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The foundation of all study of the Bible, with which the reader must acquaint himself if his study is to be securely based, is the knowledge of its history as a book. The English reader of the Bible knows that he is reading a translation of books written in other languages many centuries ago. If he wishes to assure himself of the claim which these books have on his consideration, he must know when and in what circumstances they were written, and how they have been handed down through the ages. He needs to be satisfied that he has the text of them substantially in a correct form. He is concerned, therefore, first with their production and transmission in their original languages, Hebrew and Greek, and next with their translation into the languages in which they have been made known to the inhabitants of these islands, which are Latin and English. It is this story which the present volume aims at telling.
There are two main divisions of the story. There are first the questions how and when the books under consideration came into existence, and how and when they were marked off as possessing special authority. This is what is known as the history of the Canon [canon, a Greek word meaning primarily a rule, and thence, among other things, a list of books designated by order as authoritative) . There is therefore a Canon of the Old Testament and a Canon of the New Testament, both of which will have to be briefly described. Next there is the question how these books, thus recognized as authoritative, have been handed down to us. This is known as the history of the Text; and again it is a different story for the Old and the New Testaments'respectively. Indeed, there is a marked contrast in respect of both Canon and Text between the two Testaments. In the case of the Old Testament the history of the formation of the Canon is obscure, while the history of the Text is comparatively simple; but in the case of the New Testament the history of the formation of the Canon is in most respects clear, while the history of the Text is involved and often obscure.
There is, however, a preliminary inquiry which lies behind both the composition of the books and their transmission. This is the history of writing, without which these books could not have come down to us. The fundamental fact in the history of all ancient literature is the fact that before the invention of printing-that is, until about the year 1450-every copy of every book had to be separately written by hand. The whole history of ancient literature, including that of the Bible, is therefore conditioned first by the invention of writing, and next by the materials and forms of books in the various countries in which they were produced and circulated.
It would not be too much to say that our knowledge of ancient methods of writing, the materials used, the literary transmission of texts and their contents, as well as the languages in which the texts were written, has been revolutionized by the archaeological discoveries of the last seventy years and the devoted work of scholars. For example, it was thought at one time that writing was not known in Palestine before the time of the kings. But whatever may be the relation of the earliest portions of the Old Testament to contemporary records (which is not the subject of this book) the following pages clearly show that the art of writing was well known in Palestine and the adjacent countries long before the entry of the Hebrews into the Promised Land.
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In Mesopotamia the excavations of American scholars at Nippur in 1888-1900 brought to light thousands of clay tablets, including many bearing literary and religious texts (among them the Sumerian narrative of the Flood) which extend back to the end of the third millennium b.c. Another collection of tablets was discovered by Sir Leonard Woolley in his excavations at Ur (the city from which, in Hebrew tradition, Abraham set out) of which he has given a popular account in his Ur of the Chaldees. But many other finds at different sites have made it possible to trace the history of writing as it developed in Mesopotamia, from the very earliest attempts with signs for denoting ownership, to the elaborate literary, religious and legal texts which have thrown so much light on this cradle of civilization.
Not the least important influence on the development of writing in this area was the principal medium employed-not paper or parchment and pen, but the clay tablet and stylus, which continued in use as late as the first century b.c. Adjacent countries, where the fine clay necessary was not abundant as in Babylonia, used the tablet if at all for much shorter periods. The usual shape of the tablet was oblong, and after being inscribed it was sun-dried or, if greater permanence was desired, fire-baked and sometimes even enclosed in a clay 'envelope'. The stylus, cut from a reed, made a wedge-shaped impression which could be elongated and combined in a great variety of ways, as can be seen in Plate I.
As no doubt always was the case, the earliest written signs were pictograms-i.e. simplified representations of common objects, and examples of this kind, such as that found at Kish by the Oxford-Chicago expedition under Langdon (? c. 3500 b.c.) and the large collection from the lowest strata at Uruk (c. 3300 b.c.) can be given only a very approximate interpretation. But in the tablets from the royal cemetery at Ur (c. 2900 b.c.) and from Shuruppak (c. 2850 b.c.) the signs are already passing out of the pictographic stage and becoming conventionalized. Eventually the signs lost any real resemblance they once had to real objects and became pure ideograms, often having to do duty for a number of related objects and ideas. Clearly this could lead to a good deal of ambiguity, quite apart from the enormous number of signs which would be required to convey anything but the simplest information, and a very important development was the phonetic use of many signs as syllables, for this purpose dissociated from the original meaning. Thus the sign TI, an arrow, is used to represent the sound ti in any word of which it is a component. The first step in this direction can be seen at Jamdat Nasr about 2900 b.c., but its extensive application was due not to the Sumerians (the early non-Semitic inhabitants of Lower Mesopotamia) but to their successors the Babylonians, and is already fully developed in the texts from the latest strata at Uruk (c. 2900 b.c.). At the same time the original Sumerian ideograms for many common objects were taken over by the Babylonians, and are also found, for example, in the Hittite tablets written in cuneiform. Thus the cuneiform script combines (a) an ideogrammatic basis of more than 500 signs for the more common words which, though written alike, would be read differently according to the language used in the text; and (b) a syllabic extension whereby some 300 of these signs represented the various combinations of consonants and vowels, and which could be used to spell out words in Babylonian, Hittite, etc. The next step, namely a further simplification whereby the consonants and vowels are represented singly as in the alphabet, was not
taken in Mesopotamia, but, as we shall see, was the contribution mainly of Canaan. Nevertheless this elaborate and cumbrous system served to convey an extensive literature, of which the best-known examples are the Creation Myth, the Epic of Gilgamesh with its story of the Flood, and the famous Law-Code of Hammurabi, all of which have influenced the Hebrew traditions as we see them in the Old Testament. Moreover, the fact that the medium to which the cuneiform script was adapted, namely the clay tablet, is relatively impervious to the Mesopotamian climate, is the reason that so much has survived.
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The evidence from the other side of Palestine is equally impressive. From Egypt we have actual manuscripts, written on papyrus, datable to about 2200-2000 b.c., and containing texts which claim to have been written at a much earlier period. Probably the earliest of these are two ethical treatises, the Teaching of Kagemna and the Teaching of Ptah-Hetep, works of gnomic philosophy akin in character to the Proverbs of Solomon, which are attributed to about 3100 b.c. and 2880 b.c. respectively. There are also several copies of the great ritual work, the Book of the Dead, dating from the XVIIIth Dynasty (about 1580-1320 b.c.); while portions of the Book of the Dead existed many centuries earlier.
The art of writing in Egypt, however, as in Mesopotamia, goes back into the fourth millennium b.c., and indeed it is possible that it was from the Sumerians that the Egyptians derived it in the first place. But instead of the clay tablet the principal writing medium was the papyrus sheet or roll (see below, p. 38). In general the development of writing follows the same pattern as in Mesopotamia. The well-known hieroglyphic script is, quite obviously, pictographic, and retained this form much longer than in Babylonia. But, as there, the development of a cursive script led to the conventionalization of the forms, which in time bore as little relation to the original object as the cuneiform sign. As in Mesopotamia also, the difficulty of representing more complicated or abstract concepts led to the use of the signs as homonyms (i.e. doing duty for other words with the same sound but a different meaning), or as syllables and even single consonants. But although a kind of alphabet was devised, it was largely restricted to foreign words, and its main use was to help the reader in deciphering and pronouncing the hieroglyphs and to indicate grammatical inflections.
In 1906 Hugo Winckler, excavating at Boghazkoy in north-east Turkey, discovered a hoard of some 10,000 tablets. These proved to be the royal archives of the long-forgotten Hittite Empire which, at its height in the fourteenth century b.c., reached from Anatolia into Syria and from the Euphrates to the Lebanon. In 1286 b.c. the reviving power of Egypt met the Hittite armies at Kadesh on the Orontes, and the Egyptian account of this battle, and the treaty which was made in 1269, have long been known from the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the temple wall at Karnak. The Hittite version of the treaty, written in Babylonian cuneiform, was discovered amongst the tablets from Boghazkoy, from which it is clear that the Egyptian challenge was repulsed. The end of the Hittite Empire was a consequence of the great movement of peoples in the late thirteenth century which brought the Philistines to the west coast of Palestine, but a number of Hittite principalities survived in Syria, until they in turn succumbed to the Assyrian armies about the middle of the ninth century b.c. A number of hieroglyphic inscriptions from this period have long engaged the attention of scholars, and it is these Syrian Hittites who are mentioned in the Old Testament (e.g. Num. xiii. 29-30, 2 Kings vii. 6).
The Boghazkoy tablets show that two languages were used for official documents: Babylonian, which was the international language of diplomacy in the Near East; and Hittite, also written in the cuneiform syllabic script (see Plate II (i)). But the Hittite texts contain many Sumerian and Babylonian ideograms, well known from the Mesopotamian tablets, and used by the Hittite scribes as a sort of shorthand. These ideograms helped greatly in the decipherment of the texts and so to our knowledge of the language, which is undoubtedly a branch of the Indo-European family; but in some cases they have also effectively concealed the Hittite word which they represented. Besides official letters, treaties, etc., the tablets include laws, title-deeds, religious and mythological texts (including fragments of the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic in both Hittite and Hurrian versions), magical spells, and so forth, which tell us much of the life and social and religious customs of this energetic people. The Hittite hieroglyphic inscriptions, found mainly on rock carvings and monuments from Syria after the downfall of the Empire, are pictographic in origin like the hieroglyphs of Egypt (see Plate II (ii)). The discovery of a bilingual Hittite hieroglyphic-Phoenician text of some eighty lines
should provide the key to a full understanding of the signs. They are mostly dedicatory and building inscriptions.
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In the year 1887 an Egyptian woman found, amid the ruins of an ancient city about half-way between Thebes and Memphis, a collection of some 350 clay tablets. The ruins, now well known as Tell el-Amarna, were the capital of Amenhotep IV, or Akhenaten, the husband of Nefertete whose portrait-bust in the Berlin Museum is deservedly famous. This Pharaoh attempted to revolutionize the religion of his country by substituting the worship of the sun-god Aten for that of Amen; but the change was shortlived and was reversed by his successor Tutankhamen, the discovery of whose tomb by Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter caused such a popular sensation at the end of 1922. The tablets of Tell el-Amarna raised an equal sensation amongst Oriental scholars, for here, in the middle of Egypt, were documents not written after the manner of the country-i.e. in the Egyptian language and upon papyrus-but on clay and in the cuneiform script of Mesopotamia (see Plate I). Their decipherment, moreover, showed them to be foreign-office archives containing the diplomatic correspondence of Akhenaten and his father extending from about 1370 to 1348 b.c. Besides a letter from the Hittite king Suppiluliuma congratulating Akhenaten on his accession and copies of diplomatic missives to neighbouring rulers, many of the letters are from the petty princelings and vassals of Palestine, written in Babylonian, but with frequent Canaanite glosses inserted by the scribes as aids to interpretation. It is clear that the security of this area, normally under Egyptian suzerainty, was gravely imperilled. Besides references to the movements of Hittite forces there are constant appeals, couched in the most abject terms, for help against the incursions of people called Habiru; and these are probably to be identified with other raiders, concealed by the ideogram SA.GAZ, who were invading from the north. Whether these Habiru were the Israelite tribes under Joshua, or, as others maintain, earlier movements of related tribes making their way into Palestine from the south, is still a matter of debate among scholars, though the tendency is towards the latter view. But there can be no doubt that they were one part of the mixed stock which constituted the Hebrew nation which we know from the Old Testament.
When in 1893 Sir Arthur Evans began his excavations at Knossos in Crete it was in the hope of finding inscriptions which would help in the elucidation of the engraved 'milk stones' which had been discovered at Mycenae and elsewhere in Greece. In the event he uncovered a whole civilization which, in wealth and splendour and duration, surpassed all expectations. At the height of its power in the sixteenth century b.c. the Cretan sea-empire extended over the islands of the eastern Mediterranean and to the mainland of Greece, and its ambassadors are depicted on the Egyptian wall-paintings not as tributaries but as equals. Then, about 1400 b.c., the power of Knossos was broken, probably by the Mycenaeans of Greece, until they too fell before the invaders from the north near the end of the thirteenth century b.c.
Evans found at Knossos not one script but three: the earliest, on engraved seal-stones, is hieroglyphic; second, a cursive form of writing known as ' Linear A'; and third, what appears to be a modification of this, 'Linear B' (see Plate III). Moreover tablets containing the Linear B script have been found at Mycenae and Pylos on the Greek mainland, and this form of writing continued there until their overthrow. But in spite of the efforts of Evans and other scholars, all attempts to decipher them, or even to decide the language in which they were written, were unsuccessful, and no bilingual text such as the Rosetta Stone, which provided the clue to the elucidation of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, has been discovered. This was the situation up to 1953 when an Englishman, Michael Ventris, not an archaeologist by training but an architect, was able to announce that the partial decipherment of the Linear B script had been achieved. It is now clear that the language is an early form of Greek, and the script is a syllabary of some seventy signs together with ideograms representing common objects, as in the Babylonian and Hittite scripts. In another respect the decipherment has been a disappointment. There are no religious, mythological or poetic texts, and apart from what can be gained from the archaeological evidence we are still in the dark about much that must have occupied this highly civilized people.
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So far, as we have seen, the art of writing was practised in the Near East from as far back as the fourth millennium b.c., and developed through pictographs and ideograms to syllabaries in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia and Crete. But although in Egypt the scribes, who were not so wedded to the syllabary as the Babylonians, went some way towards the next stage and evolved a pseudo-alphabet, this was used mainly to eke out the traditional script by clarifying the signs and in the spelling out of foreign words. Indeed it has been said that "syllabic writing is a blind alley from which there is no escape".
The tradition in classical times was that the Egyptians invented the letters of the alphabet, which were brought westwards to Europe by the Phoenicians. This, as we shall see, is only very partially true, and the evidence points to Central or South Palestine as the home of the alphabet as we know it, and that it was the outcome of a long process of development and much experimenting.
We may take as our point of departure the inscriptions, all unfortunately damaged or fragmentary, discovered by Sir Flinders Petrie in the winter of 1904-5 in the ruins of a temple at Serabit in the Sinaitic Peninsula. They are probably to be dated c. 1500 b.c. and appear to be the work of Semitic labourers employed by the Egyptians in the turquoise mines in this area. Although many of the signs bear some resemblance to Egyptian hieroglyphs, they are too few in number for a syllabary, and Sir Alan Gardner and others have been able to recognize the words "for Baalat", "beloved of Baalat", and "gift"-clearly references to votive offerings made to the local goddess, who both here and at Byblos was worshipped under the name of Baalat by the Semites and of Hathor by the Egyptians. Other inscribed objects belonging to the same period or perhaps earlier are potsherds from Gezer and Shechem and an inscribed dagger blade from Lachish, all, it should be noted, from Palestine, and all bearing letters of the same type as those from Sinai, but unfortunately too fragmentary to be deciphered. Also from Lachish and dated c. 1250 b.c. are four pieces of pottery, one of which bears a dedicatory inscription to a goddess; while from Gebal (Byblos), on the coast north of Beirut, come a number of inscriptions of various kings who reigned there from the thirteenth to the ninth centuries, including those on the burial-chamber and sarcophagus of Ahiram (c. 1000-975 b.c.), as well as a piece of pottery bearing the potter's name " Abda" and a bronze spatula with the owner's name " Azerbaal" clearly engraved upon it. All these, exiguous as they are individually and in detail, taken together show that alphabetic writing, with a recognizable continuity of script, was being practised in and around Palestine at a time when Babylonian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs were still in use.
There are, however, two more considerable inscriptions which deserve special mention. The first is the Calendar from Gezer (see Plate IV (i)), the oldest important Israelite document and the earliest completely intelligible text found in Palestinian soil. It contains a list of the chief agricultural operations of the farmer's year arranged in the order of the months, inscribed on limestone. It is assigned to the late tenth century, but may be earlier. The other is the celebrated Moabite Stone, which at the time of its discovery was the earliest-known example of the Phoenician alphabetic script. This stele of black basalt, on which Mesha king of Moab recorded his version of the war against the kings of Israel and Judah (the Hebrew version will be found in 2 Kings iii. 4-27) was written about 850 b.c., and is the only surviving record of the Moabite kingdom. The text in its present condition consists of thirty-four lines, the last seven of which are damaged, and the end is lost. It was found by a German missionary in the possession of some Arabs in 1868. It was then perfect, but before it was acquired for the Louvre the Arabs had broken it up, and large portions of it have never been recovered. Fortunately a paper squeeze had been taken of it before it was broken, and from this the text can be restored. The script is remarkably developed, and already shows a tendency towards a cursive form, while the words are divided by points and the clauses by strokes. It also shows that the Moabite language at this period was almost identical with Hebrew.
Other inscriptions which bring us into close contact with Old Testament history are seventy-five potsherds excavated from the floor of Ahab's palace, dealing with supplies of oil and wine and giving the names of the persons concerned and the year of the king: these probably belong to the reign of Jeroboam II (c. 774— 760 b.c.), and are written in Biblical Hebrew and in a well-formed cursive hand. There is also the Siloam inscription elegantly carved on the tunnel connecting the Virgin's Spring with the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem, which comes from the reign of Hezekiah (c. 700 b.c.-see 2 Kings xx. 20) and describes the successful junction made by the workmen cutting through the rock from opposite ends . . and on the day of the boring through the miners struck, each to meet his fellow, pick upon pick, and the waters flowed from the source to the pool. . . ." (See Plate IV (ii).)
Lastly come the collection of Lachish Letters, some twenty in number, which were discovered in 1935 and 1938 by the Wellcome-Marston expedition, under the direction of J. L. Starkey until his murder in the latter year by Arabs. These letters, written in ink on potsherds, consist for the most part of the correspondence between the military governor of Lachish and the officer of a Hebrew outpost at the time when the Babylonian armies were overrunning the country prior to the capture of Jerusalem in 586 b.c. Their boldly formed cursive script is, apart from the ravages of time and accident, still clearly legible, and their importance from the linguistic as well as the historical point of view is equally remarkable, since they are written in excellent Biblical Hebrew which has close affinities with the style of Jeremiah. (See Plate V (i).)
It is thus possible to trace the history of the Phoenician-also known as the Canaanite or Old Semitic-alphabet from about the middle of the second millennium b.c. in the countries between the Nile and the Euphrates. The evidence points to Egypt rather than Mesopotamia as having furnished the idea or model of an alphabet, and there are those who would give pride of place to the Sinaitic inscriptions as a sort of 'missing link' between Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Phoenician alphabet. But if, as is quite possible, the earliest of the Phoenician inscriptions are to be dated before those from Sinai, then these latter are rather one link in a complex chain of development, much of which is still unknown. Certainly the alphabet is a Semitic invention, and its exploitation and perfecting belong to the Phoenicians of the coast, who in the course of their commercial activities carried it to Greece. There it was adapted to the Greek tongue—e.g. the unnecessary consonantal signs were used for the vowels (which were not expressed in the Semitic scripts), and thence it passed to the West. Thus it is that our word 'alphabet' is composed of the names of the first letters of the Semitic script, aleph, beth, while the names of most of the letters of the Greek alphabet show clearly their Semitic origin.
But of more particular relevance for us is that the Phoenician or Old Semitic script was that in which the Old Testament was first and continued to be written, until superseded by the' square' or 'Assyrian' script in or about the second century b.c. It is still used, though in a late form, by the Samaritans in their sacred books.
The Phoenician alphabet, however, was not the only successful experiment in this manner of writing. The next section will show that Semitic inventiveness was capable also of adapting the ancient Babylonian script to alphabetic use.
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Very remarkable for their bearing both on the history of writing in Syria and on the intellectual and religious background of the Hebrews are the results of excavations at Ras Shamra, a site on the coast of north-west Syria not far from Alexandretta and opposite Cyprus. Here a chance discovery in 1929 led to excavations so fruitful that they have been carried on continuously, except for the interval of the Second World War, by M. Claude Schaeffer and his colleagues. The site was identified as that of the Phoenician city of Ugarit (known from the Amarna tablets), already an important mercantile town at the beginning of the second millennium b.c., which rapidly became a gateway of commerce between Asia and the Mediterranean lands. This is shown not only by the size and obvious prosperity of the population, as may be inferred from their well-appointed homes, temples, golden ornaments, etc., but also from the large number of objects of Minoan, Cypriot, Egyptian, Syrian and Hittite origin or influence. About the middle of the fourteenth century b.c. the town and its port were severely damaged by an earthquake, and were finally destroyed by the invasions of the northern sea-rovers at the beginning of the twelfth century. Among the ruins was found a building which had apparently been a library, containing quantities of clay tablets bearing cuneiform writing (see Plate VI). These texts have been investigated by a number of scholars (Schaeffer, Virolleaud, Dhorme and others) and have proved to be of the very greatest importance both in themselves and for their bearing on the ancient Hebrew records and religion. The results may briefly be summarized as follows.
The library at Ras Shamra seems to have been, if not founded, at least considerably developed about the middle of the second millennium b.c. by a king of Ugarit named Nigmed, whose name appears on several tablets and who was probably of Mitannian or Hurrian origin. It was housed in a building between the two great temples of Baal and Dagon, and contained also a high-priest's dwelling and a writing school for the training of scribes. The language of most of the texts is Semitic, and has been described as proto-Phoenician or proto-Hebrew. Many of the texts are non-literary, and several of them were dictionaries and lexicons, including Sumerian-Babylonian and Hurrian (Horite) vocabularies -Sumerian, though already a dead language, being still used by scholars, while Babylonian was the language of diplomacy (as in the Amarna letters) and of commerce, as can be seen from the business letters of the chief Ugarit merchants. In addition inscriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Hittite and Cypriot have been found, showing that Ugarit was a place where many languages met and were in use. Besides commercial there are medical, legal, diplomatic and private documents.
By far the greater part of the library at Ugarit consisted of religious writings, and it is these that are of the greatest interest for our present purpose. It is quite clear that the rites and beliefs of the cult at Ugarit were very similar to those of the Canaanite population of Palestine with whom the Hebrews coalesced and whose religion was assimilated to the worship of Jahweh of Israel. The supreme god at Ugarit was El, one of the Old Testament names for Jahweh, who rules over the other gods. His symbol is the bull, like the golden 'calf' which Aaron made in the desert (Exod. xxxii. 4) and the two which Jeroboam set up at Dan and Bethel for the rebellious ten tribes (1 Kings xii. 28 ff.). El's consort is Asherat the sea-goddess, whose name occurs repeatedly in the Old Testament as Ashteroth; she is Ishtar of the Babylonians and of the Moabite Stone, and Astarte-Aphrodite of the Greeks. Reference is also made to a great serpent with seven heads, who is fought and slain by Baal, and whose name Lotan is a form of the Biblical Leviathan, the monster of the deep (Job xli. 1, Psalm Ixxiv. 14, etc.). The struggles between the gods, their downfalls and uprisings, form a large part of this literature, as in Mesopotamia and Egypt, in singular contrast to the ethical monotheism which, in process of time, we see emerging and reaching full development among the Hebrews. Altogether, no more remarkable discovery, for the light which it throws on the religion of the Canaanite peoples before the entry of the Hebrew tribes, has ever been made.
No less remarkable, however, is the fact that these tablets are written in an alphabetic script of twenty-nine or thirty letters. In so far as it makes use of the clay tablet and stylus, and is written from left to right, the affinities of the script are with Mesopotamia, as those of the Phoenician script seem to be with Egypt. But there is little evidence to show that the Ugaritic alphabet is an adaptation of Babylonian signs as such. Rather the inventor-the word is used deliberately-was in all probability already aware of the Phoenician or a similar alphabetic system, and simply selected from the various possible combinations of wedge-impressions to represent the various consonantal sounds. The one innovation is that there are three signs for aleph to indicate the vowels a, i, u with it. That
the Ugaritic script may have had some vogue is suggested by the fact that two short inscriptions have been found in Palestine from Beth-Shemesh and the neighbourhood of Mount Tabor. But it was too late in the field to oust the Phoenician script, which was already established, and admirable though the clay tablet is from the archaeological point of view, for the user it was not so convenient as papyrus, with which the future lay. (See Plate VI.)
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It is no exaggeration to say that the scrolls from the Dead Sea caves are the biggest discovery yet made in what may be called the archaeology of the Hebrew Bible. The sensation which accompanied their disclosure was due not least to the fact that it had been assumed by archaeologists and Biblical scholars that a find of such importance could not be expected, least of all in Palestine, where climate and history alike have been unfavourable to documentary survival. Thus in previous editions of this book it had been said: "There is indeed no possibility that we shall ever find manuscripts of the Hebrew text going back to a period before the formation of the text which we call Massoretic"—i.e. before the second century a.d. The announcement, therefore, that Biblical and other Hebrew manuscripts had been found dating from the beginning of the Christian era or, as was claimed, as much as two centuries earlier, was bound to excite wide attention. Very soon a flood of books and articles was let loose which still shows no sign of subsiding, and in the early stages some of them were extremely speculative and based on an inadequate knowledge and assessment of the texts. This has been especially so with regard to the origins, affiliations, and doctrines of the community or sect which owned the scrolls, about which opinion is still by no means agreed. Similar exaggerated claims were made, on the basis of the first of the scrolls to be published, for the Biblical text used by the community, which was thought to confirm in almost every particular the traditional text which is printed in our Hebrew Bible. Further discoveries have considerably modified these claims, and, as we shall see, the work of some recent scholars in this field has been shown to be not far wide of the mark.
The site of these discoveries is the north-west corner of the Dead Sea, about eight miles south of Jericho and a mile from the ruins of Khirbet Qumran. The story of how in February or March 1947 an Arab shepherd boy, in search of a lost goat, stumbled on the first cave has often been told. Inside the cave he found a number of jars containing leather rolls wrapped in linen cloths, and fragments of other jars. The rolls, which he carried off, came into the hands of a Syrian Orthodox dealer in Bethlehem, and were disposed of by him and his intermediaries, some to the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch in Jerusalem, others to Prof. E. L. Sukenik of the Hebrew University.
The full story of all the transactions concerning the scrolls, bedevilled by suspicion and cupidity and further complicated by the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli War at the end of 1947, cannot be told here. It may suffice to say that the scrolls in the possession of the Syrian Archbishop were subsequently taken to America, where they were eventually sold to a private purchaser on behalf of the Israeli Government in 1955. These consisted of (1) the first Isaiah Scroll, practically complete, known as 'Isaiah A' (see Plate VII); (2) the Manual of Discipline in two parts; (3) the Habakkuk Commentary; (4) an Aramaic work, very much decomposed, at first said to be the lost Book of Lamech, but which is now known to be a pseudepigraphical work on Genesis. All have now been photographed and published. The scrolls bought by Prof. Sukenik have also been published with an introduction in Hebrew and in English. They are: (1) a second incomplete Isaiah, known as 'Isaiah B'; (2) The War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness, an eschatological work; (3) Thanksgiving Psalms, of which about twenty survive. In addition a number of fragments which also came into the possession of Prof. Sukenik and the Archbishop, presumably as a result of visits to the cave by the latter and the Bedouins, include portions of two manuscripts of Daniel, the first (iii. 23-30) from the Aramaic part of the book, the other (i. 10-17 and 2-6) showing the same transition from Hebrew to Aramaic as in the canonical text. It was not until February 1949 that the cave could be visited by European archaeologists, and by this time the depredations of the Bedouin, in their search for further profitable items, had made any strictly scientific examination impossible. However, it was possible to ascertain that the cave had contained forty to fifty jars, and pottery fragments which were subsequently dated in the Roman period were found in the debris, together with fragments of about twenty different manuscripts, some of them affording examples of the old Phoenician script, as in Plate V (ii).
Attention was next turned to the ruins of Khirbet Qumran, lying about half a mile away from the cave to the south between the sea and the cliffs, which were excavated by G. Lancaster Harding and Fr. de Vaux at the end of 1951 and again in the spring of 1953. These appeared to be a kind of monastery, built during or soon after the reign of John Hyrcanus (135-104 b.c.). The buildings had originally been of two storeys, with a tower, large meeting-rooms, a basement for storage purposes, and also extensive water-cisterns. One room, in view of the remains of tables and benches, a desk top, together with ink-pots, had probably been a scriptorium, and the discovery of ajar of identical type with those found in the cave, as well as a pottery kiln, proved the connexion of the monastery with the cave. Using the evidence of some 250 coins found on the site it is possible to reconstruct its history, which falls into three periods. The first runs from during or soon after John Hyrcanus (135-104 b.c.) to the time of Herod the Great, when the monastery was severely damaged by an earthquake-probably that referred to by Josephus as occurring in the seventh year of Herod (31 b.c.). The second period of occupation runs from the time of Archelaeus (4 b.c.-a.d. 6) when the monastery was rebuilt until the last years of the Jewish Revolt, when it was destroyed by the Roman legions in a.d. 68 or 69. It is presumed that immediately before this the scrolls were deposited in the cave for safety and the monastery abandoned. Afterwards the site was occupied by Roman troops, and later still by Jewish rebels during the Second Revolt which led to the final destruction of Jerusalem in a.d. 135.
Meanwhile in the autumn of 1951 the Bedouin had brought in further manuscript fragments which led to the discovery of four caves in the Wady Murabba'at, about ten miles south of Cave I. These produced a palimpsest written in the Phoenician script, Biblical fragments including a scroll of the Minor Prophets, phylacteries, and parts of two letters emanating from Bar Kochba, the leader of the Second Revolt, showing that the caves had been used as a Jewish outpost about a.d. 135.
In the spring of 1952 the whole Qumran area was surveyed by Fr. de Vaux and Prof. W. L. Reed, and no less than thirty-seven caves were found which showed signs of occupation. Of these twenty-five had pottery remains which linked them with Cave I and the monastery, and were most numerous near the mouth of the Wady. It seems likely that the caves were used for storage purposes by members of the community encamped in the area. No more complete scrolls came to light, but from one cave came the now famous copper scroll, and from others thousands of manuscript fragments which represent about a hundred different Biblical manuscripts. The piecing together and deciphering of these will engage scholars for a good many years.
Mention may also be made of another find in the Dead Sea area made in 1952 by the Bedouin, though the exact whereabouts are unknown. It consists of a number of miscellaneous business documents and marriage contracts, together with a fragmentary scroll of the Minor Prophets. The language of this scroll, however, is not Hebrew but Greek, and the text shows some remarkable differences from the Septuagint which will be discussed in Chapter V.
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With the origins and characteristic doctrines of the Qumran community we need not concern ourselves here. At present the opinion of a number of scholars is that the sect was related to, if not identical with, the Essenes, of whom we already knew something from Josephus (according to his own account a member of the Essene community in his younger days), as well as from the Jewish philosopher and apologist Philo. Pliny the Elder, the Roman natural historian who died viewing the eruption of Vesuvius in a.d. 79, tells us that the Essenes had a settlement on the west side of the Dead Sea "above En Geddi" (about twenty miles south of Qumran). But it should be noticed that opinion on this is by no means unanimous, and the description of the Essenes in ancieht writers does not always tally with what is to be learnt from the Qumran documents.
The Dead Sea Biblical Scrolls In the Manual of Discipline of the community it is laid down:
And from the place where the ten are (i.e. one of the groups into which the community was divided) there shall never be absent a man who searches the Law day and night by turns, one after another. And the masters (i.e. full members) shall keep watch together a third of all the nights of the year, reading the book and searching for justice and worshipping together.
From this it is clear that 'Bible study', especially of the Law (the Pentateuch) was an important part of the daily life of the community, and helps to account for the fact that scrolls or fragments of something like a hundred Biblical MSS., apart from other works, were found in the caves, and that many of the individual
books exist in more than one copy. Moreover these are only those that have survived, and represent only a part, perhaps only a small part, of the communal library of the sect. We need not be surprised, therefore, that a scriptorium to provide and renew copies of the sacred Scriptures was found at Khirbet Qumran. And this raises another point. The texts which were copied in the scriptorium must have come, in the first place, from outside the sect-brought, in some instances at any rate, by members as their personal property when they were admitted. If, as we shall see, there is reason to believe that at this time the text of the Hebrew Bible was not yet fixed or confined to one main tradition, it will not be surprising if there are found varieties of text which differ quite considerably from each other and from the Hebrew text of later times, when a large degree of standardization had been attained. The point is important, because when the discoveries of Cave I were first announced and it became known that the text of the Isaiah B Scroll was virtually identical with the later standard Hebrew text, and the Isaiah A Scroll substantially so, it was assumed that the Qumran discoveries confirmed both the antiquity and the uniformity of the standard text. But it is a well-known principle of textual criticism that it is never safe, nor indeed allowable, to argue from the text of one book to that of others. Thus even if, in the case of Isaiah, the community's text was close to that of the later standard text, it does not follow that it would be so in the rest of the Old Testament. And since, in the nature of the case, the community must at the outset have drawn on many sources for its copies of the Old Testament books, we must be prepared for considerable varieties in the texts. And this indeed is what we find, and will concern us later.
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As has been noted, the archaeological evidence suggests that the community abandoned the Qumran site, having placed its MSS. for safety in jars in the near by caves, not long before the final suppression of the Jewish Revolt in a.d. 73. If so, this provides the latest date for any of the scrolls. At the other end, scrolls may have been copied at any time in the community's existence during the previous 200 years or more, though in its early days, when presumably the numbers of the sect were small, there may have been no need for copying. In any case, as has been said above, the original copies of the Biblical text must have come from outside, and may well have been of varying quality and age of text. It is quite possible that a copy made late in the history of the community was from an old and relatively uncorrupted exemplar, but on the other hand it might be the last of a long series of copies and thus have been subjected to all the possible kinds of corruption of which human fallibility is capable.
Palaeography (i.e. the comparative study of scripts), which for late periods can be of great help in dating a manuscript, is handicapped by the fact that, apart from the Nash Papyrus (which is variously dated by scholars from the middle of the second century b.c. to the end of the first century a.d.) there is nothing from this period and area with which to compare the Dead Sea texts. Thus although it is possible, within limits, to date these scrolls in relation to each other, a wider reference is virtually ruled out. The same holds true for the fragments of Leviticus in the old Phoenician script. Apart from inscriptions on stone or pottery, and the Samaritan Pentateuch, which uses a degenerate form of this script, there are no known manuscripts, on leather or papyrus. On the other hand, the script is used on coins as late as the Second Revolt c. a.d. 135. As with the coins, therefore, the Phoenician script may have been used as a piece of deliberate archaizing, or it may represent a manuscript actually coming from the period when the script was in current use.
The bearing of the scrolls and fragments on the history of the Hebrew text will be discussed later in the appropriate place (see pp. 79 ff.). In this respect they are of the very greatest importance, and enable us, as has been said, to "penetrate the Massoretic barrier" by centuries. But apart from that these unexpected finds show us what ancient Hebrew scrolls looked like, the form of the script, the conventions of scribes, and the pronunciation of the Hebrew language around the beginning of the Christian era. Previously much of this had been a matter of conjecture. It is now possible to fill in many gaps, and also to hope that further discoveries of the same kind will be made where previously they had been unlooked for.
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We have now seen that, when the Hebrews left the land of Egypt, they left a land in which writing had been practised for hundreds of years; and when they entered Canaan under Joshua, they came to a land already possessing a literature and an alphabetic writing, available alike for secular and religious purposes. This has an intimate bearing on the origin and credibility of the books of the Old Testament; and the recent discoveries bearing on it have therefore been mentioned in some detail. It remains to examine the external form of the books which were used by the authors of the writings of the Old and the New Testaments, and by the scribes who handed them down from their origin to the invention of printing.
Many materials have been used by men in different parts of the world to receive writing-stone, leaves, bark, wood, metals, linen, baked clay, potsherds-but for the main transmission of the Scriptures three only are of prime importance-namely, skins, papyrus and vellum. Of these, and especially of the last two, something must be said.
With regard to leather, we know that prepared skins were used as writing material from a very early date. In Egypt there are references to documents written on skins in the time of the IVth Dynasty (c. 2900-2750 b.c.) and actual specimens are extant from the Xllth Dynasty (c. 2000-1788 b.c.). Ctesias, the Greek historian, refers to royal chronicles being written on leather by the ancient Persians, but does not specify their precise dates. They may include those to which reference is made in Ezra vi. 1, 2 and Esther vi. 1. Herodotus records that once, when papyrus was scarce, the Ionian Greeks used sheepskins and goatskins in its place; and he adds that many of the '' barbarians'' still did so in his day. From the eighth century b.c. onwards the 'writer on skin' is mentioned in Assyrian records, and also in the cuneiform texts of the Seleucid age (311-95 b.c.).
More important for our present purpose is the traditional use of leather for the books of the Law in Hebrew. In the Talmud it is laid down that all copies of the Law used in public worship must be written on skins of clean animals and in roll-form. This rule still continues in force, and many examples of such leather rolls are in existence, the earliest being those from the Dead Sea, which are made from the skins of lambs and young goats. A specimen is seen in Plate VII.
The Talmud regulation no doubt represents a long-standing tradition, and it is therefore probable that the 'rolls' from time to
time referred to in the Bible were written on this material. In Ps. xl. 7 and Ezek. ii. 9 there is no decisive indication of material; but in Jer. xxxvi. 23, where it is said that Jehoiakim used the scribe's scraping-knife to cut to pieces the roll of Jeremiah's prophecies, the use of such an instrument seems to show that the roll was of tougher material than papyrus. A knife was, in fact, part of the equipment of a scribe writing on leather or vellum, for the purpose of erasures, as we know from medieval pictures. Jer. xxxvi. also mentions, besides the ink (verse 18) and the penknife or scraping-knife (verse 23) that the scroll was written in columns (verse 23 R.V. margin). Further, it is recorded that the copies of the Law which were sent from Palestine to Egypt in the third century b.c., for the purpose of the making of the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, were on skins. At what time papyrus came into general use in Palestine cannot be ascertained. What is certain is that for formal copies, intended for use in the synagogues, leather was the regular material, and it may be presumed that this goes back at least to the period of the prophets.
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Far more widespread was the use of papyrus. The home of this material is Egypt. It was manufactured from the pith of the papyrus plant, which then grew plentifully in the Nile. The pith was cut into thin strips, which were laid down in two layers at right angles to one another, so that the fibres lay horizontally on one side and vertically on the other. The two layers were fastened together by pressure and glue, and in this way sheets were formed, which were then fastened together side by side, so as to form a roll. The height of the roll is limited by the length of the strips of pith; specimens exist which are as high as 15 inches, but about 10 inches is more usual for works of literature. The length could vary according to taste and convenience; several Egyptian liturgical rolls exist of 50 feet and over, and one is known of 133 feet; but such rolls were too cumbrous for ordinary reading, and Greek literary rolls seldom, if ever, exceed 35 feet-a length which is sufficient for a single book of Thucydides or one of the longer Gospels, but not for more. A sample may be seen in Plate VIII, which contains some columns of an oration (otherwise unknown) by Hyperides, from a papyrus of the later part of the first century in the British Museum.
Papyrus was used in Egypt as far back as the third millennium
if not earlier. How early it was in use in Greece we cannot say. But it is interesting that the ancient Phoenician town of Gebal, on the coast a little to the north of Beirut, was called Byblos by the Greeks because it was the port through which papyrus (byblos) was imported from Egypt, and we know from the Egyptian story of Wenamon that papyrus was to be had in Gebal about 1100 b.c. The evidence of Herodotus, quoted above, shows that by the middle of the fifth century b.c. it was so well established that he cannot conceive a civilized people using anything else. We may therefore take it that at least from the sixth century onwards (and possibly much earlier) the papyrus roll was the regular material for book production in the Greek world. When, therefore, in the course of the third century b.c., a demand arose among the Jews settled in Egypt after its conquest by Alexander for a translation of their Scriptures into Greek, it was on papyrus rolls that the translation was produced; and when the books of the New Testament were written, in the first century after Christ, papyrus must again have been the material. For our present purpose, therefore, papyrus is the material of first importance.
Papyrus had many merits as a writing material, and for the best part of a thousand years, at least, it met the requirements of the Greek and Roman worlds. But from our point of view it lacked one very important quality, that of durability. Originally a material of about the same consistency as paper, it is destroyed by damp and, if kept dry, becomes very brittle with age. There is only one country where the soil is so dry that papyrus manuscripts buried in it have a chance of survival, and that is Egypt. It is only comparatively recently, however, that this fact was discovered, and until then it could be said, with almost complete accuracy, that all manuscripts on papyrus had perished, and that works written in Greek or Latin could only have come down to us from the time when papyrus was superseded by the far more durable material known as vellum. All copies, whether of the Scriptures or of works of classical literature, earlier than the first half of the fourth century after Christ were assumed to have perished. It is only within the last seventy or eighty years that a flood of new light has come to us from Egypt.
The first discovery of papyri in Egypt was made in 1778, when some natives in the province of the Fayum discovered a jar containing a little hoard of forty or fifty rolls. They could, however, find no market for them, and destroyed all except one, which was taken by a dealer as a curiosity. This turned out to be merely a list of labourers employed on irrigation works in a.d. 191, and was published in 1788. During the next hundred years a few score of papyrus documents turned up, including a few of literary character : two or three portions of Homer, and (more important because new) portions of four lost speeches of Hyperides, the contemporary and rival of Demosthenes, and an ode by Alcman. The first discovery on a large scale was made in the Fayum in 1877, when a great mass of papyri was brought to light by natives, and was for the most part acquired by the Archduke Rainer of Austria for his library in Vienna. These, however, were mostly of late date and of non-literary character, and it was not until 1891 that the great era of papyrus discoveries began. In that year a number of fragments of papyrus, extracted by Prof. Flinders Petrie from the cartonnage wrappings of mummies, were found to include a few portions of Plato and of a lost play of Euripides, with a number of _ non-literary documents, all of the third century b.c. ; while a batch of rolls acquired by Dr. E. Wallis Budge for the British Museum proved to include the lost treatise by Aristotle on the Constitution of Athens, the lost poems of Herodas, a portion of a speech by Hyperides, and an unknown medical treatise, besides known works of Homer, Demosthenes and Isocrates. This fairly aroused public interest, and search in Egypt was actively pursued, with the result that now many thousands of papyrus documents are to be found in the great libraries of Europe and America, and among them several hundreds of literary texts, large and small, known and unknown.
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For a long time, however, very few of these papyri contained any portion of the Scriptures. When the first edition of the present work was published there was just one known, thirty-two leaves of a late (seventh century) papyrus book, said to have been found among the rubbish of an ancient convent at Thebes. Since then many more have from time to time come to light, culminating (for the present) in the discovery, quite recently, of considerable portions of manuscripts far earlier than any hitherto known. These will be described in their proper place in subsequent chapters. For the subject of our present chapter all that is relevant is to state that the discoveries of recent years, besides adding an earlier section to the record of the transmission of the Bible text, have also revealed a new feature in the history of the use of papyrus.
At one time it was supposed that the roll form of book continued in use up to the time of the supersession of papyrus by vellum in the fourth century. It is now clear that this is not the case either for pagan or Christian literature, and that certainly from the second century and probably as early as the first the Christian community was using the material in a different way-that, namely, which is known as the codex-form. This is in fact our modern form of book with leaves arranged in quires or gatherings. In the simplest form of quire a single sheet of papyrus is folded down the middle, so producing two leaves of four pages, and a codex could be formed of a number of such quires sewn together. Or a number of such sheets, calculated to be sufficient for the whole of the text to be written, would be laid one on top of another and the whole folded so as to produce a codex consisting of a single enormous quire. Examples are extant composed of as many as fifty-nine such sheets, or 118 leaves. This make-up must have been very inconvenient, and ultimately it was found that quires of about ten or twelve leaves was the more convenient form. Bible codices of all these types are known, and will be described in Chapters V and VII below (see Plates XV, XX, XXI).
The ancestor of the papyrus codex was the writing tablet of two or more leaves, made of wood or ivory and held together by cords or clasps. These had long been known in the ancient world and were commonly used for letters, memoranda, accounts, school exercises, and anything of an ephemeral nature. An improvement was made by the Romans sometime before the end of the first century b.c. by substituting parchment for wood, and these parchment codices were used for notebooks, and it may well be to such membranai (as they were called) that St. Paul refers in 2 Tim. iv. 13 when he asks Timothy to bring with him "the books, especially the parchments". But the convenience of the codex-form seems to have encouraged only one attempt at publishing-that of the revised edition of Books I and II of Martial's Epigrams towards the end of the first century a.d. It seems to have been a failure, and polite literature continued to appear on rolls during the first two centuries of the Roman Empire.
In Egypt, on the other hand, the evidence points clearly to the papyrus codex as the prevailing form for the Christian Scriptures from a very early date, while for pagan literature, as indeed for other forms of Christian writing, the roll was only slowly ousted. Figures drawn up by C. H. Roberts show that, for pagan literature, the papyrus codex accounts for only two to three per cent of second-century fragments, rising to nearly seventeen per cent in the third century, forty-eight per cent on the border-line of the third and fourth, and seventy-four per cent in the fourth century. In the case of Biblical fragments ten belong to the second century or beginning of the third, and all were written on codices, while of the total of 111 Biblical texts surviving from the second to the fourth centuries only twelve are from rolls, of which three and possibly six are Jewish, and five are episthographs-i.e. the Biblical text is written on the backs of rolls already used for another purpose. Thus, as Roberts concludes "when the Christian Bible (to use a slightly anachronistic term) first makes its appearance in history, the books of which it is composed are always written on papyrus and always in codex form . . . and the contrast is even more remarkable when we recall that the country where early texts were found was where the roll originated, and in which parchment (with which the codex began) was scarce".
The link between the parchment codex notebook of Rome and the papyrus codex of Egypt can only be surmised. That there was a close connexion between Egypt and especially Alexandria and Rome is well known-Egypt was the granary of the Empire, and it was in an Alexandrian grain ship that St. Paul was shipwrecked off Malta, and in another completed his journey to the capital (Acts xxvii. 6, 38; xxviii. 11). There was also an intimate relation between Roman and Egyptian Christianity at this period. But Roberts would take a further step. He suggests that St. Mark, the Gospel of the Roman Church and the earliest to be written, circulated not as a papyrus roll-Roman Christians at this time did not belong to the literary class and had no particular reason to follow the conventions of the book trade-but in a form which would be familiar from its everyday associations, that is as a codex. As such it would be more convenient for carrying about, for reference, and if need be for concealment. Now whatever may lie behind the tradition that the Church of Alexandria was founded by St. Mark, at some point his Gospel reached Egypt, was copied there on papyrus, and, it is suggested, in its original codex format also. Moreover, such was its authority that the codex-form rapidly became the norm for all copies of Sacred Scripture in Egypt. This, in the briefest outline, is the theory, which certainly accounts for the facts as they are known at present.
Besides the advantages of the codex noted above there was also the further advantage that a much greater amount of matter could be included than was possible in a roll of normal length, which was about thirty feet. We now have, as will be told in greater detail below, substantial portions of a codex containing the four Gospels and Acts written in the first half of the third century, another of the Pauline Epistles of about a.d. 200, fifty leaves of an original codex of 108 leaves containing Numbers and Deuteronomy of the early second century, a tiny scrap of St. John of the same date, together with fragments of Genesis, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Matthew and Titus also of the second century. There is even a fragment of Deuteronomy from a roll of the second century before Christ. A considerable gap in the history of the transmission of the Bible text has thus been filled by the discoveries of recent years.
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Until the discovery of papyri in Egypt, it was supposed that no actual copies of the Scriptures had survived previous to the date when vellum came into use as the predominant material for book production. Vellum (or parchment) is a material prepared from the skins of cattle, sheep, goats or occasionally deer, and preferably from the young of these animals, and forms an exceedingly durable and handsome receptacle for writing. It is, in fact, a development and improvement of the use of skins. According to Pliny, quoting the earlier Roman writer Varro (first century b.c.), it was invented by Eumenes of Pergamum, at a time when Ptolemy of Egypt, jealous of a rival book-collector, laid an embargo on the export of papyrus. This implies a date between 197 and 182 b.c., and probably does not mean that vellum had never been heard of before this date, but that it then temporarily came to the front as a material of book production. In point of fact, some documents on vellum were found in 1923 among the ruins of the Roman fortress of Dura on the Euphrates, which bear dates equivalent to 196-5 and 190-89 b.c., showing that the material was then already in use at a place far distant from Pergamum. Apart, however, from the temporary needs of the Pergamum library, the use of vellum seems at first to have been in the form of notebooks, in which it was an improvement on the wax-tablet (see above p. 41). Gradually it appears to have come into use for books, but from the point of view of the book trade it remained an inferior article to papyrus for works of literature throughout the first three centuries of the Christian era.
Exactly how the change came about is not clear, but it is certain that in the course of the first half of the fourth century vellum definitely superseded papyrus as the material in use for the best books; and since this was also the time when the Emperor Constantine the Great adopted Christianity as the official religion of the Eastern Empire, the change had a decisive influence on the tradition of the Bible text. Eusebius records that when Constantine ordered fifty copies of the Scriptures for the churches in his new capital, Constantinople, they were to be on vellum; and a little later (about a.d. 350) we learn from Jerome that the papyrus volumes in the library at Cassarea, which had become damaged by use, were replaced by vellum copies. The acceptance of Christianity must have led to a great demand for copies of the Bible throughout the Empire; and though papyrus continued in use in its native home, Egypt, the remains that have come down to us after this period are fewer in number and inferior in quality.
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From this point, therefore, we must regard the fortunes of the Scriptures as committed to vellum; and it is precisely to this period that the earliest vellum manuscripts now extant belong. The Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus are both assigned to the first half of the fourth century. Both, when complete, contained both Old and New Testaments, in Greek, with some books which were not finally accepted as canonical; and, in spite of the recent discoveries of earlier papyrus copies of parts of some of the books, they remain the principal foundation of our modern texts of the Greek Bible. Of their textual character much will have to be said in later chapters. In appearance, as may be judged even from the reduced reproductions in Plates XXIII and XXV (i), they are extremely handsome volumes (especially the Sinaiticus), written in three or four columns to the page respectively, in capital letters separately formed. Subsequently an arrangement in two columns to the page was generally adopted as more convenient (see Plate XXIV), and this style of writing, technically known as 'uncial', continued in use until the tenth century.
It was, however, a style more adapted for use at a lectern than for private reading; and in the ninth century a new style, known as 'minuscule' or 'cursive', was developed, which in a short time drove the more cumbrous uncial out of use. It was evolved from the style of writing then in use for non-literary purposes (as we now know from late documents on papyrus found in Egypt, containing accounts and other papers of the period after the Arab conquest of Egypt), and at its best it is an exceedingly beautiful form of script (see Plate XXVIII). In this script, in its various modifications, the Scriptures continued to be written until the invention of printing. Many such manuscripts are described below, for they form the main part of the materials for the history of the Bible text.
The visitor to the British Museum may still see manuscripts which reproduce in external form the books of the Bible as they were first written. In one of the exhibition-cases he will see the great synagogue rolls of the Hebrew Scriptures, written on large and heavy skins, and wound round great wooden rollers, a weight too heavy to lift with comfort in the hand. Elsewhere he may see the copies for common use, written on ordinary vellum in the familiar book-form. Among the earliest Greek manuscripts he will find delicate papyrus rolls, now spread out under glass for their protection, with their narrow columns of small writing, which may well represent that in which the Gospels and Epistles were first written down. In a special case he will see two of the earliest extant copies of the Greek Bible written in uncial letters upon fine vellum, the monument of a time when the Church was becoming prosperous under a Christian Empire, and now among the most valuable witnesses to the original text of the Bible that have been spared to us by the ravages of time. Elsewhere he will see copies
written in the minuscule script which was the vehicle of literature throughout the later Middle Ages; and also copies of the translations of the Bible into other languages-Syriac, Coptic, Latin, and ultimately English.
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