Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel’s Prophetic Library

One of the major paradigm shifts in biblical studies over the past few decades has been the increasing focus on prophecy as a literary phenomenon. In the twentieth century, “Isaiah” or “Jeremiah,” for instance, were first and foremost people whose historical reality lay tantalizingly obscured behind books attributed to them. Today, however, “Isaiah” and “Jeremiah” simply are those books—in other words, literary compositions produced in particular contexts for particular reasons. The formation and function of the books are what now constitute the primary objects of historical-critical analysis. To the extent that Isaiah, Jeremiah, or any other prophets still exist as people, they are characters—i.e., constructs of the books—not authors or historical individuals.

This approach has produced ingenious redaction-critical solutions to classic problems in the prophetic literature. However, it has also frequently been cagey on the question of how ancient scribes would have achieved these results. Sure, on the level of content, style, and language, a given verse in, say, an earlier stratum of Isaiah might well look like a late addition with an eye towards harmonization with a later stratum. But would such a change have been practically feasible within the realities of ancient Jewish scribal practice? Would it even have been motivated by their own understandings of textuality in the first place?

Nathan Mastnjak’s Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel’s Prophetic Library is a bold, programmatic attempt to account for how the biblical prophetic literature developed. Building on New Philology and book history, Mastnjak argues that the historical-critical study of this literature must begin with—and answer to—the material realities of textual production in ancient Israel and the Second Temple period. His thesis is appealingly straightforward: the prophetic books (and, quite possibly, most other biblical books) initially took form in a Persian-period context where “book” meant “a collection of non-continuous textual objects” (p. 10), not a single scroll with an architectonic structure. This collection mindset left a lasting impact on these works. In Mastnjak’s view, then, a genuinely historical approach to the formation and interpretation of the prophetic literature will require “interrogat[ing] biblical scholarship for ways that its very questions are shaped by anachronistic models of the book” (ibid.).

Before turning to the prophetic literature, Mastnjak’s first two chapters lay the groundwork for his argument by describing the history of Judahite book production. In Chapter 2 (the first main chapter following the introduction), he builds upon Menahem Haran’s influential claim that in the Persian period, Judahite scribes shifted from short papyri to long parchment scrolls. Mastnjak affirms the shift but pushes it later, to the Hellenistic period. The (modest) empirical evidence and internal hints from the Hebrew Bible itself suggest that in the Persian period, discrete papyrus sheets or short papyrus scrolls were still the Judahite scribal standard.

Chapter 3 continues this line of inquiry but pushes it further, sharpening Haran’s study of ancient materiality by integrating theoretical models and metacritical awareness from book history. In other words, Mastnjak urges that “it is not enough … to describe the basic material form of Persian-period literary production as relatively short papyrus scrolls.” Rather, “it will be necessary to ask how the producers of ancient Judean texts thought and talked about their written texts” (pp. 35–36). Central to this task is the helpful New Philological distinction between a “work” and a “text.” A “work” is an abstract literary entity—e.g., the book of Isaiah. A “text” is a discrete material instantiation of a given work—e.g., the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran. Using this framework, Mastnjak argues that many biblical uses of the term sēfer, usually translated as “book” or “scroll,” refer not to a single text but to a work distributed across (and constituted by) several texts. For Persian-period Jewish scribes, the prevailing model of the “book” was what Mastnjak calls “the multi-volume sēfer”: a collection of papyri with some degree of thematic or attributional cohesiveness but without the fixedness of a single object.

With these foundations in place, Mastnjak turns finally to the biblical prophetic literature itself. In Chapter 4, he argues that Bible scholars’ notorious obsession with recovering “original” works, especially of the prophetic literature, is rooted in anachronistic assumptions of bibliographic materiality. In this regnant view, “incorporation of sources into the work [is] incorporation into a single physical scroll with additions possible only through the writing of a new scroll” (p. 64). By contrast, the Persian-period concept of “book as collection” suggests that variations and inconsistences in prophetic literature might more plausibly be explained as the result of scribes drawing eclectically from a loosely connected assembly of discrete texts. As an example, he discusses the significantly different versions of Jeremiah that appear in two textual witnesses: the Masoretic text, i.e., the familiar Hebrew Bible that became authoritative for later Judaism; and the Septuagint, a Hellenistic Greek translation of some earlier version of these Hebrew works. Mastnjak writes, “The organizational schemes of these two books … do not need to be related in a hierarchical manner. They can each be considered independent acts of bookmaking that each arranged an unordered collection as a linearly ordered book” (p. 88). Neither of these versions of Jeremiah is currently a collection, but their compositional histories are functions of their origins as a collection.

The remaining chapters of Beyond the Scrolls offer sustained case studies in each of the biblical prophetic books. According to Mastnjak, we owe the familiar concept of such books to the Hellenistic Jewish scribes who transformed Persian-period papyrus collections into parchment scrolls. He argues that they did so according to two basic paradigms. Chapter 5 takes up one of these: anthologization—i.e., combining texts in a manner that does not construe them as a linear sequence. One prophetic book is self-evidently an anthology: the so-called Book of the Twelve, which includes the shorter (or “minor”) books attributed to distinct figures such as Hosea or Amos. Like the obviously anthological book of Psalms, the process of fixing the collection of the Twelve on a single parchment was not intended to counteract the fundamental eclecticism of the collection format.

The heart of Mastnak’s argument in this chapter is that, counterintuitively, the book of Isaiah is also an anthology. For over a century, there has been virtual consensus among scholars that the book consists of at least two literary units: First Isaiah (chs. 1–39), which contains material tracing to the eighth century BCE, when the prophet himself purportedly lived; and Second Isaiah (chs. 40–66), which is the product of an anonymous writer several centuries later. (Whether chs. 56–66 may be attributed to yet a Third Isaiah is more contentious.) Despite agreement on the composite nature of the book, scholars have generally assumed that the book claims to be entirely the work of the eighth-century Isaiah son of Amoz. By contrast, Mastnjak argues that its redactors in fact composed it as a loose anthology of multiple works by multiple prophets, similar to the Twelve. As he puts it, “This collection of scrolls had a certain thematic unity but it was the unity of an anthology, not the unity of a book centering on a single prophetic figure” (p. 133). Isaiah only came to be read as one prophet because, unlike in the Twelve, its various components are not identified as independent compositions by different authors; Isa 40 does not begin, to wit, “The word of YHWH that came to Second Isaiah in Babylon after Cyrus defeated Nabonidus.”

In Chapters 6 and 7, Mastnjak offers parallel treatments of how Jeremiah and Ezekiel reflect what he characterizes as the second major mode of prophetic composition in the Hellenistic period: narrativization—i.e., the transformation of the collection into an overarching story about a particular prophet. According to Mastnjak, these two books meet the basic literary-theoretical definition of narrative, indebted ultimately to Aristotle: they feature a “plot, [i.e.,] an unfolding of actions in time” that “consists of a unified beginning, middle, and end” and in which “the beginning is readable as a promise of the final coherence provided by the end” (p. 150). Mastnjak shows that for the Hellenistic scribes who transposed the Jeremiah and Ezekiel collections to scrolls, the fixedness and unity of the new material object facilitated an arrangement of the collection into a narrative.

At the same time, Mastnjak argues that the specific form of narrativization was not a foregone conclusion. Instead, the eclecticism of the collection continued to assert itself in this process. He demonstrates this by comparing extant versions of both books: for Jeremiah, the Masoretic text and the Septuagint, as in his earlier chapter; and for Ezekiel, the Masoretic text and Papyrus 967, a Greek manuscript that displays notable divergences from the canonical version. According to Mastnjak, these texts show that different scribes seized on the same collection to tell different stories. For example, whereas the Greek Jeremiah “has the form of a history of the last days of Judah” (p. 166) with a decidedly pessimistic tone, the Hebrew Jeremiah more optimistically suggests that “just as assuredly as Babylon accomplished the divine punishment of Judah, so the punisher itself will be punished” (p. 168).

Mastnjak’s collection approach to the narratives in Jeremiah and Ezekiel is compelling. However, I was less persuaded that this approach means we should read Isaiah as an anthology like the Twelve or Psalms. The absence of attributional headings for the different components is a bigger problem for an anthological reading than Mastnjak admits. More seriously still, he downplays the striking inclusion of non-oracular, historiographical material on Isaiah’s activities during Hezekiah’s reign (Isa 36–39; cf. the often verbatim parallel in 2 Kgs 18–20). It is difficult to explain why this material would appear in a prophetic anthology with no overall connection to the figure of Isaiah. On the contrary, its placement before Isa 40—i.e., precisely at the most widely recognized compositional juncture—makes it seem like an effort to contextualize those later oracles within Isaiah’s career. All told, while Mastnjak successfully shows that what we call Isaiah began as a collection, he does not successfully show that the compositional logic to which that collection was eventually subjected is anthological.

Now, Mastnjak might object that the anthological reading of Isaiah is necessary because if we read it as a single work, it does not meet the aforementioned definition of narrative. Indeed, he writes, “While Isaiah … contains a basic chronological scheme and even isolated narrative passages that contain plot, the work … [itself] do[es] not unfold as a narrative of change” (p. 150). But this objection actually points up another of my concerns: Why do contemporary literary theorists and their Aristotelean definitions determine what is or is not “narrative” in the Hebrew Bible? What if, for some biblical authors, “narrative” simply did not have this specific set of features? To be clear, I am highly sympathetic to the use of contemporary literary theory in biblical studies and have even urged it in print. Yet I must admit, I have never seen (and do not myself possess) a totally convincing explanation for why this use does not constitute an anachronistic, etic imposition. The consequences of this lack are evident in Mastnjak’s treatment of Isaiah. To me, it seems entirely possible (and, in fact, likely) that Isaiah does indeed constitute a narrative—just not the sort that we today expect or want.

My final point is less a critique than a regret. At the end of Chapter 7, Mastnjak proposes that the collection mindset might have outlived the collections themselves in the form of a hermeneutic of atomism and eclecticism that could be applied even to book-scrolls. “The random-access reading practices that appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls and later midrash,” he proposes, “arguably have their origins in a literary culture based on collections of small textual objects, short scrolls, and sheets—material forms that seem to be particularly suited for atomistic rather than book-level interpretation” (p. 219). This is a fascinating and compelling suggestion with ramifications far beyond the prophetic literature and even the Bible itself. However, Mastnjak leaves it frustratingly underdeveloped, dropping it a few sentences after the one I just cited. I wish Mastnjak had taken it up in a more dedicated way, perhaps in a longer version of the conclusion (which, as it stands, is just four pages). Hopefully he will find occasion to continue and to deepen this line of inquiry in future work.

These critiques notwithstanding, Before the Scrolls is an excellent book. Mastnjak’s metacritical plea for greater attention to the material realities of the production of the prophetic literature is utterly convincing. Moreover, his argument for the priority of a collection model is about as reasonable a case as could be made within the limits of the evidence (which, as he readily admits, are formidable). Much future work on the shaping of the prophetic literature will undoubtedly disagree with individual claims that Mastnjak makes about specific prophetic books. However, no future work on this topic will be able to avoid taking seriously the ancient material realities that he has uncovered.

Ethan Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Villanova University