historical perspectives: from the hasmoneans to bar kokhba in light ...

22 DAVID GOODBLATT
degree of outrage would be greater if they were rare. It is not clear
whether the scroll was owned by an individual or the community. 43
The scroll of Isaiah from which Jesus read (Luke 4) presumably
belonged to the Nazareth synagogue. Similarly "the laws" "
that the Jews took with them when they fled Caesarea must have
belonged to the local synagogue. Otherwise the Jewish leaders could
not have been charged with improperly removing "the laws" from
the city. Unfortunately, it is not clear whether this phrase refers to
one scroll or many (War 2.14.5 §§291-92).
In view of the relatively few references to books in the literary
sources, the concrete evidence of hundreds of books at Qumran is
important as a reminder that evidence from silence can be misleading.
Books may have been sufficiently prevalent in Judean society
to allow the biblical texts to become a mass medium. Still,
Qumran may not be representative of Judea as a whole. Even so,
a scarcity of books need not indicate that knowledge of biblical writings
was limited. What we must keep in mind is the extent to which
many ancient books were performance texts, that is, not intended
only or even primarily for private use by individuals but read aloud
at public gatherings. To this day Torah scrolls are used as performance
texts and no one takes them home during the week for private
study. To be sure, nowadays other copies of the Torah are
readily available for private reading at home, as well as for group
study. In contrast, as our survey of the literary sources suggested,
private copies were rare in antiquity.
The role of books as performance texts was common in surrounding
Graeco-Roman society as well as in the early Christian
movement. 44 A telling example, albeit relating to a much earlier
period, is cited by Thomas from a report in Plutarch. The latter
reports how the Athenian statesman Lycurgus, in the late fourth century
BCE, kept copies of the plays of the three great tragedians in
a public archive and required adherence to the "original" text. However,
43 Note the language at Ant. 20.5.4 §115 in MS E: .
44 On the public reading of texts in the Graeco-Roman world, see M. Hadas,
Ancilla to Classical Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 50-64.
Compare Thomas, Oral Text and Written Record, 32-34, on books as memory aids.
For Christianity see H. Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of
Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 205-6, 211-31, on
public reading of Scriptures in early Christian worship, and 231-37 for the gradual
increase of evidence for private reading which, however, is not abundant until
the third century.