works and wrote for one another. As part of their training, scribes regularly copied and modified earlier texts. Thus, many of the biblical texts began as scribal exercises, not as the normatively authoritative law codes they claimed to be. Exodus 20–23, for example, which contains what scholars call the Covenant Code, was originally written as a scribal exercise. Later scribes drew and improvised on that text as part of their own training—and this became the core of the Book of Deuteronomy. Few outside of the scribal elite would have even known these texts existed! The third kind of authority, oracular authority, is the idea that the text contains a message from the Divine realm, usually about the future. Throughout antiquity, this was the primary sense in which the Bible was perceived to be “holy.” When, for example, Hosea prophesied the destruction of Israel’s Northern Kingdom in the eighth century B.C.E., he turned out to be right, and his book was therefore preserved. Most prophesies that turned out to be wrong were rejected, although a few sneaked by.
How do we know that the Jewish people did not initially perceive the Hebrew Bible as holy in the normative sense?
Simply, most Israelites and their immediate descendants (they begin to call themselves Jews after the fifth century B.C.E.) could not read. The literacy rate was exceedingly low throughout antiquity. This does not necessarily mean that the people did not know of these scribal texts or did not hear them recited by others, but even if they knew the biblical stories, it would not have been because the stories were in the Bible; the people would have learned them solely orally. They would not have heard these texts recited at the Temple, which performed its sacrifices in silence; synagogues did not exist in the land of Israel before the first century C.E. And it is improbable that people in antiquity, who gave authority to established custom—doing what their family and village had always done—would have undone their traditions based upon an oral tradition that also appeared in a text they couldn’t even read. More specifically, little evidence exists from all of antiquity
that Jews consulted texts for their normative behavior. In fact, the Bible is replete with countless examples of precisely the opposite—people ignoring biblical rules. Furthermore, we possess a significant number of legal papyri written by Jews in Egypt in the second century B.C.E. to first century C.E., and not one demonstrates awareness of a distinctive Jewish law, even though by that time other writings show they had begun to acquire some knowledge of biblical texts. Even by the first century C.E., when synagogues arrived in the land of Israel, knowledge of scripture was spotty and its authority did not yet displace custom. Jesus, for example, had very limited knowledge of scripture. Did the Jewish leadership ever attempt to give normative authority to some biblical texts?
Yes, but their efforts largely failed. Two examples: In the seventh century B.C.E., Josiah, the king of Judah, instituted a policy of religious reforms that he based on his discovery of an older text that had been found during renovations of the Jerusalem
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