ian scholars in similar correspondence.^1334 The tendency of priests to restrict their lan-
guage to a particular form may reflect limitations imposed by an education-enculturation
programme that focused narrowly on literature of a singular purpose, namely texts that
were utilised only by those who specialised in matters associated with the temple. Thus it
may be inferred that the narrow specialisation of scribes trained for proficiency in ritual
matters may have meant that they had a decreased likelihood of adjusting the form of
long-duration ritual texts during transmission simply because they had a more narrowly
defined stock of memorised texts from which to draw. Scribes who specialised in other
textual genres may have had a greater cache of textual frames and motifs upon which to
draw when reproducing memorised texts in their given field.
The second study is that of J. Watts, and concerns the propensity for ritual texts to begin
to function as ritual objects after extended periods of textual authoritativeness.^1335 Watts
determined that the process of textual centralisation under a curriculum engendered to-
wards education-enculturation, as envisioned by Carr, could explain the process through
which texts were collated into officially sanctioned collections, but could not satisfacto-
rily explain why some texts, in particular the Hebrew Torah, appear to have adhered to a
precise written form.
(^1334) See M. Worthington, “Dialect Admixture,” 80. Worthington suggests that the disparity may be partially
due to differences in the subject-matter of the letters. It is also “possible that scholars’ learning earned them
a greater active knowledge of Babylonian than the priests, and the scholars may have been more inclined
than the priests to use elevated language because intellectual prestige in the eyes of the king meant possible
career advancement for them.” 1335
The initial study by J. Watts, "Ritual Legitimacy and Scriptural Authority," JBL 124, 3 (2005) 401-17,
was reprinted with some expansions in J. Watts, "The Rhetoric of Scripture," Ritual and Rhetoric in Leviti-
cus: From Sacrifice to Scripture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 193-217.