Transitioning from oral tradition

to the written word

A very old Jewish tradition claims that the famous Hebrew scribe Ezra drew

up the list of the books now known as the Hebrew Bible for Jews. It’s a tradi-

tion that’s really based on only a few verses from the book of Nehemiah, and

when you actually look at those verses, you can see that it doesn’t quite say

that. The problem is that the Hebrew Bible rarely talks about sacred writings.

This tradition arose among the early Rabbis, the first Jewish religious leaders

of the kind of Judaism that survives to this day. In fact, the Bible itself doesn’t

really talk about any writings. Most communications — even from God —

were oral and therefore passed on by speaking.

In the ancient world, very few people could read except for trained scribes.

Even kings usually couldn’t read and hired scribes to write for them, so refer-

ences to kings “writing letters,” for example, probably meant that they dic-

tated the letters. If you read the famous stories about how God

communicated to the people in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt, you

quickly see that the tradition is that Moses and the people heard God — God

didn’t send a letter:

Then the Lord said to Moses, “I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, in

order that the people may hear when I speak with you and so trust you ever

after.” When Moses had told the words of the people to the Lord . . .

—Exodus 19:9