Scribal Culture and the Hebrew Bible
Panel hosts: Dr. Nathaniel Greene, Prof. Matthieu Richelle
The study of epigraphic Northwest Semitic has been central to the understanding of the historical and compositional contexts of the Hebrew Bible for well over the past century. Much of this work has been dominated primarily by the task of decipherment (Richey 2021). More recent work in the field, however, has sought to push beyond merely reading these uncurated texts to consider other perspectives and contextual parameters that impinge directly on interpretation of texts epigraphic and canonical alike. These new inroads include weighing material and spatial aspects of textual production and execution (Mandell and Smoak 2019; Carr 2023), leveraging social or behavioral models for understanding scribal activity in the ancient eastern Mediterranean (Schniedewind 2024), and applying emergent digital methods of research that seek to bring the material and the textual into more effective conversation (Greene and Parker 2015). These various approaches contribute to what we might consider a more robust “assemblage model” of interpretation (Pioske 2023). What arises from these dynamic and interdisciplinary modes of approach is a fuller understanding of the remote past and its material and textual produce. After all: A text without context loses much of its meaning. This panel seeks to foster conversation at the nexus of the textual, the linguistic, and the material to imagine the future of epigraphic and palaeographic studies and how they might further illuminate—or perhaps how they should be approached in manners distinct from—the social and historical world that produced the Hebrew Bible.