scrolls near Qumran. The Masada scrolls ostensibly had some genetic connection to the
texts affiliated with the ritual centre in Jerusalem. The scrolls found at Qumran, on the
other hand, stemmed from a diverse social context that had no singular affinity with the
scrolls in the Jerusalem temple. While the collection at Qumran does exhibit some manu-
scripts that closely resembled the temple exemplars, others clearly vary from the ‘stan-
dard’ text kept at the temple. The key difference between the collections at Masada and
Qumran seems to be that the scrolls at Qumran do not necessarily reflect one particular
textual tradition, while those at Masada do reflect a single textual tradition.
We can therefore support the notion that ritually significant texts became fixed in the late
Second Temple period. This occurred through a combination of education-enculturation
processes, centred in the Jerusalem temple in the post-exilic period, which led to a singu-
lar, officially sanctioned set of documents being associated with the temple. The ritualisa-
tion of this text inevitably prevailed in an environment where text and ritual practice was
brought into closer and closer proximity, until finally the distinction between ritual text
and ritual object was lost. What emerged from this process was a fixed, sacred text.^1356
It is in this same context that we can best explain the unique stability that appears to per-
tain to the ritual and legal cuneiform texts examined from the first millennium B.C.E. In
(^1356) Implicit in this discussion is the assumption that other texts of the Hebrew Bible would come to be con-
sidered as ritual objects aswell, and thus be included in a growing body of sacred literature. It is in this light
that rabbinic discussions of texts that “defile the hands,” such as Esther, the Song of Songs and Qohelet,
can be seen (for example m. Yad. 3:5). That is, these discussions relate to the ritual functions of such texts,
or their status as ritual objects, due to their containing ritually significant material (as is the case, for exam-
ple, with the storing of texts that contained the Tetragrammaton in genizot in later periods). I owe this ob-
servation to I. Young.