Sotah 026

From early times a distinction was made between liturgical scrolls, which were used in the public reading of the Bible in places of worship, and non-liturgical or private texts. In the Second Temple period there may have been some differences in content between the two types of texts, since the former were often transmitted more precisely, with fewer mistakes and corrections. At that time there may also have been differences in external shape, but proof for this assumption is lacking. The earliest evidence for the extensive use of a new type of external shape, the codex, derives from Christian sources from the second century CE onwards, although the use of the codex form probably reflects an earlier Jewish custom and much earlier evidence (for wooden tablets) may date from the eighth and seventh century BCE. The Christian custom, in its turn, influenced the writing of the other literatures, so that the classical texts as well as later the Hebrew Bible were also written on codices. As for the Hebrew Bible, the custorn of writing in codices is well evidenced for the post-Talmudic period, though apparently not before 700 CE. The codex was restricted to the non-liturgical use of the Bible, while liturgical scrolls continued to be used for religious purposes in the Middle Ages. At that time, these liturgical texts continued to be written without vowels and accents in the form of scrolls, in accordance with the rules of writing laid down in antiquity by the rabbis. Most of those rules are also reflected in texts that are not used in the liturgy, certainly in the carefully written codices, but the latter texts were vocalized and accented and contained the complete Masoretic apparatus. From the point of view of their content no qualitative differences between these scrolls and codices are recognizable.

While the Jews had for many centuries attained high levels of literacy and had recorded various aspects of their religious teachings on papyrus and on leather scrolls, the rabbinic tradition had been a predominantly oral one and there is a singular lack of manuscript evidence of any sort from the second to the ninth century. Even if the occasional tradition had been committed to an inscription, a scroll or a piece of papyrus, wood or leather, the inefficient and awkward nature of such media made them singularly unsuitable for the transmission of such traditions in any wholesale manner, whether the attitude to orality here being presupposed is fully justified or not. The versatile nature of the bound codex had already been recognised by the Christian community a few centuries earlier and had been a factor in its prolific literary activity but it would appear not to have been adopted by the Jews for their major corpora of talmudic and related traditions until some time between the seventh and ninth centuries. During that time, what had previously been restricted to oral circulation was committed to codices and this produced precisely the effect that some rabbis feared and that others no doubt welcomed. The authority of the written word now spread from the biblical field to its rabbinic counterparts and the bound volume became the medium for the dissemination of authoritative texts. As a result, what had previously been the exclusive terrain of the scholar became familiar ground to the literate Jew and, by the same token, the attempts of the leading schools and champions of rabbinic judaism to establish authoritative guidance for the populace could achieve success by the circulation of volumes newly composed and sanctioned by them.