Book Note | The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible

William M. Schniedewind, The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible. Oxford University Press, 2019.

In the study of scribal schools in ancient Israel, the common presumption has been that the population centers were the main locus of scribal activity. William Schniedewind’s book The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Book complicates this conventional view with a fresh interpretation of a group of inscriptions found at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud. As the subtitle hints, the book makes a case for tracing the outlines of an elementary Hebrew scribal curriculum pertaining to the composition of the Hebrew Bible, constructing an argument with inscriptions found outside of Levantine urban centers. Through his new interpretation of the Kuntillet ‘Ajrud inscriptions, Schniedewind argues that ancient scribes who wrote the Hebrew Bible were trained according to an Israelite alphabetic scribal education, which emerged out of an earlier cuneiform scribal curriculum during a transitional period between the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. This argument builds on the premise suggested by recent studies of scribes and scribalism in biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies: the contents of the Hebrew Bible and the modes of its composition were fundamentally shaped and influenced by a curriculum through which ancient Israelite scribes were trained to write. Inspired by William Morrow’s usage of the term “vector of transmission,” Schniedewind traces the concrete mechanisms of cultural and intellectual contact in developing a scribal curriculum in the southern Levant by means of physical evidence from epigraphic and archaeological remains. What results is a lucid historical account of the development and principles of the elementary scribal curriculum in ancient Israel, providing in-depth insights into understanding afresh the scribal world behind biblical literature.

The book is divided into seven chapters and an epilogue. Chapter 1, “The Emergence of Scribal Education in Ancient Israel,” looks into the contours of the cuneiform school curriculum, including “sign exercises,” “thematic lists,” “advanced lists,” “numerical exercises,” and “phrases and sentences” (p. 19). This sets up a reference point to compare how each of these curricular elements from Mesopotamia constitutes a building block of the scribal exercises in the Hebrew alphabetic curriculum. Chapter 2, “Scribal Curriculum at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud,” details different types of inscriptions from the site. They attest to a range of scribal educational practices known from Mesopotamia. From Chapter 3 to Chapter 7, each of the curricular categories known from cuneiform scribal culture is further explicated with specific examples from the Hebrew Bible and West Semitic inscriptions. Starting from the most basic level, Chapter 3, “Alphabets and Acrostics,” looks at the origin and development of an early alphabetic writing system as it was transmitted from Egypt to the Levant where the abgad order of the Canaanite alphabetic tradition was standardized. Chapter 4, “From Lists to Literature,” concentrates on a curricular category of writing lists, pervasive in Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well as in the Hebrew scribal curriculum known from biblical and inscriptional evidence (pp. 70-71). Chapter 5, “Letters, Paragraphs, and Prophets,” discusses the prevalence of the genre of letter writing throughout the ancient Near Eastern literary corpora, including Mesopotamian, Ugaritic, and Egyptian literature. This chapter elaborates further on the three letter exercises from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, highlighting the highly formulaic nature of the Hebrew letter genre. Chapter 6, “Proverbial Sayings,” concerns the last phase of the elementary scribal curriculum. Though the genre of proverbial sayings is widely attested in the cuneiform text and the Hebrew Bible, the lack of such evidence from a Hebrew epigraphic source makes it difficult to reconstruct its vector of scribal transmission from Mesopotamian literature to the Hebrew Bible. Schniedewind’s interpretation of the two lines from the fragmentary inscription at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (KA 3.9) as a wisdom saying attempts to fill this lacuna. By way of a conclusion, Chapter 7, “Advanced Education” reflects upon some shared components of advanced scribal education in ancient Israel based on a set of comparative evidence from the Near East, adapted in biblical literature.

There is much to praise about The Fingers of the Scribe. Schniedewind’s remarkably comprehensive and rigorous analysis of a wide range of cuneiform and alphabetic inscriptions from Mesopotamia and the Levant yields an integrated account of the critical role that a standardized scribal curriculum played in the production of biblical literature. Reconstructing details of the scribal curriculum that attests to the influence of a cuneiform tradition on biblical writings has long remained a major crux in scholarship due to the scarce and fragmentary nature of available epigraphic evidence from ancient Israel. Nevertheless, Schniedewind’s holistic treatment of the inscriptions from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud as a set of scribal exercises that bespeaks the curricular categories known from cuneiform scribal education provides a novel empirical framework that connects the dots to clarify the impact of the Mesopotamian scribal infrastructure on the early Israelite school curriculum.

In demonstrating how a holistic examination of each piece of the Kuntillet ‘Arjud inscriptions suggests “fragments of the entire range of an educational curriculum for an ancient Israelite scribe,” (p. 8) Schniedewind also addresses and responds to a potential objection to his interpretation. The locational isolation of the site makes it difficult to envision a remote fortress as a place where scribal texts were produced and exercised. It is largely due to this locational solitude that a religious interpretation of the site dominated the previous scholarly literature. Although some inscriptions do imply religious themes, Schniedewind questions the primacy of a religious function of the site given the absence of archaeological remains that speak to such an association. Instead, he argues that the site was “a state-sponsored fortress along a desert trade route” (p. 25). In this geopolitical context, the fragments of literary texts from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud serve a role of “repurposed” texts intended for advanced scribal curriculum without necessarily associating the site and a role of scribes with religion (pp. 38-39). Combined with an introduction to the concept of a “soldier-scribe (šōpēr māhȋr)” (pp. 40-41) operating in an “apprentice-type system” (p. 47) and a geo-contextual consideration of the site, Schniedewind’s new interpretation of the Kuntillet ‘Ajrud inscriptional data as a corpus of the scribal curriculum pushes the envelope of the current understanding of the site and the texts.

While the elementary foundation of scribal education has been relatively straightforward to reconstruct because of its standardized nature, Schniedewind further notes some challenges in reconstructing the advanced curriculum for its variety and flexibility (p. 141). Nonetheless, chapter 7’s consistent focus on tracing vectors of the scribal transmission behind other literary genres in the Hebrew Bible, such as liturgical, poetic, and legal texts, helpfully orients readers to a fuller landscape of the scribal curriculum that produced the Hebrew Bible. Moreover, Schniedewind’s interpretation of the Kuntillet ‘Ajrud plaster inscriptions that feature religious themes as an upper-level scribal curriculum complements his crucial argument from Chapter 2. “The religious nature of the poetry at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud,” he states, “does not make the site a temple or a shrine, nor does it make the scribes a group of priests or prophets. Religious poetry was part of the scribal curriculum, and its context at a remote fortress such as Kuntillet ‘Ajrud suggests just such a function” (pp. 159-60).

Still, some historical questions that frame the book’s core arguments need clearer rationales and justifications. Schniedewind claims, for example, that several periods of social and political upheavals defined by the rise and fall of the major Near Eastern empires were a critical moment of innovation and/or change for local scribal curricula in ancient Israel (p. 166). Specifically, he notes: “as soon as there were alphabetic scribes, they needed to develop a curriculum. In other words, the formation of an Israelite scribal curriculum had to be at the very beginning of alphabetic writing in the early Iron Age” (p. 12; emphasis original). It is based on this supposition that a claim about the early compositional history of the Hebrew Bible as seen through the influence of the second-millennium cuneiform curriculum on the early Israelite scribal education gains support. Yet, it is unclear how and why the end of one empire and the rise of another one particularly relates to the impulse to form the alphabetic scribal curriculum in the Late Bronze Age setting when it is simultaneously claimed that “there is no large gap between the demise of cuneiform culture and the emergence of early alphabetic culture” (p. 166). This seemingly inconsistent picture does not strengthen the book’s starting assumption: “we must assume that a school curriculum developed with the emergence of the alphabet” (p. 5).

This point, however, explains the value of this study, opening up new questions for a deeper historical investigation into the relationship between a linguistic choice and a scribal infrastructure. It is a significant addition to the fields of biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies for its contributions to the study of scribal schools in ancient Israel based on tangible evidence.

Ki-Eun Jang is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible and Near Eastern Studies at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Her current research engages topics in the literary history of the Hebrew Bible, the historiography of theories of race and ethnicity, ancient inscriptions and scribes, and migration and diaspora studies.