screens Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Precedence: bulk Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On 2001-06-20 Robert A. Kraft said: >How about a new thread: what evidence do we have from antiquity for >Jewish "libraries" (public or private collections of scrolls) in >various areas of Pliny's Judaea apart from Jerusalem? E.g. Jericho? >Samaria? Scythopolis? Hebron? Masada? While the modern concept of a "library" is said to stem from the Classical Greek period (with Euripides, Plato and Aristotle as known owners of early private and/or group libraries), there is a great deal of evidence that the concept is millennia older. Judea did not exist in a vacuum; it was the heirs of a long tradition of book collecting. "Libraries" date back to Sumer. Indeed, in its mixture of legal and literary documents the library from Cave 4 at Qumran forcibly reminds one of the type of "record room/library" collections found at Nippur and Ninveh. Certainly there are several practices particular to Jewish writing systems, but these are in the most part known and not relevant to the question of "libraries." Both private and public libraries existed throughout the Greco-Roman world; Judea was part of that world as well. Further, several thousand books in scroll form were thrown away in the digs at Pompeii and Herculaneum before those "charred sticks" were recognized as books in private libraries (and this was only after someone realized that those cases holding the "charred sticks" were bookshelves). Many of these Judean sites have charred layers. It is unlikely that people will recognize burnt scrolls among the other charred "sticks" at these digs -- if they are not expecting to find leather or parchment "books." Yet, burnt scrolls are undoubtedly among those charred remains. Leather as a dry surface writing material dates back to ca. the 11th or 10th centuries BCE -- and very probably earlier. There are a some points that should be mentioned, in fact, strongly stressed. 1) Literacy is an urban phenomenon. The written word and literacy go hand in hand with urbanization, otherwise known as "civilization." Civilization depends upon excess food, which is why urbanization arose in areas such as the fertile crescent -- where the excess of food produced permitted urban centers to develop and to grow. Subsistence farming does not produce an excess: illiteracy was normal in colder climates. Very few areas in Western Europe could support urban centers of any size (a city of 14,000 inhabitants was "large"). Until the invention of the horse collar in the 12th century CE, it took *18* people on the land to support *1* person in the city. Prior to the spread of Christianity and the creation of monastic sites with their own farm lands, libraries did not and could not exist in most of Western Europe for the simple reason that the majority of the inhabi- tants were too busy trying to find enough to eat to waste time on the *written* word. The assumption that West European techniques used in their illiterate societies applies to the literate societies of the Ancient and Late- Antique Near East is alterity in action. Alterity says that post- Enlightenment West European concepts apply to these documents and cultures -- which they most emphatically do not. 2) Writing began in trade and trade remains the primary use of writing; legal documents ran and still do run second; literature was and is very far down the list. As the majority of people working with ancient documents are most concerned with literature, whether of a sacred or profane nature, this also brings a distorted point of view to the data for it misplaces the emphasis. 3) What texts survive is always an accident of time and place -- not to mention what remains after selective destruction has taken its toll. Standing far down the line behind extant commercial and legal documents (including annals), we find literary texts. There are a disproportionate number of religious texts in comparison to other literature. A fairly large proportion of religious texts were actually carefully composed fiction not meant to be taken literally. Many so-called religious "myths" and "legends" were intended rather to edify and to instruct. Religious texts, though, move out of the literary sphere into the legal sphere with regularity. While as all literature, religious documents tell us what was important to a given society, nevertheless, this emphasis on religion distorts the data base. 4) Literature, or what modern "rationalists" refer to as "fiction," plays a vitally important role in all cultures -- past and present. Fiction, for example, allows peopleto explore different political philosophies, to address moral dilemmas, to discuss fears openly, to argue a point from a different position, and to postulate alternate futures -- all vicariously, without having to experience these things first hand. Fiction as a vehicle of exploration and edification clearly is pre- historic even though our earliest written examples date back to Sumer. Moderns, however, mistakenly assume fiction to be "useless," "irrelevant," "siwash," and even, to quote one 'gentleman', "mental masturbation" -- all statements which display a gross misunderstanding of the role of fiction in a culture. Judea was not isolated and there is no reason to believe that "record room" temple/governmental libraries of the Sumerian/Akkadian/Ugaritic model did not exist in Judea at the time of the DSS. Indeed, there is evidence that Greek temples had this type of Semitic mixed record room/libraries. While direct evidence for such pseudo-public libraries in Judea is currently only inferential, there is *primary* evidence for private libraries in Judea: bookshop products. Bookshop products do more than indicate a literate society; they also indicate private and/or group collections. Bookshop products show up throughout the urban centers from antiquity and on down the millenia. They certainly show up among the DSS. Nor do we know where those DSS bookshop scrolls originated: Jerusalem was only one of the urban centers in Judea. The massive number of hands and the variety in fonts and mutations of fonts does more than imply different sites of origin: these multiplicities state it. As bookshop products are never official or authoritative -- they are literary fiction --, they tell us what subjects were of vital interest in a society. They also tell us that there were private and/or group libraries in the Judea of the DSS. Regards, Rochelle -- Dr. Rochelle I. Altman, co-coordinator IOUDAIOS-L [EMAIL PROTECTED] For private reply, e-mail to "Rochelle I. Altman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from Orion, e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: "unsubscribe Orion." Archives are on the Orion Web site, http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il.
