Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel's Prophetic Library

Before the Scrolls traces the media history of the biblical prophetic corpus to propose a material approach to biblical literature.Although scholars understand that the material of composition was the scroll rather than the codex, they persist in imagining the form as a single textual object.This assumption pervades centuries of scholarship and drives many of the questions asked about biblical composition.Nathan Mastnjak raises the question of the original physical format of biblical texts and argues that many of the literary works that would eventually become the Bible's prophetic books were not written initially as books.Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel were originally composed on loosely organized collections of multiple short papyrus scrolls and sheets.Though rarely considered in scholarship, the realia of a text's form, format, production, and material substance have a profound influence on the meaning of the text.Unlike works committed to single book-scrolls, these collections did n