Examining ancient Egyptian papyri, as well as scrolls from animal skins in Levantine sites such as Deir Alla and Qumran, highlights how scribes would add text to preexisting scrolls and showcases the limited size of scrolls intended for regular use.
Papyrus Chester Beatty I ca. 1160 B.C.E. (verso, cropped). The Hieratic scroll includes the contendings of Horus and Seth on the recto, and on the verso, an encomium to Rameses V, a hymn to Amun, a record of the sale of a bull and other business matters.
Published: May 20, 2022
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
An excellent survey of scribal tools and media is now available in Philip Zhakevich, Scribal Tools in Ancient Israel: A Study of Biblical Hebrew Terms for Writing Materials and Implements (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020).
For broader survey of work on this question, see my article, “From Source, Tradition and Redaction to a Scroll Approach,” ZAW 132 (2020): 594–621, including listings in notes 1 and 3 (594–595) of some scholars who already have made important contributions from archaeological work on ancient scrolls to study of the formation of the Bible.
For more implications, again see my “Rethinking the Materiality of Biblical Texts”, 604–619.
This term is modelled on Sara J. Milstein’s term “revision by introduction,” coined and used effectively in her Tracking the Master Scribe: Revision Through Introduction in Biblical and Mesopotamian Literature (New York: Oxford, 2016).
Chloé Ragazzoli, Scribes: Les artisans du texte de l’Égypte ancienne (1550–1000) (Paris: Les belles lettres, 2019), 98.
If a scribe wished to add new material to a text’s beginning or middle, the entire text needed to be rewritten to ensure a seamless, attractive text. To be sure, we have documented examples of the addition of words or phrases in the margins or between the lines of existing scrolls. Yet these types of changes are of limited scope and character. In addition, gluing a new piece of parchment or papyrus to the beginning was not generally done, perhaps for aesthetic reasons. For a survey of examples of such secondary connection and gluing, see Idan Dershowitz, The Dismembered Bible: Cutting and Pasting Scripture in Antiquity, FAT 134 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021). As becomes evident across his discussion, even his overview only finds a small number of ancient examples, even as these isolated instances are gathered from highly diverse areas (ancient Egypt, later Hellenistic Egypt, Qumran). The closest analogies to the sorts of mechanics of redaction presupposed in contemporary source hypotheses are actually neither “scripture” nor ancient, but “modern analogues” in Dershowitz’s discussion.
The term “processed animal skins” used here for scrolls produced from animal skins rather than “parchment,” since the process used to make parchment, a particular kind of writing material made from processed animal skins, was not developed until the third century C.E. For more on this and methods for preparation of scrolls from animal skins, see Ira Rabin, “Material Analysis of the Fragments,” in Gleanings from the Caves: Dead Sea Scrolls and Artefacts from the Schøyen Collection, ed. Torleif Elgvin, Kipp Davis, and Michael Langlois, LSTS 71 (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 61–71; and Ira Rabin, “Building a Bridge from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Mediaeval Hebrew Manuscripts,” in Jewish Manuscript Cultures: New Perspectives, ed. Irina Wandrey, Studies in Manuscript Cultures 13 (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2017), 309–322 (at 310–313).
In this way, the chapter reinforces the diverse decrees, commandments, and teaching seen across Leviticus 1–25. We see something similar towards the end of Deuteronomy (ch. 28).
For a recent overview, see Julia Rhyder, Centralizing the Cult: The Holiness Legislation in Leviticus 17–26, FAT 134 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 42–43 (especially note 68).
Editor’s note: For more on this phenomenon, see Zev Farber, “The Resumptive Repetition (Wiederaufnahme),” TheTorah (2013).
Karel van der Toorn, Becoming Diaspora Jews: Behind the Story of Elephantine, ABRL (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 65 (also p. 76).
Psalm in 1 QS IX:26b–XI:22 versus 4QOtot in QSdVIII:10ff.
Jacques Monfrin, “Preface,” in Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, ed. Henri-Jacques Martin and Jean Vezin (Paris: Editions du Cercle de la librairie-Promodis, 1990), 9–14.
We see similar size limits of page size imposed on contemporary book media of diverse types that are not scrolls, such as dedicated digital books readers (like the Kindle) that technologically could easily be larger. For a survey of the rapid growth in average height of men over the last century, especially among wealthy males in North America and Europe, see Frederick Wu, et al. “A Century of Trends in Adult Human Height,” Elife 5 (2016). Doi: 10.7554/eLife.13410.
This (preliminary, unpublished) survey covered 120 preserved Bronze Age Egyptian scrolls bearing literary texts that are listed in the standard overviews of Bronze Age Egyptian literature by Egyptologists, starting with Georges Posener, “Les richesses inconnues de la littérature Egyptienne (recherches littéraires I), Revue d’ égyptologie 6 (1950): 27–48, and including numerous subsequent discussions of the category of “literature” in Egypt and considerations of what should be included in it. See especially Richard B. Parkinson, “Teachings, Discourses and Tales from the Middle Kingdom,” in Middle Kingdom Studies, ed. Stephen Quirke (Surrey: SIA Publishing, 1991), 91–122 and the essays collected (and earlier works cited) in Verena M. Lepper and Roland Enmarch (eds.), Ancient Egyptian Literature: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). My initial conclusion is that none exceeded 8–10 meters in length, and all but eight were 4 meters or less in length.
For application of the concept of a De Luxe scroll with large margins, fine script, few or no corrections, and/or unusually large size (originally created in the study of Greek classics) to Qumran texts, see the important book by Emanuel Tov, Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert, STDJ 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 124-129. This book, along with Tov’s specific essays on the topic, forms a crucial resource for a contemporary scroll approach to the Bible.
Initial reflections along these lines were offered already in Menahem Haran, “גודלם של ספרים במקרא והיקפם של ספרי תורה ונביאים: היבטים פליאוגראפיים וקומפוזיציוניים בסידור האסופה המקראית” [The Size of Books in the Bible and the Division of the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic Work], Tarbiz 53 (1984): 329–352. Editor’s note: See also discussion in Elaine Goodfriend, “Why Is the Torah Divided into Five Books?” TheTorah (2018).
Haran, “The Size of Books”, esp. 329-330.
On this shift, see Drew Longacre, “Comparative Hellenistic and Roman Manuscript Studies (CHRoMS): Script Interactions and Hebrew/Aramaic Writing Culture,” Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies 7 (2021): 7–49 (at 22). Asaf Gayer and this present author are engaged in a project to further explore this shift, with a preliminary report to be given as a paper, “Use of Digital Imaging Software to Determine Shifts in Script Density Distribution in Egyptian and Levantine Scrolls” at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.
Indeed, Julio Trebolle, Emanuel Tov, Mika Pajunen, and Nathan Mastnjak have noted text-critical evidence from the Septuagint and from Qumran manuscripts suggesting that large subsections of some biblical books (Samuel-Kings, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Psalms) may have been written on separate manuscripts well into the Second Temple period. Julio Trebolle,”Samuel/Kings and Chronicles: Book Divisions and Textual Composition,” in Studies in the Hebrew Bible, Qumran, and the Septuagint (FS Eugene Ulrich), ed. Peter W. Flint, Emanuel Tov, James VanderKam (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 96-108; Emanuel Tov, “The Coincidental Textual Nature Of the Collections Of Ancient Scriptures” in André Lemaire (ed.), Congress Volume: Ljubljana 2007 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 153–169; Mika S. Pajunen, “Perspectives on a Single Authoritative Book of Psalms in the Late Second Temple Period,” JSOT 39 (2014):139-63; Nathan Mastnjak, “Jeremiah as Collection: Scrolls, Sheets, and the Problem of Textual Arrangement,” Catholic Bible Quarterly 80 (2018): 25–44; idem. “The Book of Isaiah and the Anthological Genre,” Hebrew Studies 61 (2020):49–72.
On this, see above, note 1.
This article synthesizes and preliminarily reports on an ongoing research project on use of material history, particularly on scrolls, to study the formation of the Bible. This work was preliminarily published in Carr, “Rethinking the Materiality of Biblical Texts.” The term “material history” was used earlier for such study in David Stern’s book, The Jewish Bible: A Material History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017).
