Text Density, Scroll Carrying Capacity and Pre-Biblical Sources: How a Hellenistic Period Shift in Text Density is Relevant to Hypotheses about the Formation of the (Hebrew) Bible

For centuries biblical scholars have relied on data from the Hebrew Bible itself to construct hypotheses about its pre-biblical written sources.Only rarely, however, have they informed such hypotheses with specific information about the material medium, namely bookrolls/scrolls, on which these sources were originally inscribed.1This article focuses on the question of the carrying capacity of ancient literary scrolls and a likely shift in such carrying capacity that likely transpired