Thinking Digitally About The Dead Sea Scrolls - Book History Before and Beyond The Book - Mroczek

Thinking Digitally About the Dead Sea Scrolls: Book History Before
and Beyond the Book

Eva Mroczek
Book History, Volume 14, 2011, pp. 241-269 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/bh.2011.0006
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bh/summary/v014/14.mroczek.html
Access provided by University of Glasgow Library (19 Jul 2013 10:19 GMT)
Thinking Digitally About the
Dead Sea Scrolls

Book History Before and Beyond the Book*
Eva Mroczek
The electronic representation of texts completely changes the text’s status; for the material-
ity of the book, it substitutes the immateriality of texts without a unique location; against
the relations of contiguity established in the print objects, it opposes the free composition of
infinitely manipulable fragments; in place of the immediate apprehension of the whole work,
made visible by the object that embodies it, it introduces a lengthy navigation in textual
archipelagos that have neither shores nor borders.
Roger Chartier, “Representations of the Written Word,” in Forms and Meanings: Texts, Per-
formances and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1995), 18.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing
new under the sun. . . .
Of making many books there is no end.
Qohelet 1:9, 12:12
Electronic textuality has challenged scholars to revisit the categories in

which we think about text, categories that had long been dominated by
the printed book. Far from being a narrow subfield, digital text—with its
much-discussed set of characteristics like fluidity and collective creation,
discontinuity and segmentation, proliferation and ambitions to universal-
ity1—has broad conceptual implications for book historians. To be sure,
notions of a less static, bounded textuality did not originate with electronic
text—concepts of process and intertextuality expressed by theorists like
Bakhtin, Barthes, and Kristeva; Foucault’s problematization of the figure of
* This article originated as a presentation at the SHARP conference in Toronto in 2009. I

thank Alan Galey for sparking my interest in digital humanities, and for encouraging cross-
historical thinking in his seminar in the Book History and Print Culture program at the Uni-
versity of Toronto. I also thank the anonymous reader of this article for helping me nuance and
enrich my argument. Above all I am grateful to my mentor, Hindy Najman, whose scholarly
work and teaching have challenged and inspired me to rethink concepts of writing and text in
ancient Judaism for the past six years.
242 Book History
the author; and, more recently, investigations of textual instability and mu-
tability in print by Jerome McGann have all served to challenge the notion
of texts as static and bounded entities. But digital text has made such char-
acteristics of textuality immediately palpable and ubiquitous, bringing them
to the forefront of scholarly attention. Indeed, the penetration of electronic
textuality into all areas of scholarship and daily life not only encourages
us to reflect on what “book history” should include in its purview, but, as
N. Katherine Hayles has suggested, it also invites us to see texts of various
kinds with fresh eyes.2
This article takes up Hayles’s challenge by initiating a conversation be-
tween textual cultures from the present and from the distant past: digital
texts and ancient scrolls, two areas that bookend the book historian’s tra-
ditional subjects—print codices. While insights from digital text have been
used to reflect on largely overlooked aspects of print—by Jerome McGann,
for instance—little such work has been done on preprint, precodex textual-
ity, which has not been of primary concern to book historians.3 In addition,
the scroll culture I want to examine is not of the Graeco-Roman world,
the context most often invoked to illustrate the beginning of the history of
reading in the West, but the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of Jewish manu-
scripts dating from between the third century b.c.e. and the first century c.e.
While the Scrolls participate in the textual cultures of both the Ancient Near
East and the Hellenistic world, they also reflect a distinct approach to the
preservation and transmission of written traditions, which are understood
to be divinely revealed or inspired, in the context of Jewish communities in
antiquity.
Through a conversation between the digital world and this precodex tex-
tual culture, I would like to accomplish two overlapping goals. The first is
related to the way we understand the textual culture of the Dead Sea Scrolls
specifically. I show that as digital textuality helps us dismantle rigid, print-
centered assumptions about books and authors, it also gives us new con-
ceptual lenses for seeing this other nonprint textual culture, which has been
poorly served by print-centered definitions. This is, in a sense, the flip side
of Roger Chartier’s call to understand the “digital revolution” in the context
of a long history of change in the transmission of texts, with particular at-
tention to the shift from the roll to the codex form. Chartier wrote in 1995
that examining the effects of that change in late antiquity can help us think
about the shift to digital text in our own time: “understanding and master-
ing the electronic revolution of tomorrow (or today) very much depends
on properly situating it within history over the longue durée. This permits
Thinking Digitally About the Dead Sea Scrolls 243
us fully to appreciate the new possibilities created by the digitalization of

texts.”4 I suggest that the opposite is also true: our understanding of digital
text—the way it has forced us to reimagine textuality—can help us see past
forms of transmission in new ways as well.
In the process, I draw book historians’ attention to the corpus of the
Dead Sea Scrolls and to scroll culture more generally, which represents a far
richer and more complex mode of writing and reading than introductions to
the history of books might suggest. This is closely related to my second goal:
to reexamine the traditional narrative of book history “over the longue du-
rée,” a narrative that traces the forms writing has taken from antiquity to
the present and discusses the impact these forms have had on the way texts
were composed, used, and imagined. In this narrative, the scroll is a minor
player, relegated to a few introductory remarks and discussed primarily in
terms of its limits in comparison to the form that superseded it—the codex,
the first great textual revolution that allegedly made new patterns of think-
ing, along with new practices of nonsequential, random-access reading, pos-
sible.5 The subsequent development of print increased the proliferation of
texts and access to information, while hypertext is identified with textual
fluidity, fragmentation, and expansion.
Book historians, with D. F. McKenzie, have rightly stressed that transfor-
mations in the material ways texts are recorded and transmitted also trans-
form the way they signify. But as much as material forms do affect meaning-
making, to what extent do they constrain it? I argue that the classic narrative
of the history of textuality must be nuanced if it is not to become overly
linear, supercessionist, and materially determinist. Looking backward, we
naturally see past material forms in terms of the forms that succeeded them,
but this may blind us to their function, use, and possibilities in their own
cultural contexts—contexts that are determined not only by materiality but
also by cultural and social realities. We must not assume too much about
the efficacious power of material/technological developments to make pos-
sible certain patterns of thought and enable cultural practices and symbolic
motifs. This is particularly true of the way we understand the scroll form,
which, in its own cultural context, was hardly limiting, constraining, and
cumbersome, but had much richer possibilities than postfactum compari-
sons with later forms might suggest. In my examination of one rich “scroll
culture,” then, I show that textual expansion and proliferation, fragmenta-
tion and discontinuity are not innovations made possible by the codex form
or by digital textuality, but cultural motifs and imaginative possibilities that
had vibrant lives in cultures that experienced their texts as scrolls. All in all,
244 Book History
through the conversation between digital texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls, I
maintain that a linear, evolutionary history of writing, reading, and textual
transmission is an untenable proposition. While form and technology cer-
tainly have an effect on the way that texts signify, the ways in which people
have conceptualized the world of texts have surprising affinities, echoes, and
revivals across vast cultural and material divides.
While I use models and metaphors from digital culture to shed light on
ancient texts, there is a larger point to be made about the dangers of natural-
izing certain modes of text production and reading as inherent to particu-
lar materialities—and this applies equally to the characteristics I link with
digital textuality throughout this essay. I have started with Roger Chartier’s
characterization of digital texts as borderless, fluid, and infinitely manipu-
lable; but his statement came at an early stage of the study of electronic text,
and has since been problematized by scholars who point out the restrictions,
both technological and sociopolitical, that govern its production, transmis-
sion, and accessibility. The same critique of developmental history and ma-
terialist determinism that I apply to scholarship about scroll format applies
to descriptions of digital textuality as well. Still, the models and metaphors
of scholars like Chartier remain evocative; while we may nuance them, they
still point to the ways in which the ubiquity of digital texts has made certain
features of textuality more thinkable, more imaginable, even if we no longer
consider them inherent or exclusive to the digital medium.
My argument, then, is structured around two such concepts: nonlinear,
fragmented reading, and the destabilization of fixed, bounded textual identi-
ties. First, I lay some groundwork for examining the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus
as a significant representation of an ancient Jewish textual culture, rather
than a marginal and anomalous collection. Second, I examine the way elec-
tronic text’s destabilization of the concept of a “book” and an “author” can
help us think about the Scrolls, using two specific textual examples—Torah/
Pentateuch-like materials and Psalms from Qumran—that have eluded cat-
egorization based on traditional (print-centered) definitions of the book.
Third, I examine segmented, nonsequential reading and compositional prac-
tices in Jewish antiquity, hoping to nuance the evolutionary narrative that
equates scrolls with linearity, the codex with the beginning of nonsequential
reading, and electronic text, on the other end of the spectrum, with fully
developed fragmentation. Finally, I reflect on the symbolic roles of texts in
the imagination, particularly the cultural ambivalence to the ubiquity and
universality so central to texts in the digital age—and, perhaps surprisingly,
in ancient Jewish writings as well. Here and there, in the words of an ancient
sage, “of making many books there is no end” (Qohelet 12:12)—a state-
ment that might inspire us to think not only about the transformations of
text across time, but also about the openness and multiple possibilities that
emerge from the interaction between material texts and their social uses.6
The Dead Sea Scrolls and “Book Culture”

in Jewish Antiquity
The Dead Sea Scrolls is the common name given to a cache of about 900
documents, dating from between the third century b.c.e. and the first centu-
ry c.e., discovered in the late 1940s and early 1950s in a series of caves near
Qumran, by the shores of the Dead Sea.7 By general scholarly consensus, the
documents belonged to a religious community or communities that broke
away from the priestly establishment connected to the Jerusalem temple for
a variety of reasons related to sacrificial practice and calendrical issues,8 and
inhabited the Qumran settlement in several phases from about 100 b.c.e.9
until its destruction by Roman troops in 68 c.e.
The Dead Sea Scrolls have revolutionized the fields of biblical text criti-
cism, early biblical interpretation, and early Jewish social history. But is
this corpus the collection of an anomalous, marginal sect, self-consciously
in opposition to the broader culture of Judaism at the time? Such has been
the common view, which sees the Scrolls as unrepresentative of a wider,
“normative” tradition. In what follows, however, I outline the features of
the corpus and make the case for why we should, in fact, see it as more
than the idiosyncratic library of a small splinter group, but as an excellent
representation of the culture—particularly the “book culture”—of Judaism
in late antiquity.
The fragmented manuscripts make up an extraordinarily diverse collec-
tion of religious literature.10 Texts that we would now recognize as “bibli-
cal” make up a large part of the corpus, but they are not quite identical to
the books now printed and bound in Hebrew Bibles: some, like Exodus,
Jeremiah, and Psalms, exist in divergent literary editions with extensive dif-
ferences in terms of content and order,11 while others display smaller-scale
textual variations that suggest that the textual form of scriptural books was
not firmly fixed during this period.12 Another category are texts often called
“pseudepigrapha,” religious works that are not included in the Jewish can-
on, but that nevertheless seemed to enjoy the same kind of sacred authority,
such as the book of Jubilees, the Temple Scroll, and a number of visionary
246 Book History
texts, including compositions that expand and retell biblical narratives with
interpretive embellishments. It appears that in addition to a textual fluidity
within scriptural books, the concept of a closed canon was also unknown,
with many more texts enjoying religious importance and new sacred litera-
ture still being composed.13 Finally, works interpreted as “sectarian,” that
is, reflecting the specific history, beliefs, and practices of the community who
lived at Qumran or their predecessors, form another loose category. These
include documents like the Community Rule and the Damascus Document,
which tell the foundational story about the beginnings of a small group of
righteous people and lay out rules and procedures for life in the community,
and texts that interpret biblical prophecies with regard to the community’s
situation and the life of their founder; visionary and sapiential texts that
do not specifically mention the community, but reflect a dualistic, eschato-
logical and exclusive theology, have also been commonly regarded as sectar-
ian.14
As research on the Scrolls has progressed over the last sixty years, how-
ever, the validity of these three convenient ways of categorizing the litera-
ture has come into question. While the entire library had been labeled as
“sectarian” in the first generation after its discovery, it soon became evident
that most of the works were not composed, or even copied, by the scribes
of Qumran, but reflected much broader traditions. First, paleographical
evidence shows that many manuscripts predate the settlement. Second, the
hundreds of different scribal hands attested in the Scrolls show that it is very
unlikely that the majority of the texts were copied at a settlement the size
of Qumran, even over a long period of occupation. Third, it is becoming
increasingly clear that in terms of content, there is no longer very much that
can be called narrowly “sectarian” about the scrolls. Key theological motifs
often associated with narrowly sectarian beliefs—like a dualistic worldview,
adherence to a solar rather than a lunar calendar, and a belief in the elect
status of a small minority—are present to varying degrees in a much broader
body of literature from outside the community as well.
This extends to the textual culture represented by the collection. The
corpus, comprised both of texts copied onsite and those brought from else-
where, participates in and reflects a much wider material culture of scroll
production and inscription in ancient Palestine. Moreover, the ways that the
community read, interpreted, collected, and expanded their textual heritage
cannot be seen as anomalous either. The textual variants in the scriptural
texts of Qumran are not narrowly sectarian in nature, but are interpretive
embellishments and rearrangements that participate in a broad tradition
of ancient Jewish textual development, found also in the Samaritan Penta-

teuch, in the Old Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (aka Septuagint),
and within the traditional Masoretic text itself. Thus, the textual variety
and fluidity that existed in the scriptural texts found at Qumran were not
unique to the community. Neither was the lack of a closed, fixed collec-
tion, or canon, of religious texts. The recognition of authoritative status for
many other works, such as the books of Enoch and Jubilees, was a much
wider phenomenon; these texts enjoyed a long afterlife in later communities
(Jubilees, for instance, remains in the biblical canon of the Ethiopic church,
and Enoch is quoted as scripture in the New Testament [Jude 14–16]).15
While earlier scholars assumed a great deal about a closed canon already in
the second century b.c.e., their theories rest on dubious literary references
that have been read anachronistically, in light of much later developments
when a fixed scriptural canon had become a reality in Jewish and Christian
communities. There is no evidence in the Jewish sources themselves that
the large, fluid collection of scriptures found at Qumran was a sectarian
anomaly.16
It seems fair to say, then, that while some of the specific beliefs and prac-
tices of the groups that inhabited Qumran, such as their foundational story
and their interpretation of biblical prophecies as relating directly to their
leader and community, were indeed unique, the Dead Sea Scrolls are in fact
representative of a much broader culture of textuality in Palestinian Juda-
ism.17 In fact, they are our only manuscript evidence for the time period,
our sole material example of a Jewish collection of texts. The task now is
to interpret what they contribute to historical bibliography for Jewish an-
tiquity—starting with what they tell us about ta biblia—the “Bible”—itself.
It is certainly true that the Scrolls represent, by far, the oldest biblical
manuscripts ever found. But what is even more interesting is what the
Scrolls tell us about the very concept of a Bible, in the sense of a textually
fixed and exclusive authoritative collection of books: it did not yet exist. In-
stead, we have a large and amorphous collection of scrolls. Among them are
documents that look very much like the books of the Torah or Pentateuch,
or the book of Psalms that we know. But we also have texts that are similar
to these books, but rearranged or expanded, as well as completely different
works that seem to be just as authoritative, produced using the same scribal
habits, and quoted in other texts. These diverse works were copied, quoted,
and updated by scribes in dynamic processes of communal interpretation,
and preserved side by side in the same caves, even if there were divergences
between them. Instead of a limited selection of books with fixed forms,
248 Book History
we find a sprawling collection of overlapping scrolls that were constantly

added to, rearranged, and used in the community, without clear canonical
boundaries.
Text as Process: Rethinking “Books” and

“Authors” in Digital Text and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Connections with models of digital textuality should already be emerging.
But the models for the way that this corpus has been described in the sixty
years since its discovery have tended to be doubly anachronistic. First, they
assume a textually fixed, exclusive biblical canon. Second, and most per-
tinent to our purposes here, the prevailing model is a book, a fixed and
linear text attributed to an author, with a stable identity and form, and a
strong link between author, text, and material object. But these assumptions
about textuality are not borne out in the texts themselves, and have been
shown to be historically contingent and thoroughly dependent on a certain
understanding of print culture. They have been radically destabilized by the
advent of electronic text, which defies our expectations of textual identity
and authorship. These same assumptions, inappropriate for digital texts,
must also be dismantled when we approach these ancient scrolls. Models
and concepts that we immediately associate with digital information, such
as fluid, collective processes of rewriting and updating rather than coherent
textual identity and authorial property, are very helpful for imagining the
textual landscape of ancient Judaism.18
The argument that we must rethink concepts of textuality for Jewish
antiquity is not, of course, new. As the publication of the Scrolls neared
completion, many scholars began to challenge older models and to point out
the dangers of anachronism in the way we describe these materials, warning
against, for example, views of textual stability and concepts of authorship
that are inappropriate to the ancient context.19 My suggestions are meant
to build upon this ongoing conversation, and to propose ways in which
our evolving understanding of these ancient texts can be thematized and
invigorated through analogy with another nonbook textuality. I will now il-
lustrate the way in which a digitally inspired sense of textual instability, un-
boundedness, and collective authorship can help us dismantle anachronistic
print-centered “book” models for studying the Dead Sea Scrolls through
two textual examples: collections of Psalms, and Torah or Pentateuch-like
texts. The intuitive standard for these—and the lens through which the first
Qumran scholars looked at the finds—has been the book of Psalms, with
150 compositions in a set order, which we understand ancient communities
to have attributed to King David; and the Torah, or Pentateuch, five books
of history and law, which Jewish tradition claims was written by Moses.
But the actual finds do not fit into these definitions in a straightforward
way. First, the best-preserved Psalms scroll (11QPsalmsa) has confused
scholars who have tried to define and categorize it. Its fifty compositions
are arranged in a different order from the Psalms in later Bibles, and ten of
the compositions do not appear in the canonical Psalter at all. What is this
scroll? A “book of Psalms,” or something else? Was it “scripture” at Qum-
ran? A crux of the question is a passage that appears near the end of the
scroll, the so-called prose insert in col. 27, celebrating David as a psalmist:
And David, son of Jesse, was wise, and luminous like the light of the
sun, and a scribe, and discerning and perfect in all his paths before
God and men. And the Lord gave him a discerning and enlightened
spirit. And he wrote psalms: three thousand six hundred; and songs
to be sung before the altar over the perpetual offering of every day,
for all the days of the year: three hundred and sixty-four; and for
the Sabbath offerings: fifty-two songs; and for the offerings of the
first days of the months, and for all the days of the festivals, and
for the Day of Atonement: thirty songs. And all the songs which he
spoke were four hundred and forty-six. And songs to perform over
the possessed: four. The total was four thousand and fifty. All these
he spoke through prophecy which had been given to him by the
Most High (11QPsalmsa col. 27).20
This passage has been interpreted in two major ways: is it a colophon stak-
ing a claim that King David is the author of the text, and therefore confirm-
ing that this scroll is a “scriptural Psalter”? Or, since this passage is not like
a psalm by David, does its existence, along with the other noncanonical
psalms and different arrangement, indicate that this scroll is not biblical,
but a secondary interpretation or a liturgical compilation of some sort? The
scroll has been called everything from a “library copy,” a “liturgical collec-
tion,” and a “manual for choristers,” to “a true Scriptural Psalter.”21 Even
though pluriformity is a normal feature of ancient Jewish writings, it is still
a source of confusion for scholars who want to name and define this scroll
by the standard of a later entity, the biblical book of Psalms.
Similar difficulties exist for Torah- or Pentateuch-like texts, which di-
verge in varying degrees from the biblical texts that we know. For example,
a text called the “Reworked Pentateuch” contains a running text of the
250 Book History
Pentateuch, rearranges stories, adds interpretive embellishments, and adds

new material about the celebration of festivals. Scholars are still debating
whether this text is used as a Torah, or Mosaic scripture, or whether it
is part of a genre called “Rewritten Bible,” a secondary, interpretive text.
Arguments are primarily based on whether the text is “close enough” to
the canonical book—which means that the definition is based on counting
variants, although there are no criteria for how many variants are accept-
able and how many suffice to move a work into the “nonbiblical” category.
Scholars have argued that the “Reworked Pentateuch” contains enough
“scribal deviations” from the “biblical text,” supposedly understood in its
time as a “Mosaic original,” to make the work “nonbiblical.”22 Another
text, the Temple Scroll, has similar content to the book of Deuteronomy,
but is not ascribed to Moses at all—rather, the narrative voice is recast as
the first person speech of God. This text has also been defined in myriad
ways—from a book of scripture to a secondary legal interpretation.23 The
key issue here seems to be not scribal “interference” but attribution: how
can a Torah be a Torah if it is not ascribed to Moses? What are these other
texts, like the Torah but not quite?
While such problems with categorizing texts result partly from the strong
place the later biblical canon has in our imagination, these attempts to
name works are also shot through with unnuanced print– and codex-cen-
tered concepts, which presuppose the model of more or less stable, bounded
books attributed to an originary author. These fluid, multiform, and over-
lapping texts become a source of confusion and endless debate, unnameable
and unplaceable in their own context. This interpretive variability brings
me to Roger Chartier’s insight that the tight link between a textual form,
an author, and a material object is historically contingent.24 No such fixed
link is applicable either to digital text or to the world of precodex, preprint
writings. Here, then, digital textuality can come in to help us reorient our
thinking about scroll culture. Chartier explains that the digital revolution
destabilizes the fixity or identity of the text, and dethrones the figure of the
author,25 and these observations are also applicable to the textual culture of
late antique Judaism, as represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Literary evidence suggests that the way textuality was imagined was not
in terms of specific “books,” but of larger, looser traditions of divinely re-
vealed writing. We see this in the text from the Psalms scroll, which does
not mention “a book of psalms,” “the book of psalms,” or “the psalms,”
but only “psalms,” tehillim. The claim that “David wrote psalms” certainly
does not refer to any book in particular, but, in enumerating how many of
each kind of song David wrote, “seeks to overwhelm us with numbers”26—

to communicate the idea of a vast number of divinely revealed prayers and
sacrificial songs.
A similar idea of many texts, not identifiable with particular books, exists
in the book of Jubilees, a very influential text in the last centuries before the
common era and beyond.27 Jubilees, written in the third or second century
b.c.e., rewrites the narrative of the giving of the law at Sinai, claiming to be
a prior revelation or parallel revelation to Moses. But Moses and his Torah
do not function here as the be-all and end-all of divine revelation, and nei-
ther does the book of Jubilees itself: The heavenly tablets written by God are
the “original” divine text, tablets that contain information about the calen-
dar, sacrificial and moral laws, and visions of the future. These tablets are
represented or reflected in some way by other writings that are mentioned
throughout the narrative: a proliferation of books written in every genera-
tion, by the patriarchs Enoch (the first scribe), Abraham, and Jacob. These
writings do not seem to refer to any particular, identifiable texts. Rather,
we glimpse a picture of an imagined world populated by a myriad of writ-
ings, which sprawl, overlap, and are preserved, passed down, and updated
by wise, inspired tradents—archives expanded in every generation. In this
world, as Hindy Najman has written, Moses is only “one of many bookish
heroes charged with the transcription of the heavenly tablets.”28
Let us imagine, then, that when ancient Judeans spoke of “Torah” or
“Psalms,” they were not thinking of specific titles with particular textual
forms, but of loose ideal types of divine instruction or writing, imaginative
concepts that were reflected in one way or another through actual, grow-
ing collections of psalms and laws. Such a concept of text finds support in
both the literary evidence and the diverse manuscript evidence that has been
preserved. It seems clear that to ask if the Great Psalms Scroll “is” the book
of Psalms, or if the Reworked Pentateuch “is” a Torah, is not appropriate in
this context. Confusion ensues because placing such fluid, growing, multi-
form works into the model of a stable “book” with a coherent identity is as
impossible as printing the Internet: it is simply a different textuality.
The role of the author as an originary creator of a literary work is equally
inappropriate for this culture. In digital text, we observe the untangling of
author, text, and object—texts are “constantly modified by a multiple and
collective writing” by and for new communities of readers.29 In the scribal
culture of ancient Judaism, the same principle seems to apply. Not only do
we have manuscript evidence, but we also have literary hints of how the role
of the scribe was imagined. Scribes are praised for their divine inspiration
252 Book History
and wisdom, and have an active role in transmitting and creating culture. To
return again to Jubilees: here, every great biblical hero has become a scribe.
Enoch, the world’s first scribe, wrote divine texts; Abraham copied his fa-
ther’s books; Jacob wrote down new revelations; and Moses wrote down
still more on Mount Sinai. More and more needs to be written, copied, and
re-presented in every generation. Levi is told to “take his father’s books and
preserve and renew them for his sons until this day” (Jubilees 45:15).30 To
preserve is also to renew or refresh, and, drawing on the examples of these
great scribal figures, the learned Jewish scribe must have felt authorized to
update the texts for his community.31
The scribe as an inspired performer, as renewer and updater, undercuts
the sense of identity between text and author. Thus, we need not ask if an-
cient communities believed that David really wrote all the Psalms on this
scroll and therefore believed their collection was scripture—rather, the com-
munities who used them copied, rearranged, and added to the texts that
they had, in the spirit of David, perhaps in a sense as David;32 David, in any
event, was called a scribe as well, since he, too, was said to have transcribed
and arranged divinely revealed texts. To say that a text like the Reworked
Pentateuch is not scripture because it has too many “scribal deviations” is
likewise inappropriate. The production of text is not one originary event
that is then reproduced mechanically, but a process of scribal transmission
across time.
For Chartier, “palimpsestic and polyphonic” digital texts “challenge the
very possibility of recognizing a fundamental identity for a text”;33 but this
is also true of the Scrolls. It is anachronistic to ask whether this particular
scroll is “a copy of the Davidic book of psalms” if there is no conception
of such a coherent authorial, material, and textual entity, a “book.” These
multiform works, with their expansions, rearrangements, and various ex-
tents, were not deviations from any authorial original or standard text; they
were simply the way that text production happened. We might look to N.
Katherine Hayles, who, in her programmatic work on how digital text chal-
lenges the fundamental concepts of book history, suggests a reinvention of
the idea of a “work” in terms of texts “spread out along a spectrum of
similarity and difference along which clusters would emerge.”34 From this
follows her notion of “Work as Assemblage, a cluster of related texts that
quote, comment upon, amplify and remediate one another.”35 We might
return, too, to Chartier’s evocative description of the way digital textuality
challenges the idea of the book: “in place of the immediate apprehension of
the whole work, made visible by the object that embodies it, [digital text]
introduces a lengthy navigation in textual archipelagos that have neither

shores nor borders.”36 Both Hayles’s notion of clusters and assemblages and
Chartier’s borderless, shoreless archipelagos are helpful images for the cul-
ture of sacred writing in Jewish antiquity. Rather than definitive, delineated
“books” to which “deviant” texts are compared, we have expanding collec-
tions of discourse that all claim to participate in a larger, undefined body of
revelatory traditions.
I have suggested how models from digital textuality can help us nuance
the way we think about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and can free us from assump-
tions about books and authors that have misrepresented these fluid, expand-
ing materials. In the process, I have also shown some of the richness of this
material, and begun to undermine certain assumptions about scroll culture
and its limits. It has been suggested that the roll form “placed severe limita-
tions on the expansion of writing,” because it had to be held in both hands,
making simultaneous reading and writing impossible, and its materiality
constrained such practices as annotation and cross-referencing,37 practices
that became possible with the codex and exploded in the digital age. But,
as the examples of expanding Psalm– and Torah-like discourses show (and
there are many others), ancient Jewish scribes did not seem to be so bound
by the constraints of their texts’ material forms. It is true that physically,
there was simply no space on scrolls for additions beyond a few words, and
material evidence supports the argument that this was not practiced. But
scribes had their own modes of rewriting, embellishing, rearranging, and ex-
panding texts. Textual scholar Emanuel Tov writes that rewriting happened
in the mind of the scribe. Rather than annotating existing texts, he wrote
new scrolls, incorporating his additions, omissions, and interpretations into
the fabric of the text,38 many of which show evidence of a complex use of
other sources; regardless of whether they were physically in front of the
scribe or remembered from liturgical or educational contexts, they were still
used as sources for the production of sophisticated written literature. This
is true both for the documents found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and, by
extension, for earlier stages in the formation of biblical books. The physical
form of texts cannot be isolated as the deciding factor in what discursive
possibilities are available; social practices of text production must also be
considered. In the rich and expansive textual culture of ancient Judaism,
the robust memory and creativity of scribes compensated for the ostensible
inflexibility of their physical medium.
254 Book History
Manipulating Texts: Linearity and Segmentation in

Scrolls, Codices, and Screens
I have shown how electronic text’s destabilization of the concept of “book”
and “author” can help us think about the textual culture of ancient Juda-
ism, and begun to present the scroll as a textual form with more richness
and potential than we usually assume. I now move on to my next theme: the
question of linear as opposed to tabular, fragmented reading, asking once
again to what extent materiality constrains practices and how ancient and
contemporary textualities can shed light on one another.
It is well recognized that digital textuality has not only challenged the
identity of works and the concept of authorship, but also altered reading
practices. The major feature associated with digital reading is that it is seg-
mented and discontinuous. For Roger Chartier, this fragmented reading is
indeed an innovation made possible by electronic text, with its “ephemeral,
multiple, and unique textual units onto the screen, units that are created
following the will of the reader.”39 Here again, Chartier’s claim does not
convince, as many technological and social factors besides “the will of the
reader” govern and constrain the way digital texts are experienced; yet the
basic point about the segmentation of digital reading will still resonate with
anyone who has ever wasted a night getting lost in Wikipedia. Here, though,
it might seem that the analogy between scrolls and screens breaks down,
since linear, continuous reading is a widely recognized feature of the scroll
form. According to the well-known narrative of the history of textuality,
the fragmentation of reading progressed along a linear model, from scroll,
through codex, to electronic texts. Once again, I draw on Chartier’s articu-
lation:
We know . . . that reading the volumen in antiquity implied a con-

tinuous reading, involving the entire body because the reader had to
hold the scroll with two hands, and this prevented the reader from
writing while he or she read. We know that the codex, first hand-
written and then printed, enabled practices previously impossible.
The reader could leaf through the book, which was henceforth or-
ganized by quires, leaves, and pages. The book could be paginated
and indexed, which enabled the reader to cite precisely and to easily
find a given passage. Thus the form of reading encouraged by the
codex is discontinuous, but it is a discontinuous reading in which
the overall perception of the work, imposed by the very material-
ity of the book, is always present. How might we characterize the
reading of an electronic text? . . . Such a reading brings ephemeral,

multiple, and unique textual units onto the screen, units that are
created following the will of the reader, and they are in no respect
pages set down once and for all. The image that has become so
familiar, that of surfing the web, clearly indicates the characteristics
of a new way of reading: segmented, fragmented, discontinuous.40
We have, then, a picture of two successive revolutions—the codex and hy-

pertext—that have enabled the development of fragmentary reading, a prac-
tice that had been impossible with the scroll. In this narrative, the equation
between the scroll form and continuous, linear reading is axiomatic. Indeed,
the term “scrolling” refers to sequential reading on a computer screen, and
“scroll reading” has been used as a shorthand term for continuous modes of
reading, particularly in Peter Stallybrass’s work on practices of Bible read-
ing in early modern England.41 Vandendorpe writes that with the volumen
format, it was
taken for granted that readers would read from the first line to
the last and that they had no choice but to immerse themselves in
the text, unrolling the volume as a storyteller recounts a story in a
strictly linear continuous order. . . . The advent of the codex was a
radical break with this old order, and it brought about a revolution
in the reader’s relationship to the text. . . . It was the page that made
it possible for text to break away from the continuity and linearity
of the scroll and allowed it to be much more easily manipulated.42
Vandendorpe also cites C. Sirat, who writes that it took “twenty centuries
for us to realize that the fundamental importance of the codex for our civi-
lization was to enable selective, noncontinuous reading.”43
But with its language of possibility and enablement, this model is rigidly
mechanistic, and must be nuanced. In fact, based on the ancient Jewish
sources, the equation between the scroll and a linear textuality is impossible
to uphold. Perhaps the material form of the volumen suggests continuous
reading, but the cultural uses of texts in this particular time and place show
a rather different picture. We might imagine that “readers would read from
the first line to the last and that they had no choice but to immerse them-
selves in the text, unrolling the volume as a storyteller recounts a story in
a strictly linear continuous order”; but based on what we know about the
social uses of texts in the context of ancient Judaism, this is simply not the
case. It seems unlikely that scrolls were used primarily for such solitary and
256 Book History
sequential “scroll reading,” as we would read a novel today. Rather, texts

were put to practical use, and, in many cases, functioned as much as com-
pendia—reference works for instruction and exegesis—as they did as con-
tinuous narratives.44 They were deployed and consulted in bits and pieces
for liturgical performance, educational recitation, religious instruction, and
legal and theological interpretation, as much in Jewish antiquity as in later
religious communities who had adopted the codex form.
These religious and communal uses of text were discontinuous, selective,
and modular. Indeed, the very formation of the religious literature of Jewish
antiquity was an anthological process, and most of the works we think of
as “books” are better understood as collections or compilations of frag-
ments. This is true not only for the explicitly anthological compositions, like
Psalms and Proverbs, but also for the literature that makes up the prophetic
books and the Pentateuch.45 The Documentary Hypothesis posits that the
Pentateuch was essentially “cut and pasted” from four (or five) separate
“documents.” The classical articulation of this theory has undergone radical
challenge, particularly in its presupposition of coherent, separate, originary,
written works.46 But however we imagine the material ways these works
were composed, and even if we emphasize their oral origins, there is clear
evidence that they came together in a process of compilation, manipulation,
and rearrangement. While this has long been evident from literary analy-
ses of biblical texts, it is particularly clear in the texts found at Qumran:
for instance, two versions of the book of Jeremiah where the contents are
differently arranged, and the “Reworked Pentateuch,” which also reorders
text by, for example, weaving fragments of Deuteronomy into the text of
Exodus.47
The anthological modes through which these texts were composed con-
tinue in their reception and use. In-depth work by James L. Kugel on early
biblical interpretation shows that a fragmented approach to exegesis was
common in ancient Judaism. In his studies of the literature of the second
temple period, which is saturated with interpretations of earlier traditions,
Kugel argues that the basic unit for interpreting texts was often the indi-
vidual verse, not whole stories or longer passages.48 John Locke’s famous
critique of printing Bibles “chopp’d and minc’d” into chapter and verse
divisions, where he argues that coherence and meaning are sacrificed when
Bibles are experienced as collections of “loose Sentences, and Scripture
crumbled into Verses, which quickly turn into independent Aphorisms,”
might seem just as applicable to some of the verse-based uses of texts of
Jewish antiquity. There—long before the formal, visual division of text into
chapters and verses—small, de-contextualized segments of text formed the

basis for interpretive traditions and the building blocks of new literature.
What Kugel calls “exegetical motifs,” comments on single verses or even
words, circulated freely and were used and reused in diverse ways by many
different interpreters, who strung them together into new narrative com-
positions. These separate kernels of tradition likely originated in auditory
contexts of education and homiletics. And yet the fact remains that they are
related to small segments of text and that they, in turn, became manipulable
segments that were compiled and arranged to create new compositions.
It is easy to overstate the case for the primacy of verse-based, segmented
interpretive motifs. I do not want to claim that in Jewish antiquity, the dis-
continuous “database” had won a battle against linear “narrative,” as if a
textuality based on fragmented and manipulable elements was incompatible
with unfolding, continuous trajectories—as if they were “natural enemies,”
as scholars like Lev Manovich and Ed Folsom have suggested.49 In a re-
sponse to Folsom, Hayles calls modes of narrative and database, on the
contrary, “natural symbionts,”50 or interdependent species, and such seems
to be the case in Jewish antiquity as well. Scriptural texts were mined for
quotations to guide the lives of communities, and interpretation did seem
to be predicated on smaller units; but all this was also harnessed to tell and
retell an unfolding story of God’s continuing relationship with Israel from
creation, through sin and exile, and to the End of Days—and ancient com-
munities understood themselves to be living in a specific moment in this
timeline.51 This is evident, for instance, in a work like Jubilees, whose au-
thor used his database of interpretive motifs to craft a new text, a sweeping
narrative of the history of Israel from beginning to end, or in the writings of
the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. To point to discontinu-
ity, segmentation, and fluidity is not to deny the importance of linear narra-
tives in this culture, or to set up a false dichotomy between these modes—it
is only to show that the scroll culture of Jewish antiquity did not impose
the linear use of texts, and did not preclude segmented reading and the ma-
nipulation of fragments of tradition—in short, that it was not the evolution
of the codex form that made such discontinuous textual practices possible.
In fact, David Stern, writing about the history of Jewish reading, presents
a rather different picture of the contrast between scrolls and codices than
is found in this familiar tale. Stern’s work on the earliest Jewish biblical
codices from the ninth and tenth centuries suggests that it was in fact the
adoption of the codex form, combined with other sociocultural develop-
ments, that contributed to the rise of certain modes of sequential, continu-
258 Book History
ous reading and interpretive practices among medieval Jewish scholars.52

Stern, drawing on Kugel’s work on earlier interpretive practices, contrasts
the small-scale, fragmentary interpretive motifs in Jewish antiquity with the
more continuous, sustained interpretations of medieval commentators, in-
terpretations that seem more closely dependent on reading texts visually
and spatially, with more regard to what precedes and succeeds them. This,
Stern writes, was so because along with the codex came more possibilities
for scholarly annotation, and more attention to the text as a visual entity to
be read in private. Along with this, texts were more often read in sequential
ways, rather than remembered as orally received, often free-floating “sound
bytes.” Stern’s observation connecting the oral/auditory anchoring of scroll
textuality and the “visualization” of text in the codex is consistent with the
observations of other textual historians.53 But according to Stern’s analysis,
the spatiality of the early Jewish codex supports linear reading, as opposed
to the fragmentary interpretation and use of scroll-based text, a conclusion
that is diametrically opposed to our familiar, book-historical narrative. Not
only does Stern’s work force us to question our assumptions about the ways
physical forms determine textual practices, but it also challenges us to re-
think the common identification of oral or auditory knowledge with linear
patterns and visual-based communication with segmentation.
These observations about material forms and the possibilities for discon-
tinuous uses of texts have implications for our understanding not only of
textual history but also of early Jewish and Christian communities. As is
well known, Christians were the first to adopt the codex form for the major-
ity of their writings, a phenomenon that has eluded easy explanation. The
familiar story is that with its new possibilities for discontinuous, indexical,
selective reading, the codex was well-suited to early Christianity’s deploy-
ment of fragments of the Jewish scriptures for their theological ends—that
is, for “mobilizing citations of the Sacred Word for preaching, worship, and
prayer.”54 But this assumes two dichotomies that cannot be upheld, both
between the interpretive possibilities of the scroll and the codex forms and
between the textual practices of early Jewish and Christian communities.55
In fact, the selective mobilization of scriptures for the theological needs
of religious communities was not only possible, but in fact ubiquitous in
Jewish communities that used scrolls. Christian modes of scriptural quota-
tion for doctrine, preaching, and prayer were not new; they participated
in broader Jewish traditions, whose use of the scroll form hardly limited
the richness of their textual practices, including the nonsequential citation
and juxtaposition of texts from diverse parts of scripture.56 Let me provide
a few examples from Qumran of the way scriptural material was used for
communal religious goals. Some interpretive texts do follow a linear model,
such as the verse-by-verse commentaries on the books of Habbakkuk or
Isaiah,57 but others exhibit “random access” to older textual traditions. For
instance, a text called the “Florilegium” (4Q174) weaves together quota-
tions from various parts of Exodus, Psalms, Samuel, Amos, Isaiah, Ezekiel,
and Daniel and interprets them all to support the community’s conception
of itself as a virtual temple.58 A second text, the “Testimonia” (4Q175), jux-
taposes quotations from Deuteronomy, Numbers, Deuteronomy once more,
and Joshua that concern different kinds of messianic figures. Legal works
and compositions narrating community origins are also full of evidence for
the nonlinear juxtaposition of textual citations and allusions from various
scriptural loci.59 Jewish and Christian communities used the scriptures with
a preference for many of the same books, for similar ends, and in similar,
segmented ways.
While the unrolling of a scroll suggests a continuous mode of reading,
where the text flows on in an undifferentiated stream without tabular aids
to break it up into units and orient the user, our textual evidence shows
that ancient Jewish literature was experienced in other ways. Chartier’s ob-
servation that “against the relations of contiguity established in the print
objects, [digital text] opposes the free composition of infinitely manipulable
fragments”60 seems applicable to the way that ancient Jewish texts were
composed, interpreted, cited, and reused in new writing.61
This prompts us to ask: if the materiality of a scroll does not encourage
such reading, what did facilitate it? While “tabular” or “indexical” fea-
tures are much more developed in the codex, the scribes of the Dead Sea
Scrolls did have some methods of division and annotation at their disposal,
such as paragraph breaks and indentation to mark semantic units, scribal
symbols—usually paleo-Hebrew or cryptic letters—to indicate passages of
interest62, and the occasional use of red ink that may have marked texts used
in liturgical performance. But the other “tabular aids” had more to do with
the ear than with the eye. Texts were experienced in aural ways, and educa-
tion—judging by comparative evidence from the Ancient Near East—was
largely based on memorization and recitation.63 But this does not imply
a sequential, narrative approach to text; indeed, it was the memorization
of lists that formed the basis of the earliest education in the Ancient Near
East,64 and collections of disparate proverbs were likely the earliest Jewish
educational materials.65 Fragments of tradition lived not only on parchment
but also in people’s ears and memories. These mnemonic archives and aural
260 Book History
indexes served as resources for the sophisticated textual work of Jewish

scribes, making it possible for unrelated verses to be juxtaposed and distant
fragments to be located, manipulated, and combined long before either the
codex or hypertext. Modular reading and composition is a function not
only of material form but also of cultural practice.66
Canons without Covers: Textual Ubiquity, Canon

Formation, and Google PageRank
As a final point, I want to bring out one more theme that has already been
implicit—textual proliferation—and reflect on the imaginative or symbolic
dimensions of writing across its long history. In the digital age, we often
speak of “information overload”—the uncontrollable expansion of the In-
ternet, and the staggering task before those who want to archive online
material for posterity. While the sense of an overwhelming volume of infor-
mation, of textual ubiquity—whether it causes jubilation or anxiety—seems
inextricable from the way we imagine the Internet, students of print culture
know that it is not particularly new. In the early years of print, anxious
voices cried out about the inundation of text flowing from the presses. But
I have shown that this idea of the vastness and expansion of writing is a
very ancient imaginative motif. In ancient Jewish texts, we have a universe
populated by lore: it is vast, expanding, never to be fully grasped. Writ-
ings appear, almost like characters populating the narrative, at every turn
in a work like Jubilees; David writes thousands of psalms; and the fact that
books of Torah already exist does not prevent writers from writing and col-
lecting even more.
This is true across genres, and most of all in the tradition of Wisdom
literature. Wisdom is not a virtue or the capacity for understanding, but, as
James Kugel has argued, it is the quantity of things known about a vast di-
vine system that orders the world.67 The gathering of wisdom is a collective
endeavour of collecting: the task of the sage is to collect bits and pieces of
wisdom—usually as pithy proverbs—and pass them down to future sages,
who would add even more, in the hopes of uncovering more and more of
the corpus of divine wisdom that is beyond the ken of any one human being.
The value ascribed to proliferation helps explain this biblical description of
wise King Solomon: “And he spoke three thousand proverbs: and his songs
were a thousand and five. And he spoke of trees, from the cedar tree that is
in Lebanon even to the hyssop that springs out of the wall: he spoke also of
beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes” (1 Kings 4:32–33).
Solomon is a living anthology, and the content of his wisdom mirrors the ed-
ucational use of comprehensive lists of plants, animals, people, and places in
Mesopotamian scribal education. The text from the Psalms scroll, discussed
above, also testifies to the cultural value ascribed to this idea of abundance:
David wrote 4,050 songs! This staggering number shows the importance of
textual proliferation, not represented in any single, identifiable book, and
not graspable by any individual.
But just as in the age of print and the Internet, there was anxiety about
the overwhelming multiplicity of text as well. A certain weariness about
the proliferation of text haunts the epilogue of the book of Qohelet, itself a
collection of various, sometimes contradictory musings: “Of making many
books there is no end, and much study wearies the flesh” (12:12). Flavius
Josephus is more openly critical, claiming that unlike the Greeks, Jews “do
not possess myriads of inconsistent books, conflicting with each other” but
only twenty-two (Against Apion I.38–40). This statement, written around
100 c.e., is perhaps our earliest evidence for the conception of a limited
number of holy books, but it is questionable as evidence for a closed scrip-
tural canon. Josephus’s remarks are polemical, his ensuing description of
what the twenty-two books were is impossible to identify clearly with any
known canonical collection, and the number twenty-two, corresponding to
the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, may be used symbolically as
a way to express the fullness of wisdom or revelation.68 There is also little
indication that his views were broadly shared. Many other sources seem
to imagine texts in a vague, general way, without reference to any fixed
collection of particular titles, and in fact, the material evidence shows us
the “myriads” of books were indeed copied and used, despite Josephus’s
protestations.69 It seems that Josephus’s statement may best be understood
through an insight of Roger Chartier’s about early modern print culture:
there is an anxiety and ambivalence about textual multiplicity, and a dialec-
tic between the desires for comprehensiveness and selectivity in the imag-
ined, ideal library.70
A sprawling, ubiquitous textuality is a cultural motif shared by digital
information and ancient Jewish scribal culture. It should help us get out
of our model of a closed codex, bound by two covers, as the starting point
for analyzing this prolific, generative corpus of religious literature. Still, the
question of canon cannot be fully abandoned. While there was no closed
set of authoritative books in this age but textual archipelagos that had nei-
ther shores nor borders, there were works with more stability and more
influence than others. Collections of Psalms, Isaiah, and Deuteronomy, for
262 Book History
example, are best represented among the Qumran manuscripts, and seem to
be quoted and alluded to most in other works. But how do we think about
religious textual authority without thinking of a bound and bounded codex
Bible, a fixed canon?
Looking at literary, not only religious, canons could help, since these can
be visualized as books on a shelf to which more books can be added—just
as more scrolls can be added to a shelf or a cave. But here again, we have an
intriguing analogy from digital information. Instead of thinking of textual
authority in the Scrolls in terms of selecting and binding texts in a codex,
perhaps we might think of it in terms of the way Internet search results are
compiled and presented. Google PageRank uses an algorithm to arrange its
top hits according to how many and which pages link to each site—judging
relevance and authority by influence and use.71 Such a model works well
for ancient Jewish texts, where authoritative works were not selected delib-
erately, but became authoritative in an organic process of increasing copy-
ing, quotation, and use. A metaphor like Google PageRank could reflect
this dynamic and open, but self-perpetuating process of canon formation.
Thinking digitally about the Scrolls can help us conceptualize the authority,
the fluidity, and the multivalent intertextual relationships in ancient scroll
culture, where we see little evidence of any materially imposed sequence or
limit. The categories or hierarchies that existed were mental concepts: order
was a matter of software, not hardware.
Conclusion
I have suggested that models and concepts drawn from digital textuality
can help us rethink the textual culture represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Models of digital text help us to conceptualize text production as a collec-
tive process of growth, and to recognize surprising affinities between ancient
and modern nonsequential textual practices. Of course, we can configure
our comparisons differently. My comparison was meant not to claim that
scroll culture resembles digital text in some ontologically fixed sense, but to
point to the productivity of models and metaphors across historical periods.
The analogy between the rise of the codex and the advent of electronic text,
which I have implicitly critiqued in this essay, remains helpful and produc-
tive in many ways. But there is a more complex, more interesting story to be
told about what came before the book: a story that should challenge our at-
tempts to write book history along a model of linear progress, and to inter-
pret D. F. McKenzie’s reminder that “form effects meaning” too literally. We
should, perhaps, think not of evolutions from one mode of writing, reading,
and publishing to the next, but of clusters of features that recur and recon-
figure depending on the material and cultural ways in which texts change.
Notes
1. For a recently revised treatment of these topics, see Christian Vandendorpe, From
Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library, trans. Phyllis Aronoff (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2009). Earlier reflections on the conceptual characteristics of the
electronic textual “revolution” can be found in, among many others, Chartier, “Representa-
tions”; and Roger Chartier, “Languages, Books, and Reading from the Printed Word to the
Digital Text,” trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan, Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 133–151; Jerome Mc-
Gann, Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2001);
and Kathryn Sutherland, ed., Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997).
2. N. Katherine Hayles, “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality,” Yale
Journal of Criticism (2003): 263–290, 263.
3. To my knowledge, the only such attempt has been Scott B. Noegel, “Text, Script,
and Media: New Observations on Scribal Activity in the Ancient Near East,” in Voice, Text,
Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies, ed. Raimonda Modiano, Leroy Searle, and
Peter L. Shillingsburg (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 133–143.
4. Chartier, “Representations,” 20.
5. The classic treatment is, of course, Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of
the Codex (London: Oxford University Press, 1983). See also Colette Sirat, “Du rouleau au
codex,” in Le Livre au Moyen Age, ed. J. Glenisson (Paris: Brepols, 1988), 14-21. A concise
account of the change, reflecting the general scholarly consensus, appears in Christian Vanden-
dorpe, “Toward the Tabular Text,” in From Papyrus to Hypertext, 28–39.
6. I thank the anonymous reviewer of this article for pointing out the multifaceted ways
in which this verse might be emblematic of my argument here.
7. Helpful introductions to both the site and the texts are James C. VanderKam, The
Dead Sea Scrolls Today (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994); and Jodi Magness, The Ar-
chaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002).
8. The specific identity of this group, and their relationship to the priestly “establish-
ment” in Jerusalem, continues to be debated. The earliest Qumran scholarship identified the
Qumranites with the Essenes, one of three major “sects” of Judaism (along with Pharisees and
Sadduccees) described by the first-century historian Flavius Josephus, and this identification
continues to be popular; however, more recent scholarship has complicated the question by
arguing that Josephus’s account oversimplifies the diversity within Jewish traditions and social
configurations around the turn of the eras. For one plausible account, see Florentino García
Martínez and Adam van der Woude, “A ‘Groningen’ Hypothesis of Qumran Early Origins and
Early History,” Revue de Qumrân 14 (1990): 521–542.
9. According to the redating of the occupational phases of the site by Magness, Archaeol-
ogy.
10. For a comprehensive account and analysis of the contents of the collection, see De-
vorah Dimant, “The Qumran Manuscripts: Contents and Significance,” in Time to Prepare
the Way in the Wilderness: Papers on the Qumran Scrolls, ed. Devorah Dimant and Lawrence
Schiffman (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 23–58.
11. See Eugene Ulrich, “Multiple Literary Editions: Reflections Toward a Theory of the
History of the Biblical Text,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), 99–120, and his other essays in that volume.
264 Book History
12. Individual manuscripts of scripture at Qumran are similar to (although not identical
with) several different textual versions known from other sources, including the traditional
Masoretic text (based on a medieval manuscript) that now forms the Hebrew Bible, the He-
brew Vorlage of the ancient Greek translation (popularly known as the Septuagint), and the
Samaritan version of the Pentateuch. There are also text forms that do not show consistent
affinities with any of these known versions. See Emanuel Tov, “Groups of Biblical Texts Found
at Qumran,” in Dimant and Schiffman, Time to Prepare the Way, 85–102; and Emanuel Tov,
“The Significance of the Texts from the Judean Desert for the History of the Text of the Hebrew
Bible: A New Synthesis,” in Qumran between the Old and New Testaments, ed. Frederick H.
Cryer and Thomas L. Thompson (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 277–309. It is im-
portant to note that what we now think of as “text groups” are not coherent entities with con-
sistent internal characteristics; rather than thinking about the “Masoretic text,” for example,
it is more accurate to think of the “Masoretic collection of texts,” because the characteristics
of the texts vary from book to book. The collection appears to consist of texts that happened
to be at hand, rather than to be based on any criteria of selectivity. There is no evidence that
textual variety was a problem at the time the Dead Sea Scrolls were collected; sometimes, when
it was noticed at all, it was incorporated into exegesis; see, for example, George Brooke, “E
Pluribus Unum: Textual Variety and Definitive Interpretation in the Qumran Scrolls,” in The
Dead Sea Scrolls in Their Historical Context, ed. Timothy H. Lim et al. (Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, 2000), 107–119.
13. While terms like “canonical” and “biblical” are still frequently in use in the field of
second temple Jewish studies, it is becoming increasingly clear that a “canon,” a closed and
fixed collection of sacred books, did not exist in the Dead Sea Scrolls or second temple Judaism
more broadly. A vast bibliography exists on this subject. See, for example, Eugene C. Ulrich,
“The Notion and Definition of Canon,” in The Canon Debate, ed. Lee Martin McDonald and
James A. Sanders (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002), 21–35; James VanderKam, “Ques-
tions of Canon Viewed through the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in McDonald and Sanders, Canon
Debate, 91–109; James VanderKam, “Authoritative Literature in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Dead
Sea Discoveries (1998): 382–402. A provocative earlier articulation that there was no “canon”
but a sense of a large, undefined, fluid body of sacred traditions at this period is found in John
Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel After the Exile (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988).
14. For the problems involved in classifying a text as “sectarian” or “nonsectarian” on
various criteria, such as origin, usage, or contents, see Carol Newsom, “‘Sectually Explicit’
Literature from Qumran,” in The Hebrew Bible and Its Interpreters, ed. William Henry Propp,
Baruch Halpern, and David Noel Freedman (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 167–
187.
15. On this, see James VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1984), 110.
16. On the inadequacy of dividing texts along sectarian lines in light of similar rhetorical
strategies and concepts of textual authority across a variety of writings, see Florentino García
Martínez, “Beyond the Sectarian Divide: The ‘Voice of the Teacher’ as an Authority Conferring
Strategy in Some Qumran Texts,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Transmission of Traditions and
Production of Texts, ed. Sarianna Metso, Hindy Najman, and Eileen Schuller (Leiden: Brill,
2010), 227–244.
17. For a clear articulation of this position, see Brooke, “E Pluribus Unum.”
18. I am not the first to try and juxtapose digital texts with premodern work from the Jew-
ish tradition. The Talmud, a compendium of rabbinic commentary, has been called a hypertext,
because of its nonlinear layout—the oldest text surrounded by layers of commentaries, reminis-
cent of a series of threaded comments on a blog post. But I hope to go beyond surface analogies
with hypertext and see if we can use new models, metaphors, and vocabulary to imagine how
ancient people might have conceived of their own textual heritage, and how this can help us
think ourselves back into a different “book culture.”
19. Examples of such innovative work will be discussed below.
20. Text from the editio princeps edited by James A. Sanders, The Psalms Scroll of Qum-
rân Cave 11 (11QPsa), DJD 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 92.
21. See the excellent summary of the debate between Sanders, the scroll’s editor, who
thought the scroll was scriptural, and his critics in Peter Flint, The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls
and the Book of Psalms (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 204–217; see also Gerald Wilson, “The Qumran
Psalms Scroll Reconsidered: Analysis of the Debate,” CBQ 47 (1985): 624–642. 11QPsalmsa
has been given a variety of definitions, including a “true scriptural psalter” (Flint, Dead Sea
Psalms Scrolls, 227; Flint builds upon the early work of Sanders, for example, “Cave 11 Sur-
prises and the Question of Canon,” McCQ 21 [1968]: 1–15; and “The Qumran Psalms Scroll
[11QPsa] Reviewed,” in On Language, Culture and Religion: In Honor of Eugene A. Nida,
ed. Matthew Black and William A. Smalley [The Hague: Mouton, 1974], 79–99); a “library
copy” (Patrick Skehan, “Qumran and Old Testament Criticism,” in Qumrân. Sa piété, sa
théologie et son milieu, ed. M. Delcor [Paris: Duculot; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1978],
163–182, 168–169); an “incipient prayer book” (Shemaryahu Talmon, “Pisqah BeemsaPasuq
and 11QPsa,” Textus 5 [1966]: 11–21, 13; see also Moshe H. Goshen–Gottstein, “The Psalms
Scroll [11QPsa]: A Problem of Canon and Text,” Textus 5 [1966]: 22–33); and an “instruction
book for budding levitical choristers” (Patrick Skehan, “The Divine Name at Qumran, in the
Masada Scroll, and in the Septuagint,” BIOSCS 13 [1980]: 14–44, 42).
22. For the claim that the scribal intervention into 4QRP was “extensive enough” to
put its authoritative status in question, see Sidnie White Crawford, “The ‘Rewritten Bible’ at
Qumran,” in The Hebrew Bible and Qumran, ed. J. H. Charlesworth (N. Richland Hills, Tex.:
BIBAL Press, 1998), 173-195. White Crawford and Tov, the editors of 4QRP (“Reworked
Pentateuch,” Qumran Cave 4. VIII: Parabiblical Texts, Part I, DJD 13, ed. H. Attridge et al.
[Oxford: Clarendon, 1994], 187–351), did not originally consider the text “biblical.” Tov,
however, is now suggesting that 4QRP should be studied as Hebrew scripture, in “The Many
Forms of Scripture: Reflections in Light of the LXX and 4QReworked Pentateuch,” in From
Qumran to Aleppo: A Discussion with Emanuel Tov about the Textual History of Jewish
Scriptures in Honor of His 65th Birthday, ed. A. Lange et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2009), 11–28. Eugene Ulrich has long considered 4QRP as an alternative edition of
the Pentateuch (see, for example, Eugene Ulrich, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Biblical Text,”
in The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, ed. Peter W. Flint and
James C. VanderKam [Leiden: Brill, 1998], 1:88–89). For other views on the status of 4QRP,
see Moshe J. Bernstein, “Whatever Happened to the Laws? The Treatment of Legal Material in
4QReworked Pentateuch,” DSD 15 (2008): 24–49; Michael Segal, “4QReworked Pentateuch
or 4QPentateuch?” in The Dead Sea Scrolls Fifty Years After their Discovery, ed. Lawrence
H. Schiffman et al. (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2000), 391–399; and Tov’s previous
position articulated in “Excerpted and Abbreviated Biblical Texts from Qumran,” RevQ 16
(1995): 581–600.
23. Lawrence H. Schiffman, “The Temple Scroll and the Halakhic Pseudepigrapha of the
Second Temple Period,” in Pseudepigraphic Perspectives: The Apocrypha and Pseudepigra-
pha in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. E.G. Chazon and M.E. Stone (Leiden: Brill, 1999),
121–131. For a discussion of the authoritative status of this text, see Hindy Najman, Seconding
Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2003),
chapter 2.
24. On the historical contingency of this triple link, see Chartier, “Languages, Books, and
Reading,” 141. Chartier mentions the rise of the libro unitario, the work of a single author
bound in one codex, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a key innovation in the history
of the concept of a book.
266 Book History
25. Once again, of course, these ideas have precursors and are neither inherent nor unique
to digital textuality; they are, however, vividly illustrated in electronic text.
26. James L. Kugel, “David the Prophet,” in Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a
Literary Tradition, ed. James L. Kugel (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 45–54.
27. Ideas about writing in the book of Jubilees are discussed by Hindy Najman, “Interpre-
tation as Primordial Writing: Jubilees and Its Authority Conferring Strategies,” JSJ 30 (1999):
379–410; on the revelatory power of writing in Jewish antiquity more broadly, see Hindy
Najman, “The Symbolic Significance of Writing in Ancient Judaism,” in The Idea of Biblical
Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel, ed. Hindy Najman and Judith H. Newman
(Leiden: Brill, 2004), 139–173.
28. Najman, “Primordial Writing,” 388. To be sure, the sefer torat Moshe, the book of
the Torah of Moses, is firmly established already in the book of Ezra, dating from the Persian
period (fourth–third centuries b.c.e.), and its central place in the Jewish community is without
question. But what exactly Ezra’s Torah of Moses included is unclear, and some laws ascribed
to it are not to be found in any Torah version that has survived. See Hindy Najman, “Torah
of Moses: Pseudonymous Attribution in Second Temple Writings,” in The Interpretation of
Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity: Studies in Language and Tradition, ed. Craig A.
Evans (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 202–216.
29 Chartier, “Languages, Books, and Reading,” 144.
30. Translation of Jubilees from the Ethiopic by O. Wintermute, in Old Testament Pseude-
pigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985).
31. See Eva Mroczek, “Moses, David and Scribal Revelation: Preservation and Renewal
in Second Temple Jewish Textual Traditions,” in The Significance of Sinai: Traditions about
Sinai and Divine Revelation in Judaism and Christianity, ed. George J. Brooke, Hindy Najman,
and Loren T. Stuckenbruck (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 91–115, where I discuss the scribal identities
of exalted figures like Moses and David, and situate them as exemplars for Jewish scribes who
copied, transmitted, and expanded the texts associated with them.
32. Here, scholarship on practices of pseudepigraphy is helpful. Hindy Najman has writ-
ten extensively on pseudonymous attribution not as fraudulent or deceptive, but as a way of
both claiming authority for a work and attempting to continue the legacy of a revered, exem-
plary figure, resulting in what she has called “discourse tied to a founder.” See Najman, Sec-
onding Sinai; Najman, “Torah of Moses”; and, most recently, Hindy Najman, “How Should
We Contextualize Pseudepigrapha? Imitation and Emulation in 4Ezra,” in Flores Florentino:
Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Early Jewish Studies in Honour of Florentino García Martínez, ed.
Anthony Hilhorst, Émile Puech, and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 529–536.
33. Chartier, “Languages, Books, and Reading,” 145.
34. Hayles, “Translating Media,” 277.
35. Ibid., 278.
37. Vanderndorpe, From Papyrus to Hypertext, 28.
38. Emanuel Tov, “The Writing of Early Scrolls and the Literary Analysis of Hebrew
Scripture,” DSD 13 (2006): 339–347.
39. Chartier, “Languages, Books, and Reading,” 145.
40. Ibid., 151–152.
41. See Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” in Books and Read-
ers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 42–79.
42. Vandendorpe, From Papyrus to Hypertext, 28–29.
43. Sirat, 21, cited in Vandendorpe, From Papyrus to Hypertext, 30.
44. See Chartier, “Languages, Books, and Reading,” 151–152, on the correspondence of
the encyclopedia with fragmented electronic reading.
45. See David Stern, “The Anthology in Jewish Literature: An Introduction,” in The An-
thology in Jewish Literature, ed. David Stern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1–11;
and Jeffrey Tigay, “Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy,” in Stern, An-
thology in Jewish Literature, 15–31.
46. The literature on the evolution of the Documentary Hypothesis and alternative propo-
sitions is too vast to summarize here. A helpful and judicious work is Joseph Blenkinsopp,
The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible (New York: Doubleday,
1992). For two recent assessments, see Pauline A. Viviano, “Source Criticism,” To Each Its
Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Application (Louisville: West-
minster John Knox, 1999), 35–57; and John Van Seters, “The Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy,” in The Hebrew Bible Today (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster
John Knox, 1998), 3–49.
47. This practice of “harmonizing” the text of the Pentateuch by juxtaposing sections
from different books with one another is a feature of the proto-Samaritan textual tradition,
which is reflected and further revised in the “Reworked Pentateuch” from Qumran.
48. James L. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of
the Common Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 24–28; and James L.
Kugel, “Two Introductions to Midrash,” Prooftexts 3 (1983): 131–155.
49. Folsom takes up this argument in “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of
Archives,” PMLA 122.5 (2007): 1571–1579, citing Lev Manovich, The Language of New
Media (Cambridge: MIT P, 2001), 225.
50. N. Katherine Hayles, “Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts,” PMLA 122
(2007): 1603-08. In a response to his respondents, Folsom accepts Hayles’s characterization of
the interrelationship between these two modes.
51. See Matthew P. Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture
in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), for an excellent
account of the way two modes of using Scripture—as pilgrims (that is, texts are progressive
narratives constituting a redemptive journey) and as bees (that is, texts are flowers or hives,
storehouses of discrete information that is extracted discontinuously)—coexisted in the prac-
tices of Puritan readers. I thank the anonymous reviewer of this article for pointing me to this
work, which resonates in deep ways with the ways religiously authoritative texts were read and
produced in Jewish antiquity.
52. See David Stern, “The First Jewish Books and the Early History of Jewish Reading,”
JQR 98 (2008): 163–202.
53. See, for example, Vandendorpe, From Papyrus to Hypertext, 28, 30–38. There are
indications in the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, of attention to the visual character of writing as
well, a point I will explore further in future work.
55. Scholars have also argued that the codex was a material way Christians defined them-
selves in contrast to Jews, who continued using the scroll form, although there is no firm evi-
dence to suggest such a motivation, especially given the fluid, overlapping identities of Jews and
Christians and the fact that neither group was monolithic. Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Read-
ers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1995), surveys a variety of suggestions for why Christians favored the new format,
and finally argues that the practice began with the binding of seven Pauline letters into a single
codex. The story is further complicated by the work of Robert Kraft, who has questioned the
logic of the assumption that since Christians adopted the codex on a large scale, all papyrologi-
cal evidence for scriptural codices must be Christian, not Jewish. The dearth of information
about Greek-speaking Judaism in Egypt, and the reliance on later normative/rabbinic materials
as sources for earlier practices, makes it impossible to be certain that codex scriptures were a
solely Christian phenomenon in the first few centuries c.e.; for these matters, see Kraft’s notes
268 Book History
and bibliography at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rak//courses/735/book/jewish%20codices.html.

A more detailed exploration of the Christian adoption of the codex is beyond my scope here,
and I will limit myself to some remarks about the way Jews deployed their scriptures before the
birth of the codex.
56. See George Brooke, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament (Minneapolis,
Minn.: Fortress Press, 2005), on the shared exegetical methods of the two corpora. In fact,
both interpretive practices and the texts most widely used to support theological claims—for
example, Isaiah and Psalms—are similar in the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Christian writings.
57. See Maurya P. Horgan, Pesharim: Qumran Interpretations of Biblical Books (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1979).
58. On this text, see George Brooke, Exegesis at Qumran: 4QFlorilegium in Its Jewish
Context (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985).
59. See especially the Damascus Document; for example, Jonathan G. Campbell, The Use
of Scripture in the Damascus Document 1–8, 19–20 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995).
61. Although, of course, the claim that textual fragments are infinitely manipulable is true
neither for scrolls nor for electronic text.
62. The precise uses of the scribal marks in the Dead Sea Scrolls are not well understood.
See Emanuel Tov, “Scribal Markings in the Texts from the Judean Desert,” in Current Research
and Technological Developments on the Dead Sea Scrolls: Conference on the Texts from the
Judean Desert. Jerusalem, 30 April 1995, ed. Donald W. Parry and Stephen D. Ricks (Leiden:
Brill, 1996), 41–77.
63. See David Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Litera-
ture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), who presents a sustained analysis of education-
enculturation in the Ancient Near East, Israel, and the Greek world, arguing throughout for its
anchoring in the performance and memorization of texts.
64. The idea of memorizing and orally reciting lists seems counterintuitive: on the list as
an “archetypal form of hypertext writing,” and a form specific to writing, the visual realm, and
tabularity, see Vandendorpe, From Papyrus to Hypertext, 81.
65. See James L. Crenshaw, Education in Ancient Israel: Across the Deadening Silence
(New York: Doubleday, 1998).
66. This argument has affinities with William A. Johnson’s work on modes of reading in
the classical world, “Toward a Sociology of Reading in Classical Antiquity,” AJP 121 (2000):
593–627. Focusing on the theme of vocal versus silent reading, Johnson critiques the prevalent
argument that ancient people were unable to read silently because of the lack of reading aids
like word division and punctuation. Rather than putting too much stock in the constraints of
these physical characteristics, he discusses broader “systems” of reading or “reading cultures.”
While Johnson does conclude that most reading was indeed done out loud, this was not be-
cause the materiality of a book scroll made readers incapable of reading silently, but because
the sociocultural use of texts tended to favor oral performance.
67. James L. Kugel, “Wisdom and the Anthological Temper,” Prooftexts 17 (1997): 9–32.
68. On what Josephus can and cannot tell us about the history of the canon, see Steve Ma-
son, “Josephus and His Twenty-Two Book Canon,” in McDonald and Sanders, Canon Debate,
110–127.
69. Scholars, however, have attempted to read specific evidence for the contents and ar-
rangement of the later canon into earlier, vague, impressionistic references to holy or tradi-
tional texts, dating from times when knowledge about and access to specific works would have
been limited and varied across Jewish communities. For examples and critiques, see Barton,
Oracles of God; Kraft, “Para-mania”: and, in a more specific context, Eugene Ulrich, “The
Non-attestation of a Tripartite Canon in 4QMMT,” CBQ 65 (2003): 202–214.
70. Roger Chartier, “Libraries Without Walls,” in The Order of Books: Readers, Authors,
and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G.
Cochrane (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 61-88.
71. See, for example, Amy N. Langville and Carl D. Meyer, Google’s PageRank and Be-
yond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2006), and, of course, many online resources.

Thinking Digitally About The Dead Sea Scrolls - Book History Before and Beyond The Book - Mroczek

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Thinking Digitally About the Dead Sea Scrolls: Book History Before

and Beyond the Book

Book History, Volume 14, 2011, pp. 241-269 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

Electronic textuality has challenged scholars to revisit the categories in

* This article originated as a presentation at the SHARP conference in Toronto in 2009. I

us fully to appreciate the new possibilities created by the digitalization of

The Dead Sea Scrolls and “Book Culture”

of ancient Jewish textual development, found also in the Samaritan Penta-

we find a sprawling collection of overlapping scrolls that were constantly

Text as Process: Rethinking “Books” and

Pentateuch, rearranges stories, adds interpretive embellishments, and adds

each kind of song David wrote, “seeks to overwhelm us with numbers”26—

introduces a lengthy navigation in textual archipelagos that have neither

Manipulating Texts: Linearity and Segmentation in

We know . . . that reading the volumen in antiquity implied a con-

reading of an electronic text? . . . Such a reading brings ephemeral,

We have, then, a picture of two successive revolutions—the codex and hy-

sequential “scroll reading,” as we would read a novel today. Rather, texts

chapters and verses—small, de-contextualized segments of text formed the

ous reading and interpretive practices among medieval Jewish scholars.52

indexes served as resources for the sophisticated textual work of Jewish

Canons without Covers: Textual Ubiquity, Canon

and bibliography at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rak//courses/735/book/jewish%20codices.html.

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