32 A History of Judaism
There had been a long tradition of scribes as adjuncts of administra-
tion in bureaucratic states in the Near East and Egypt, and it is possible
that some of those who copied Jewish religious texts in the Persian
period, such as Ezra ‘the scribe’ (as he is described in the biblical text
itself), held such official positions in Jewish society in earlier times. The
biblical texts preserve a tradition that scribes were trained within
family- like guilds and that a prominent family of scribes could play a
major role in political life in the period of the monarchy, when the high-
est scribal office was that of royal scribe, but there is no evidence of a
class or guild of Jewish scribes by the end of the Second Temple period.
It is possible to discern the distinctive work of numerous individual
scribes in the production of the Dead Sea scrolls between the second
century bce and the first century ce, but the texts themselves make
no reference to who they were, and neither Josephus nor the tannaitic
rabbis of the first two centuries ce have anything to say about the quali-
fications or social role of a scribal guild.
Scribes were widely employed for everyday purposes, such as the
copying of legal documents, as can be seen on marriage documents and
deeds of sale of the first and second centuries ce found in caves by the
Dead Sea. It seems likely that any such scribe who turned his hand to
copying out a religious text would need to have the trust of his clients,
who would generally be unable to check the accuracy of his text. One
should imagine such scribes approaching their task with reverence, in
the knowledge that the object they were creating became holy through
their actions. For rabbinic Jews who believed that touching any biblical
text, even an excerpt of just eighty- five letters, would render the hands
impure, the process of writing must have been even more solemn than
that of a non- Jewish sculptor creating a statue for worship, for whom
(according to Cicero) the sculpture became holy only once completed
and dedicated. It was perhaps because such scribes were necessarily per-
ceived as both learned and pious that the authors of the Gospels
imagined them as an identifiable section in the Galilean crowds envis-
aged as communing with Jesus.^10
Somewhat at odds with the value ascribed to the Hebrew texts and
its physical copies was the translation of the sacred texts into other
languages, but it is evident that this was being done by Jews even before
the mid- second century bce, when the final parts of what is now the
Hebrew Bible – the last prophecies in the book of Daniel, which seem to
have been composed in 167 bce – were written. The Pentateuch was
translated into Greek, probably in Alexandria, already in the third