of
well-trained religious experts (rabbis, priests, and so forth), whose authority
is said to rest on sacred or revealed literature, but actually resides in complex,
and frequently hierarchical, social structures. Although generations of believers have affirmed the Tanak (or one of the Christian Bibles) as primary or
even sole authority for their faith and practice, it has never exerted that
authority because it is really just an anthology of eclectic Hebrew and Aramaic texts originally composed for a variety of purposes, some of which cannot be described as religious in any meaningful sense.44
In other words, Tanak is a cultural artifact and, as such, is subject to the
whims of utility to which all artifacts are subject. Any cultural artifact, such
as a wheel or a text, can be replicated like a DNA-sequence, either perfectly
or imperfectly, but the survival and use of the artifact depends on the cultural
equivalent of natural selection, a process in which ever-changing ideas about
the artifacts usefulness are transmitted from one human brain to another.45
The majority of participants in religious communities claiming a biblical
foundation fail to study this anthology with any degree of depth, or choose to
ignore much of its content, reducing their preferred cluster of religious
stuff to a few concepts that are personally or socially useful. This relative
irrelevance of the Tanak occasions no surprise for those who have studied it,
considering the self-evidently false, and often internally incoherent claims the
anthology makes. Tanak was not designed to be religiously authoritative and
remains authoritative only through intensive efforts by trained community
leaders. It is no surprise, for example, that the earliest evidence for the use of
the literature now known as the Former Prophets consists of Hellenistic historians (e.g., Demetrius, Eupolemus) who change the literatures content as
needed, as well as early Roman-era ad hoc citations, quotations, and allusions
that make little use of any larger literary context or themes and instead fragment or atomize the cited lines (e.g., Qumran, New Testament). That the
43. An excellent example is Justin L. Barrett, Theological Correctness: Cognitive
Constraint and the Study of Religion, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion
11 (1999), pp. 325-39; see also Boyer, Religion Explained, pp. 85-87.
44. Definitions of religious vary in scholarship, of course, but I usually define a
work of literature as religious if it appears to be designed to define, proclaim, defend, or advance a set of ideas about supernatural agency or an ultimate reality. Mere
mention of a god or use of a supernatural agent as a character in a tale does not necessarily constitute religious literature, as the god or agent is frequently nothing more
than a narrative necessity. By this definition, significant portions of the Tanak do not
qualify as religious literature, although aggressive readers have managed to find
religion in all Tanaks texts, nevertheless.
45. Noll, Is There a Text; cf. Noll, Evolution of Genre in the Hebrew Anthology.

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Former Prophets ever became religiously useful, much less religiously

authoritative, is a puzzle that can be explained only by appeal to the aggressive theological eisegesis of religiously motivated readers.46
This research on the cognitive optimum and its influence on the construction and maintenance of a god-concept impact the common, but in my view
false, hypothesis that biblical stories of textual dissemination shed light on
the early stages of scripturalization. Researchers usually assume that the religious competition described in biblical narratives reflects real-world competition that was somehow comprehended by hoi polloi.47 For example, some
portions of Tanakportions that are frequently stressed by trained religious
leadershippresent a competition between the religion of Yahweh and the
religion of the other Canaanite gods (e.g., Deuteronomys prohibition of the
other gods). The competition is artificial, a literary construction, and would
have been unknown to, or wholly ignored by, the illiterate masses. An allegedly awful Canaanite god, such as Baal, is identical to Yahweh, and both
rarely rise above the level of a Canaanite cognitive optimum. Each of these
two gods is an invisible agent from the sky with a human-like mind and an
enduring interest in human affairs.48 Their only differences are found in a
cluster of sophisticated doctrines added to Yahwehs biblical repertoire, but
noticeably lacking from all available pre-Hellenistic epigraphic references to
Yahweh. Thus the Torahs complex tale of Heilsgeschichte is well-known to
highly literate modern researchers with Ph.D.s in biblical study, but would
have been irrelevant to the needs of the average, illiterate Iron Age farmer
and his family. And thus, your gods have become, O Judah, as many as your
towns! (Jer 2,28b). Yet, according to common hypothesis, passages such as
Deuteronomy 31, Nehemiah 8, or 2 Chronicles 17 explain the process by
which scrolls about Yahweh became widely known as scripture, and exerted
religious authority among a critical mass of mostly illiterate Jews.
Tanaks own provisions for, and descriptions of, public dissemination of
its contents are unrealistic. Given the uneven nature of the anthologys
religious content, one is not able to assume with confidence that a coherent
doctrine of a god, such as that implied by Deuteronomy, could have been
46. Noll, A Portrait of the Deuteronomistic Historian at Work? in Raising Up a
Faithful Exegete: Essays in Honor of Richard D. Nelson (eds. K.L. Noll and B.
Schramm; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2010), pp. 73-86; cf. Noll, Presumptuous
Prophets Participating in a Deuteronomic Debate, in Prophets and Prophecy in Ancient Israelite Historiography (eds. M.J. Boda and L.M. Wray Beal; Winona Lake:
Eisenbrauns, in press).
47. For a critique of this endemic fallacy in biblical scholarship, see Noll, Was
There Doctrinal Dissemination?
48. Pyysiinen notes that the careful distinction between alleged divine reality and
human conceptualization of that reality so common to sophisticated theological literature is lost on, or willfully ignored by, the majority of religious participants, for
whom the supernatural agent is, quite simply, an invisible agent with a human-like
mind and a deep concern for whatever it is that the believers are concerned about.
See Pyysiinen, How Religion Works, 220, and 225-26.

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disseminated effectively by a public discussion of this content. (Even today,

too much Bible content tends to confuse lay members, who then initiate worried discussions about so-called hard sayings of the Bible.) Heavy doses of
spin would have been required for effective dissemination. Specific
passages that exhort or describe public dissemination give little hint of how
such spin could have been accomplished or what its content should be. These
passages do not even suggest that the ancient scribes were aware that such
spin was necessary. In Nehemiah 8, one comes closest to this possibility, but
the narrative does not suggest that the priestly assistance (e.g., Neh 8,7-8)
was needed to explain literary incoherence. That possibility would have to be
read into the text.
These tales in Tanak are idealistic, lacking verisimilitude. The commandment at Deuteronomy 31,10-13 for a seventh-year public recitation of the
scroll suggests that the scribes who invented this Moses also envisioned a
literary world in which this literary version of his words would be venerated
by all the people who are identified as Israelites or Judahites, but the real
world provides a variety of rewritten Torah texts that competed with or
improved this literary version. Likewise, when 2 Chronicles 17 constructs a
fictional King Jehoshaphat who sends officers to compass the region claimed
by this narrative as the kingdom of Judah, it suggests, quite naively, an
unproblematic dissemination of complex religious lore by just a handful of
teachers (five officials, accompanied by eleven priestly assistants) over a vast
and almost entirely uneducated population. Or again, in Nehemiah 8, the
author envisions a one-time event over a few short days, not a blueprint for
ongoing ritual reinforcement of textual prescriptions, and this detail is particularly problematic.
The cognitive theory of religion suggests that successful dissemination of
complex religious teaching must defeat the average persons natural tendency
to return to the cognitive optimum, and that requires the imposition of at least
three elements: regularly scheduled teaching events, frequent ritual reinforcement of those teachings, and a series of checks against defection.49 Biblical tales and exhortations, such as Deuteronomys seventh-year public
recitation of its contents, fail on all three levels. If an effective dissemination
of religious instruction was taking place as early as the Persian period, Tanak
not only fails to report on this process but also offers, in place of that missing
report, textual accounts that cannot possibly describe a successful doctrinal
dissemination.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the data I discussed earlier triangulate
on the Hasmonean and Herodian periods. It was then, and only then, that
unequivocal evidence appears for the multiplication and circulation of
Hebrew literature. It was then, and only then, that a massive explosion of
additional literature in response to these Hebrew texts suddenly and dramatically appears (especially at Qumran, but also in the previously known
so-called intertestamental literatures, such as the Testaments of the
49. Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity.

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Patriarchs, Psalms of Solomon, Judith, Similitudes of Enoch, and so forth). It

was then, and only then, that Hellenized Jews began to treat Hebrew literature as sources for historiographical efforts (from Demetrius to Josephus). It
was then, and only then, that traces of an emerging Oral Torah, a body of
ever-expanding halakhic discussions, enabled an otherwise unworkable anthology of folklore and commandments to become, eventually, the authoritative Torah of Moses. It was then, and only then, that unequivocal evidence
for an institutionalized setting for textually based ritual, namely the synagogue, began to emerge.
Elsewhere, I have suggested that an early period of about ten to fifteen
human generations (circa 300 to 100 BCE) can be viewed as the key stage of
punctuation, or rapid evolution, in which the literary artifacts we now call
Tanak were transformed from a loose anthology of disparate literature known
to only a handful of scribes, to an increasingly religiously useful anthology of
literature disseminated among many of the literate Jews, the contents of
which were at last gradually becoming known as well, though imperfectly,
among illiterate Jews.50 But even then, the process of scripturalization had
only just begun. Tanak as religiously authoritative literature required an additional stage, beginning roughly with the Hasmoneans (circa 160s-60s BCE)
or perhaps a little earlier with people like Jesus ben Sira, and continuing
through the late Second Temple decades (60s BCE-70 CE), during which this
loose anthology and a corresponding idea that texts are able to exert religious
authority gradually spread among Jewish communities (and early Christians).
This idea about the potential religious authority of texts would not penetrate a
critical mass of people until after 70 CE, when the task of deciding which
specific texts are the ones to exert religious authority resulted in a new stage
of evolution, namely the process of canonical formation (second to fourth
centuries CE).
To summarize: prior to the Hasmonean era, literary figures such as Moses
and books such as Deuteronomy were not well known among the Jews. Outside a small circle of scribes, texts were never a part of Jewish religious life.
What we today associate with the biblical descriptions of Judaism was the
invention of the final ten or twelve human generations of the Second Temple
period. Even during these generations, the idea that a text can exert religious
authority spread very gradually, and was largely unknown.

50. Noll, Evolution of Genre in the Hebrew Anthology.