the formation of the bible 31
The belief in the divine origin of the words recorded in the Penta-
teuch rendered sacred the parchments on which these words were
inscribed. Josephus recorded riots when a scroll of the Torah was burned
by a Roman soldier in Judaea in the mid- first century ce; when the
synagogue of the Jews in Caesarea came under attack from local gen-
tiles in 66 ce, just before the outbreak of war against Rome, the Jews
abandoned the building but preserved the scrolls. Josephus recorded of
himself that after the destruction of the Temple in 70 ce he begged a gift
of sacred books from the Roman emperor Titus.
In early rabbinic terminology found in the Mishnah, sacred books
were those that ‘defile the hands’. This notion must be connected to the
more general concepts of purity and impurity in biblical texts (see Chap-
ter 4), but in this case it apparently concerned a sort of religious charge,
like the force said to have killed Uzzah for touching the ark of the cov-
enant in the time of King David, although with less deadly effect. The
notion is without parallel in other pre- Christian ancient religions; in
many respects Jewish reverence for scriptural texts as objects was clos-
est in nature to pagan attitudes to the statues of their gods. Already in
rabbinic texts from the early third century ce rules can be found for the
copying of sacred texts; these rules were to be increasingly elaborated
over ensuing centuries, with detailed instructions even for the decora-
tive flourishes in the shape of crowns on top of certain letters in Torah
scrolls. The emergence of careful rules can be observed in the biblical
manuscripts from Qumran, the earliest to survive (in some cases dating
back as early as the second century bce), in practices such as the use of
palaeo- Hebrew letters or dots for the divine name, probably to prevent
accidental uttering of the name aloud, which, as we shall see (Chapter
4), was felt to constitute sacrilege.^9
Such emphasis on the nature and value of the written biblical texts
implied great faith in the reliability of the scribes who copied them out
for study and liturgical use. It is probable that archetypes of at least
some biblical texts were preserved in the Temple in Jerusalem, but
whether or how often these archetypes were consulted is unknown. The
biblical manuscripts from Qumran exhibit much textual variety, rang-
ing from numerous orthographical variants in manuscripts of the
Pentateuch, with Hebrew words sometimes written with the consonants
to mark vowels and sometimes not, to much larger variations in the
text: in a fragmentary manuscript of the books of Samuel, the version at
Qumran is much closer to the account of this period in Chronicles than
in Samuel in the later rabbinic Bible.