so forth. Some of these texts were actually composed within the Second
Temple period, but many went back far earlier, to the time before the Bab-
ylonian Exile in the sixth centuryb.c.e.For example, most modern schol-
ars agree that large parts of our biblical books of Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, and
Micah go back to the eighth centuryb.c.e.; to a still earlier period belong a
number of other texts — for example, some of the songs and psalms found
in the Bible, along with a portion of the historical and legendary material
later included in different books.
If these texts had thus been preserved for hundreds of years before the
start of the Second Temple period, they must have played some active role
in the lives of those who preserved them. After all, the parchment or papy-
rus on which texts were generally written begins to disintegrate after a cen-
tury or so; recopying books was a tedious, and expensive, process. If these
writings were nonetheless saved and recopied, it seems likely that, far back
into the biblical period, people were using them for some purpose. An-
cient laws were no doubt written down to preserve their exact wording, so
that they might be explicated and applied to real-life cases; if psalms and
hymns were similarly recorded, it was probably because they were an ac-
tual part of the liturgy in use at one or another ancient sanctuary; tales of
past heroes and their doings were written down to be read in court or at
festive occasions; and so forth.
Nevertheless, it is only some time after the return from the Babylonian
Exile at the end of the sixth centuryb.c.e.that we begin to find frequent
reference to the Scripture (principally the Pentateuch) and its interpreta-
tion. This is truly the time when these ancient texts begin to move to center
stage in Judaism. Several factors combined to make Scripture so important.
One of these is a rather universal phenomenon. Scripture may have
come to play a particularly important role in Judaism, but in many reli-
gions and civilizations (some of them quite unrelated to Judaism), writ-
ings from the ancient past also play a special role — the Vedas in Hindu-
ism, the Zoroastrian Avesta, the writings of Confucius, and so forth. What
is behind this phenomenon? With regard to premodern societies, our own
view of knowledge as a dynamic, ever-expanding thing is rather inappro-
priate. In such societies people generally conceived of knowledge as an al-
together static, unchanging thing, and they therefore tended to attach
great significance to the wisdom found in writings from the ancient past.
Indeed, as the chronological distance between such writings and them-
selves increased, so too did the esteem in which these ancient pronounce-
ments were held. After all, what the ancients knew, or what had been re-153Early Jewish Biblical InterpretationEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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