particular, the centre of scribal activity at Nineveh produced a ritual text that shows com-
parable levels of standardisation to the ritualised texts associated with the centre at Jeru-
salem. While this observation is accurate for manuscripts that were affiliated with scribal
centres, whether in Nineveh or in Jerusalem, it is not necessarily true for those manu-
scripts that did not share such an affiliation with a centre of scribal activity, such as those
exemplified by the cuneiform literature from diverse areas and the disparate biblical
scrolls in the collection at Qumran. Further, the failure of this process of stabilisation to
apply to texts of other genres is exemplified by the variation in the manuscripts examined
from Nineveh that represent the genres of epic, astronomical observations and omens. As
has been discussed above, the evidence from the law text examined here is suggestive but
ultimately inconclusive.
In this sense it seems justifiable to talk of ritual texts, and more specifically ritualised
texts, as being objects that pertain in an almost exact form to the localised centres of rit-
ual at which they were copied. The evidence from the first millennium cuneiform sources
would appear to support the view that, with regard to the biblical text in the late Second
Temple period, we can to some extent talk in terms of ‘one temple, one text.’ Certainly
this is a terminology that can in part be supported by the ancient Near Eastern cuneiform
evidence at Nineveh, where a ritual text is the only text-type found to conform to a level
of standardisation that is comparable to the Torah scrolls of the late Second Temple pe-
riod.