Scrolls, divisions and chapters
Date
100CE
after the rise of Christianityapproximate date
Picturing the Bible as a book is anachronistic: Israelites wrote on scrolls and other materials, and most ancient Jews never had access to a Torah scroll.
Sourced narrative
Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.
3 statements
01From scroll to codex
Picturing the Bible as a book is anachronistic. The book as an object, sheets of parchment or paper bound between covers, appeared only later, coming into use after the rise of Christianity; before that, Israelites wrote on animal-hide scrolls, tablets of clay, wood or wax, potsherds and stones. Jews transmitted biblical texts as separate scrolls, and they were published as a single volume only long afterward.
Most Jews in antiquity had no means of owning or handling a Torah scroll: in the first century CE there was probably one copy per village, if that, few could read, and reading was often a public event performed before an audience. Few authors signed their work, and many added material anonymously, under the name of the early prophet or sage whose words they were expanding.
Much of today's Bible comes from changes made long after antiquity. The ancient Hebrew texts did not carry the titles Genesis, Exodus and so on, which come from the Greek and Latin translations read by Christians; Jewish tradition names each book by its first word (Bereshit, 'In the beginning'). The chapter divisions are likewise medieval.
§ 04Network
Connections
§ 05Bibliography
Further reading
Benjamin Sommer, Jewish Concepts of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
How Jews have understood the Bible across different historical moments · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 61
§ 06Apparatus
Sources on this page
- 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 40inspect
- 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 40; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 40inspect
- 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 40inspect
- Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
- Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
- Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
- Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
- Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.