Learning to be a Biblical Scribe: Examples from the Letter Writing Genre

The paper illustrates how scribal education shaped and influenced biblicalliterature. It discusses how educational curriculum can be reconstructed fromHebrew inscriptions and comparative examples in cuneiform literature. TheHebrew educational curriculum was adapted from cuneiform models in the 12thcentury BCE. These models were known in Canaan, and then used by earlyalphabetic scribes. The best repository of ancient Hebrew scribal practice comesfrom the desert fortress of Kuntillet ʿAjrud where all the categories of elementaryscribal education are known. Perhaps the most important of these was letterwriting, which was a basic part of a scribe’s everyday duties. Not surprisingly, letterwriting was also one of the foundations of scribal education, and it was adaptedand used for writing biblical literature in ways both mundane and profound. Thisincluded both the structuring of biblical narrative and the genre of writingprophets.