**Knowledge Construction in Late Antiquity**

# **Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes**

#### Edited by Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos

Associate Editors Stavros Frangoulidis · Fausto Montana · Lara Pagani Serena Perrone · Evina Sistakou · Christos Tsagalis

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# **Volume 142**

# **Knowledge Construction in Late Antiquity**

Edited by Monika Amsler

The open access version and prepress of this publication has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

ISBN 978-3-11-099763-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-101031-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-101104-2 ISSN 1868-4785 DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111010311

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# **Acknowledgements**

This volume is the result of a workshop that was supposed to take place at the University of Maryland in May 2020. As can easily be guessed, the workshop had to be cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It finally took place online in January 2021. I thank professors Antoine Borrut and Hayim Lapin for their support in the different organization and reorganization processes, and the Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies for the financial support. The online workshop was graciously facilitated by Mikol Bailey, who was a graduate student at the University of Maryland at the time. I am grateful to the series editors for accepting the volume as a Trends in Classics—Supplementary Volume, and especially to Antonios Rengakos for his speedy and patient replies to so many questions.

The Swiss National Scientific Foundation is to be thanked for approving the project who allowed me to spend time at the University of Maryland (P2ZHP1\_181576), and for funding the open access publication of the present volume.

Finally, I would like my colleagues who contributed to this book — thank you for showing up to the workshop, although it took place online and during a pandemic, and for entrusting me, to most of you a total stranger at this point, with your marvelous work!

Monika Amsler

### **Contents**

**Acknowledgements V List of Figures and TablesIX**

Monika Amsler **Introduction: Knowledge Construction in Late Antiquity 1**

Daniel Picus **Better Left Unread: Rabbinic Interpretations of Prophetic Scrolls29**

Jeremiah Coogan **Tabular Thinking in Late Ancient Palestine: Instrumentality, Work, and the Construction of Knowledge 57**

Elizabeth Mattingly Conner **Leading Sources of Knowledge at the Monastery: Isidore of Pelusium 83**

Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos **Fabricating Monstrosity: Archival Manipulation and the Production of Orthodoxy in Socrates of Constantinople's** *Ecclesiastical History***105**

Nicola Reggiani **Knowledge Construction in Progress: From Paratext to Marginal Annotations in the Greek Medical Papyri133**

Courtney A. Roby **Learning from Mistakes: Constructing Knowledge in Late Antique Mathematical Texts155**

Monika Amsler **The "Poetic Itch" and Numerical Maxims in the Talmud – An Inquiry into Factors of Knowledge Construction189**

Lillian I. Larsen **Re-scaffolding a 'Missing Chapter'219** **VIII** Contents

Robert Edwards

**Grammar in the School of Diodore of Tarsus: An Institutional Context for the Transfer of Exegetical Knowledge 257**

**List of Contributors 283 General Index 285 Index Locorum293**

# **List of Figures and Tables**

### Monika Amsler **Introduction: Knowledge Construction in Late Antiquity**

Social studies of the sciences have long analyzed and exposed the constructed nature of knowledge. Pioneering studies of research in laboratories conducted by eminent scholars such as Karin Knorr Cetina, Bruno Latour, and Steve Woolgar have identified many factors that affect the processes by which scientific results are generated and interpreted.1 The factors they found dictating *what* knowledge is being produced, and *how*, were money, training and curriculum, location and infrastructure, biography-based knowledge and talent, and coincidence.

The method adopted by these groundbreaking studies has since led to the establishment of the "sociology of science."2 In subsequent years, the field has left the realm of the laboratory to analyze all kinds of spaces in which forms of knowledge are being produced. Yet, unintentionally, the focus shifted from the interactions between nonhuman and human actors, which was a central part of Knorr Cetina's, and Latour and Woolgar's, study of knowledge construction in the laboratory, to an almost exclusive focus on human agency. This led to criticism by said founding scholars, which in turn led to the development of "practice theories" that place a distinct focus on the role played by nonhuman factors in the construction of knowledge.3 Ultimately, this renewed focus on the object led to a material turn in the humanities, which came to be interested in material culture. As the compound terminology suggests, material culture still focuses predominantly on human culture, yet it does so by positing a distinct relationship between (social) culture and material.4 Among other things, this interest moved archaeology out of the shadow of text and accorded the field a standing in its own right. Nowadays, however, the term "materiality" is preferred over "cultural studies," in an attempt to "move away from the idea of a separation between material and cultural domains, and to accommodate the material form of things."5

We find a good example of materiality thinking in Latour's discussion of the *Berliner Schlüssel*, the Berlin key. Latour depicts this special key as a disciplinarian, since it can only be retrieved by the resident of an apartment building after

 **1** See Latour/Woolgar 1979; Knorr Cetina 1981.

**2** See Knorr Cetina/Mulkay 1983.

**3** E.g., Knorr Cetina *et al*. 2001; Latour 1999; 2007.

**4** Hicks 2010, 26.

**5** Hicks 2010, 74.

he has locked the door.6 As a result, the key forces residents to lock the house and imposes a precaution against burglaries. By way of mass production, the key, although the product of human invention, skill, and ethics, emancipates and, seemingly independently, begins to interfere in and shape the local community. Jennifer Knust has applied these insights to a type of materiality that is somewhat closer to the topic of knowledge construction in late antiquity than is the Berlin key: New Testament manuscripts.7 As she points out, the mix and match of works transmitted (or not) in single manuscripts shaped the cognitive resources of individuals and communities. Similarly, the system of rows for numeric cross-referencing that Eusebius adapted for the Gospels has, as a cognitive tool, shaped the reading of these four separate books as a coherent canon.8 Knowledge construction and knowledge practice, these studies have shown, cannot be separated from the material with which (or, more precisely, in which) knowledge is conceived and transmitted.

The sheer idea to investigate what factors constructed knowledge in a laboratory, rather than just to assume that laboratories produced some sort of independent and pure knowledge, resulted from the linguistic turn in the Humanities that unearthed the social constructedness of what it means to "know." The linguistic turn ultimately also paved the way for critical theories and New Historicism, which, together with the material turn, merged in theories of thingness that draw from "social theories of emotion and affect."9 These theoretical momenta have shaped the historiography of late antiquity, which, as a conceptual chronological framework, is equally recent and has generated research foci such as "knowledge production" or "objects of knowledge."10

Somewhat parallel to these developments, epistemology has become another field of research in the study of late antiquity. Multiple monographs, collected volumes, and essays have been devoted to topics such as, for example, the social and political impact of the Roman Empire on the formation of knowledge, its order, and its encyclopedic expansion.11 Other issues that have been addressed concern knowledge building and transmission in terms of "finding," "inheriting," or

 **6** Latour 1991.

**7** Knust 2017.

**8** See Crawford 2019, 96–121; Coogan, this volume.

**9** Kotrosits 2020, 3. As she further points out, these theories themselves "emerged out of a kind of frustration or weariness with the linguistic turn, of which these same fields were prime propagators" (3).

**10** On the history of the concept of late antiquity, see Martin 2005.

**11** E.g., Formisano 2013; König/Whitmarsh 2007; Lehmhaus 2015.

"borrowing";12 structures and strategies of knowledge;13 applicability;14 the development or attribution of authority by way of knowledge production;15 sociological aspects of knowledge;16 the practical negotiation of knowledge as "knowing";17 and the cross-fertilization of knowledge.18 In his monograph *What Did the Romans Know?*, Daryn Lehoux engages with implicit taxonomies that regulate credibility and incredibility (i.e., Why did the ancients believe that garlic was magnetic?), and Michael Chin has worked on the symmetry between grammar, education, and the cosmic order.19 Obviously, an unprecedented array of research has been devoted to questions of how knowledge was gathered, weighted, produced, consumed, and distributed.

With a knowledge construction framework, the present volume offers ways of thinking about knowledge that combine insights from material culture and materiality studies with those gained from studies of late-antique epistemology. Knowledge will be presented as attached to and transmitted by objects. But knowledge construction goes even a bit further in that it encompasses the specific task of "knowledge production," the haptic "knowledge manufacture," and the social factors that regulate and weigh forms of knowledge.20 Indeed, benefiting from the momentum of these issues and theories in the study of late antiquity in recent years, scholars are now able to ask questions about issues including the use of material, economic aspects of availability and access to material, the social incentives for writing, the author's or artist's education, as well as the time, space, and budget that allowed or impeded the production of a certain type of knowledge. All these aspects are prerequisites for the construction of knowledge. They shape a text or another epistemological object not regarding content and genre but also regarding its morphological appearance. Like epistemological factors, material factors can limit or promote the development of knowledge,

**14** E.g., Formisano/van der Eijk 2017.

**16** E.g., Wissa 2017.

 **12** E.g., Althoff *et al*. 2019.

**13** E.g., Doody *et al*. 2012; for a bibliographical essay on technical and science literature in Greco-Roman antiquity, see Taub 2017, 149–156.

**15** E.g., Berkovitz/Letteney 2018; König/Woolf 2017; Taub/Doody 2009.

**20** On knowledge production, see Stefaniw 2018; on knowledge manufacture, see, e.g., Lundhaug/Lied 2017. They succinctly address the challenges that rise from negotiating templates of redaction criticism as they evolved around texts with ongoing religious reception histories and the actual manufacture of texts.

sometimes also urging creative solutions due to constraint. Coincidence and chance play an indeterminable role in this and point to the importance of the consideration of contingent factors in knowledge construction, such as imagination, projection, misconception, and error, any or all of which may ultimately serve as the basis for innovation.

As this overview has shown, knowledge remains associated with the study of a given text as the intellectual output identified as knowledge. Only a few studies have started to make the transmitting object the center of attention, and not necessarily with respect to how these media help expand, shape, and confine knowledge.21 The work of Andrew Riggsby, Matthew Crawford, and Jeremiah Coogan has broken ground in that regard by looking at cognitive tools that help bundle disparate data. Riggsby has addressed decisive tools in the construction of knowledge, such as lists, tables, maps, and weights and measures.22 Crawford has shown how Eusebius's use of tables to organize literary works has impacted a whole religious tradition.23 Coogan has drawn attention to the innovative and versatile character of certain seemingly simple paratextual features such as the table of contents, the recipe book, or simply the row as it appears in documents or tables.24 Much work remains to be done in this regard, and many cognitive tools still need to be recognized as such. The focus could still be expanded, for example, to view the materiality of texts itself as epistemic objects rather than reduce them to mere transmitters of knowledge, and to ask about the disciplinary function (remember the Berlin key!) of basic writing materials such as tablets, scraps, styluses and their contribution to the very particular structure of lateantique knowledge.

Indeed, the field seems to move gradually in a direction in which questions become of interest that probably seemed too basic to prior scholars. How, for example, did the habit of writing primarily on wooden tablets, pottery shards (ostraca), or papyrus scraps shape the texts to which we can often access only through much later, polished manuscripts? Can the original shapes of the physical material involved in a text's composition still be detected? How did the meager space on such limiting writing surfaces allow for the production of late antiquity's bulky volumes?25 Indeed, thinking about knowledge construction in the

 **21** E.g., Kotrosits 2020; Miller 2009.

**22** Riggsby 2019.

**23** Crawford 2019.

**24** See Coogan 2021a; 2021b; and this volume.

**25** Questions regarding a material surface's influence on a given text's reception have received more consideration; see Kehnel/Panagiotopoulos 2015.

case of bulky volumes means moving beyond contending simply with the fact that the material was collected and arranged. It would imply asking how people collected literary excerpts or information, where and how they acquired the skills to collect them, how they stored and managed their data, and what systems they had implemented for data retrieval. How did the arrangement proceed? How was it planned? Who arranged the material, and who sponsored all this labor? Who was interested in a bulky volume, and was it actually read? How and where did people learn to write or compile books? The answers to these questions must be inferred from material finds and the texts themselves — unfortunately, there is no ancient account that moves beyond collecting and arranging.26 Drafts, so valuable for this particular purpose, did not survive: the material surfaces of drafts were reused or left to perish because they no longer mattered next to the fair copy.

### **What Makes Knowledge: Data and Information**

Knowledge construction obviously has to do with processes of collecting, sorting, arranging, and ultimately using, whether we can describe these processes or not, and whether they are mechanized or not. What is being collected has come to be referred to as "data" in the past century. Data can then be arranged into information, which is then used as knowledge. Knowledge, again, combined with experience, will lead to wisdom. This process has been transferred into a hierarchy, the hierarchy of knowledge. Generally depicted in the form of a triangle, the hierarchy suggests a succession of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, with data being placed at the large bottom of the triangle and wisdom at the narrow top.27 There is much to be learned about how we are trained to think about knowledge production through this graphic hierarchization: It assumes a large quantity of data against a much smaller amount of wisdom and an increasing contraction of data through processes of generating information, knowledge, and, finally, wisdom. Alas, the pyramid ultimately devalorizes data and data collection and its arrangement into information. These processes may indeed seem to be less labor-intensive when aided by contemporary computer technology, but they were time-consuming and effortful in antiquity and required a lot of knowledge, wisdom even, to do so.

 **26** See the summary in Blair 2010, 14–24; Dorandi 2007 (2017).

**27** E.g., https://www.ontotext.com/knowledgehub/fundamentals/dikw-pyramid/, accessed 18 August 2021.

Although we need not agree with this visual translation of data processing, it helps raise questions about how people in late antiquity hierarchized stages of knowledge construction. As has already been mentioned, drafts were not much appreciated in late antiquity and thus were reused, washed off, or simply left to disintegrate. It appears that an aesthetic and material hierarchy regarding the process of text production was in play. Certain texts were associated with a particular format, like the Torah with a scroll, for instance.28 If so, what was the status of tablets, ostraca, even rotuli that contained only an excerpt of a text or a text in its preliminary stages? Were these artifacts and texts considered to be proper writings or of a different quality, maybe even "oral"? Thinking along ways of knowledge hierarchization may further point to imbalances where the historian sees knowledge or wisdom in places where the ancients saw data or information, and vice versa.

Current definitions and demarcations of data, information, and knowledge vary. Wisdom is defined as a form of knowledge that is unteachable, or at least unmanageable by information systems, since it consists of personal experience and skill rather than just data and information. Therefore, wisdom is often omitted from the discussions of knowledge hierarchies, and I similarly will exclude it here. Indeed, the more recent the definitions of the components of the pyramid are, the more they are marked by electronic computations, which focus predominantly and, in light of the hierarchy, somewhat paradoxically on the complex potential of data.29 Simpler and somewhat older definitions may therefore be more useful for historical purposes. In these discussions, data can be anything between signs and "elementary descriptions of things, events, activities, and transactions."30 Information is defined as organized data that is supposed to convey some overriding meaning. Knowledge, in turn, is said to consist of data *and* information, that is, accumulated learning, which, together with experience, can be applied to make decisions, identify and solve problems.31 In terms of knowledge construction, these demarcations can be used fruitfully in thinking about a text's formation and purpose. Was the text meant to provide information, or was it a collection of data? How do the choices made in turning data into information reflect prior knowledge and strategies of data processing qua education?

 **28** See Picus, this volume.

**29** See Braf 2002, 75.

**30** Braf 2002, 74.

**31** See Braf 2002, 74. I picked what seemed to be the most useful definitions for the present purpose from her summary of (often overlapping) definitions by prior scholars.

I would like to illustrate how these demarcations could be used with a brief example from the Babylonian Talmud's tractate Shabbat. The work, which dates to the fifth or sixth century CE, is a compilation of earlier traditions, like most, if not all, late-antique works of this size.32 The scholarly consensus tends to attribute the formation of this work to oral transmission, although the use of tablets and other writing material as occasional tools for knowledge preservation has been acknowledged.33 The section I would like to discuss in terms of data, information, and knowledge falls, at least to some extent, outside of this discussion because it is one of the rare instances in which the use of a written document is explicitly mentioned.

According to the text itself, then, what is discussed is an astrological hemerology "found in Joshua b. Levi's notebook" (Aramaic *pinkas* from Greek *pinax*). It is a homogenous list that first discusses the influence of the stellar constellation on a person born on a certain day of the week before turning to the hours of the day. As it appears now in the Talmud, however, it seems that the list has been tampered with for the sake of turning its data into information: the hemerology is periodically interrupted by quotations. These interferences in the list show that someone considered the information provided by the list as mere data that needed reconfiguration. The list, which in itself is already data turned into information, is brought into conversation with information derived from personal experience, weaving both together into knowledge that would serve future decision-making on an even more complex basis than the list itself attempted to do. In the following annotated extract from this passage, the original list is rendered in *italics*, insertions are in Roman, and the compilers' comments are underlined.

But Rav Ashi said: "I and Dimi bar Kakuzta were [both born] on the first [day] of the week. I am a king, [yet] he is the head of thieves! Rather [it means that the person will be] entirely good or entirely evil."

*Behold, one who [is born] on the first [day] of the week, will be a man without one [thing] in him.*  What is "without one thing in him"? [What] if one would say "without one virtue"?

But Rav Ashi said: "I was [born] on [the] first day of the week! Rather, [the text should read] 'but without one evil [thing in him]!'"

 **32** The date is debated, some scholars placing the closing date of the work into the first half of the eighth century CE. Notwithstanding minor changes, which are unavoidable in a manual copying and transmission process, I believe that the work was finished during the period indicated above and in a much more concise process than assumed up until now (see my forthcoming monograph).

**33** See Jaffee 2001, 128–140.

*One who is born on the second day of the week will be a quarrelsome man. What is the reason? Because the waters were divided on it [the second day].*

*One who is born on the third day of the week will be a rich man; he will [also] be a fornicating [man]. What is the reason? Because the plants were created on the [third] day …* (b. Shabb. 156a)34

If the hemerology and the quotations are both considered data, then the information they each transmit on their own is that who one will become depends on which day of the week one was born. Together, however, they teach that how the lot has to be interpreted depends on additional data such as personal experience and observation. By turning data into information that appeals to the learners' better judgement, knowledge is generated. Additionally, both sets of data, hemerology and quotations, are now arranged in a way that teaches the skill of arguing. This can also be seen from the critical remark by the compilers (underlined in the above passage). Thereby, knowledge is not only produced but is simultaneously shown by way of *mimesis*, how it should be applied by someone who *knows*.

This passage in tractate Shabbat continues for a bit in the same way with the stereotyped content of the notebook interrupted by associative quotations before adding short hermeneutical expositions and stories. They are each concerned with astrology and whether stellar constellations apply to the people of Israel. Such thematic agglutinations of formally disparate material stimulates questions about how the text came into being in the first place. Are the quotes that interrupt the stereotyped content of the notebook transcripts of an actual discussion styled after *apo phones* transcripts of lessons as they were produced by students of the medical school in Alexandria (550–650 CE), for example, or the student questions inserted in the lectures of Didymus the Blind?35 Or are they excerpts from other written sources (maybe *apo phones* themselves) that were used associatively along the content of the notebook? Apart from the rough common subject, the latter procedure seems more likely, due to the stylistically disparate nature of the inserted material.

Fragmenting texts by content, or simply sorting tablets, scraps, or ostraca, which due to their constrained format can only contain excerpts, would have served two purposes: the literary storage of data pertaining to the same topic in one place (tablets joined with string, or a scroll) and the creation of new knowledge by way of arrangement. Indeed, the discursive style adopted by the

 **34** Translation follows Gardner 2008, 317, slightly adapted. For another discussion of this passage, see Rubenstein 2007.

**35** See Szabat 2015, 261, and Stefaniw 2019, 62–64, respectively.

Talmud teaches the art of conversation and argument building on top of the literal content. The work mimics how this information could be turned into knowledge. Since we find stories with similar or even identical structures and vocabulary distributed associatively all over the Talmud, it is more likely that we face a composition of multiple written sources rather than the product of an actual conversation.36 The form of the late-antique notebook, especially consisting of multiple tablets that were tied together, is suitable for rearrangement. Once untied, the tablets could easily be stored together with others according to content. At the moment of compilation, attached keywords would be consulted and thematic threads created by way of arranging and rearranging tablets.

The loose nature of tablets, ostraca, or papyrus scraps, the most ordinary writing materials, indeed enabled compilers to compose by moving them around, thereby using the information on the tablets as data to generate a different cluster of information. That way, compilers could easily experiment with different arrangements before settling for one, saving valuable time and more costly material such as papyrus sheets or parchment needed for drafting.37 Ultimately, this enabled complex and sometimes hidden structures, such as underlying numerical patterns, as they have long fascinated scholars.38 Templates for such data management are found in the bookkeeping of large estates, for example, where receipts constantly had to be classified and then drafted into weekly, monthly, and yearly overviews of expenses and income.39

The process of collecting notes and excerpts on small slips, tablets, or ostraca and storing them according to keywords, numbers, letters, or even dates must have been rather obvious to the ancients. This would explain the overall silence about the exact process. It was likely a form of collective tacit knowledge indispensable if one wanted to smoothly navigate everyday life: a form of knowledge

 **36** Thus, two stories relating how Chaldeans made a prediction according to the stars that once came true and once did not are found in b. Shabb 156b, and a third one is in b. Shabb. 119a. Another example consists of recipes of a certain style that are found, for example, in b. Git. 68b– 69b; b. Avod. Zar. 28a–29a; b. Shabb. 109b–110b.

**37** See Locher/Rottländer 1985. Dershowitz 2021 shows how many apparent "jumblings" in the biblical text point to the use of many loose text carriers in the composition and transmission of the text.

**38** Jacobs 1983; Pasternak/Yona 2016; Valler 1995.

**39** See Rathbone 1991, 335–341. There are several ways to think about how thematic excerpts were kept together: in the same place but managed by an index list; loosely tied together according to subject; sewed or folded together (e.g., papyrus). See Blair 2010, 99, for similar strategies in the seventeenth century. The literary and visual documentation of such archiving strategies is a modern phenomenon.

embodied in society that informs new inventions and transfers of knowledge but can never be fully made explicit.40 Based on the available sources, it seems that the Swiss polymath and "father of modern bibliography" Conrad Gessner was the first to describe the method he applied to craft his impressive work of indexing all books and authors ever known. In an entry titled "de indicibus librorum" in the second part of his magnum opus, in the *Pandecta*, he writes that (1) everything important that one reads should be copied on a piece of paper; (2) every idea should occupy a separate line; (3) the ideas should be cut apart so they can be arranged and rearranged at will and into clusters and subdivisions; and (4) the final order should then be copied and fixed directly.41

History, we have learned in the past decades, is not a linear development, and much less does it follow a teleological aim. Rather, technologies come and go, are reinvented, renovated, and forgotten again. Gessner was maybe the first to describe this method using the material of his time, (thin!) paper and scissors — but he was certainly not the first to use it. Based on the mistakes in the text of Pliny the Elder's *Natural History*, Alfred Locher and Rolf Rottländer have suggested that this first-century author applied a very similar method. Although Pliny did not use scissors but dictation and slim wooden tablets rather than paper, they describe the process as practically identical.42 Indeed, while people after Gessner discovered the handy and standard size of playing cards imprinted only on one side to write down their notes, which allowed them to skip the step of cutting their notes apart, Pliny may have found some of his excerpts already tailored to the size of a tablet, papyrus scrap, or ostracon.43 This might have been the case with the hemerology found in Joshua b. Levi's notebook, which stretched over several pages qua tablets and was thereby already portioned to be interrupted by other quotes and excerpts.

Why was this method not documented earlier, if it was already known and practiced in the time of the Roman Empire? As mentioned above, it may have been because it was part of the collective tacit knowledge. Alternatively, it may have been documented, but we have no access to this documentation. Then

 **40** On forms of tacit knowledge, see Collins 2010, 119–138. On innovations for data management, see Coogan this volume.

**41** See Krajewski 2011, 13.

**42** See Locher/Rottländer 1985. Others have criticized their model as too neat; see Dorandi 2007 (2017).

**43** On the use of playing cards, see Krajewski 2011, 33; and Blair 2010, 94. Locher/Rottländer 1985 suggest that Pliny might have used the thin wooden slats that have been found in contemporary military camps (e.g., Vindolanda and Vindonissa) and which Martial refers to as Vitellian tablets in his *Epigr.*, 14.8–9.

again, classifying is not everybody's cup of tea. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, for example, used Gessner's system when working as a librarian, and he purchased a closet to sort paper slips as designed by Thomas Harrison in the 1640s for his own projects.44 Leibniz's successor as the librarian in Wolfenbüttel, however, none less than Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, preferred to stroll through the library instead of updating registers and to discover neglected books and topics by accident.45 Undoubtedly, cataloguing data facilitates and accelerates knowledge production, while accidental finds and spontaneous associations and combinations may produce more innovative and creative results. Both ways of processing data have their advantages and disadvantages and the ability to attend to different tastes in a society or to a prevailing aesthetics of knowledge production. After all, it was not just Lessing's individual mood to stroll through the library and bring long-forgotten books to light: he was also acclaimed for it.46

# **Texts as Artifacts and Tools that Shape Knowledge**

To illustrate processes of knowledge construction, Yoshiteru Nakamori chose the example of a particular Japanese chess player's method for creating new tactics.47 The chessboard and playing pieces, however, did not seem to play a significant role in Nakamori's assessment of how ideas are transformed into deployable and communicable knowledge. And yet they are the center scaffolding, to piggyback on Larsen's terminology, around which new tactics are constructed. After all, the board and the pieces are the prime reason for the development of new tactics; their material qualities and limits stimulate and constrain at the same time in addition to the firm rules of the game. Moreover, visualization of ideas is frequently the first step in the process of transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.48 A chessboard, with its clear pattern and consistent pieces, clearly helps the process of developing new tactics, either through experimentation with the physical game or by drafting a mental image.

**47** Nakamori 2019. See discussion below.

 **44** See Krajewski 2011, 16–23 (with picture).

**45** See Krajewski 2011, 32–33.

**46** See Krajewski 2011, 33.

**48** See Battistutti/Bork 2017.

Similarly, ancient thinkers often resorted to diagrams and tables to visualize their knowledge and to identify paths for the solution of a problem. It was obviously easier to calculate fractions and unit conversions with a visual aid — numbers arranged in a table or list, for example — than without.49 Indeed, we might suspect that diagrams and tables also preceded the arrangement of excerpts in the preparation of composite works, such as, for example, the *Ecclesiastical History* discussed by Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos in this volume. Diagrams and tables serve as "external representations" of new and innovative knowledge and allow for manipulation and experimentation with what are otherwise bound to remain shadowy ideas.50 Since pictures and signs are capable of conveying ideas much faster than texts, it is not surprising that the intellectual turmoil of late antiquity was negotiated graphically.51

Tables and diagrams organize the space of knowledge, whether on a tangible surface or imagined. Ancient thinkers used this capacity to create associative loci in their minds that helped them remember things; the places created an *ordo rerum* in the mind to which new items could be associated.52 This idea of assembled and assorted knowledge loci is mirrored by the material involved in knowledge construction. Indeed, Cicero himself was aware of this connection when he wrote, "We shall employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it."53 The most basic material locus in (on) which to preserve knowledge for the ancients is obviously the tablet, ostracon, or papyrus scrap. Like the chessboard, they impose structuring boundaries. Tablets and other material places of knowledge can easily be grouped according to a certain order: an encyclopedic compilation, such as Socrates's *Ecclesiastical History* or the Babylonian Talmud. The final arrangement of these material bits and cognitive places of knowledge is ultimately the product of carefully planned text architecture. Without such planning, the meaningful structures obtained by way of recycled excerpts could not have been achieved.

Although they do not talk about this process — again we may suspect collective tacit knowledge in play — ancient authors obviously planned and drafted their work ahead of time, some with stunning success. The order of Pliny the Elder's *Natural History*, for example, is well known and may be too familiar by now

 **49** See Roby, this volume.

**50** See Guerra/Ostergaard 2016, 237.

**51** See Garipzanov 2015.

**52** On the ancient theory of memorizing by loci, see Small 1997, 83. On actual and conveyed places of knowledge, see Jacob 2018.

**53** Cicero, *De or.* 2.354, trans. Sutton/Rackham.

to evoke astonishment. Still, it must have taken a lot of advance planning, sorting, and defining of "places" to achieve a macrostructure that starts with the planets and ends with minerals, while moving associatively through every known natural substance in between. Another example are the two books that constitute Lucian of Samosata's *True Story*, which have puzzled scholars ever since because the sequence of motifs in each book mirrors the one in the other exactly.54 For *The Learned Banqueters*, Athenaeus crafted dialogues between dinner guests out of excerpts and arranged them thematically. Christian Jacob has suggested that Athenaeus "started to organize his reading notes and collection of excerpts in categories such as 'wine,' 'cups,' 'fishes,' 'courtesans,' 'water,' 'parasites,' etc."55 In her close reading of the Talmudic tractate Avodah Zarah, Mira Beth Wasserman discovered a macrostructure that organizes the material "as a journey down a cosmic ladder, moving from the heights of humans' spiritual aspiration down through descending rungs of creaturely existence. As the tractate begins, narratives about individuals who find redemption in the next world predominate. Later, the talmudic discussion shifts its orientation downward, from the supernal realm of souls and spirit to the material world of embodied, animal existence. Finally, the deliberations drill down into the inanimate domain of objects, investigating the physical properties of idols and other things."56 The creative work of compilers, or authors working with excerpts, obviously began long before they started composing, such as the selection of topics and the drafting of a macrostructure (sequence of topics) or maybe even a microstructure (an associative pattern, a dialogue structure, or the arrangement of material according to the four rhetorical elements).57 The easiest solution, at least on the macrolevel, was to follow an already existing text. It may not be surprising, therefore, that commentary literature abounds in late antiquity.

How did the designs for such text architectures come about? Michael Roberts once observed that "poets looked to the visual arts for inspiration; they understood composition in visual terms."58 Roberts refers here to aesthetic models rather than the mimesis by poets of the technique and mechanical procedures applied by artists. Yet, it might be safe to assume that methods for the composition of aesthetically appealing and intellectually challenging texts (i.e., text

 **54** See Anderson 1976, 8–11.

**55** Jacob 2000, 551 n. 182.

**56** Wasserman 2017, 32–33.

**57** The rhetorical elements in a composition are as follows: the introduction (*prooimion*/*exordium*), the narration of the case (*diēgēsis*/*narratio*), the proofs (*probatio*/*pistis*), and the peroration (*epilogos*/*peroratio*).

**58** Roberts 1989, 118.

architecture) were similarly adapted from the visual arts such as painting, weaving, tessellating, or actual architecture.

Indeed, already the etymology of the Latin word for text (*textus*), as well as the one used to denote Talmudic tractates (*massekhet*) point to some conceptual connections, since in both cases the terms denote fabric.59 Ellen Harlizius-Klück has long pointed out that the art of weaving served in many, and especially also distinctly mathematical, ways as a framework (pun intended!) to build knowledge or *episteme*. 60 Most interesting for the present purpose is her emphasis on the importance of the regulatory beginning in weaving, the *starting border*, which organizes the warp threads. These threads determine the success of the structure and envisioned pattern of the whole fabric — a mistake in the starting border will affect the whole weave. Tellingly, an emphasis on beginnings is notable throughout ancient discourses, whether they initiate a speech; a new year, month, or week; or a ceremony. The word *hymnos*, for example, is linguistically closely related to the *hymên*, the starting border.61 The starting border, in turn, is the result of careful planning, drafting, and small-scale experimenting by the weaver (usually female).62

Similar activities of warping, *ordior* in Latin, appear to have preceded the composition of texts.63 In his work on "revision" in ancient texts, Sean Gurd found that authors treated the need for revision as the result of imperfect planning.64 Accordingly, late-antique scholia on Homer and Euripides show a deep "concern to evaluate an author's reasons for expanding on a theme or a topic … why certain subjects are treated at length while others are not."65 Thus, while careful planning is obviously expected, the actual process remains concealed. The general nonchalance with which the topic is addressed seems rather pretentious, since the ideal was spontaneous creation rather than minute and laborious preparation.66 Rare hints allude to the (probably many) tablets that were consulted before their data was used to craft new knowledge.67 A similar situation regarding drafts and descriptions of processes preceding the actual work can be found in the context

**66** See Gurd 2012, 9–11.

 **59** See Stemberger 2011, 126.

**60** See Harlizius-Klück 2004.

**61** See Harlizius-Klück 2016, 103–110.

**62** See Harlizius-Klück 2004, 101–102.

**63** See Scheidegger Lämmle 2015, 172.

**64** Gurd 2012, 17–18.

**65** Gurd 2012, 82.

**67** See the analysis of Pseudolus's reference to *sed quasi poeta, tabulas cum cepit sibi* (like a poet who consults his tablets) in Scheidegger Lämmle 2015, 175.

of art, be it weaving, painting, or producing mosaics.68 Drafts, unlike the final piece, are not meant to last. They are often customized, unique, and subject to changing trends.69 Against this lack of evidence of how it was done, the construction of texts became even more laborious during late antiquity. And the ties to weaving become apparent in the times' liking of centos: texts that treat words from ancient writers like the threads with which they create a completely new text. Optatian's artful grid poems even treat individual letters as weft and yarn with which he weaves a text with an intext.70

In ancient weaving, weft and yarn are to the fore: they constitute the fabric and hold together the loom, which is otherwise just a bundle of sticks and beams.71 Like the yarn is tied to these beams in the weaving process, letters are tied to their writing surface. The latter were mostly loose, as the most common writing surfaces in late antiquity were wooden tablets, ostraca, or papyrus scraps. As such, these primary writing surfaces were as temporary as the loom. The loose and disparate nature of the so-distributed knowledge can be both a disadvantage, since they risk getting lost in the archive or on the street, and an advantage because of their flexibility and portability. Similar to tesserae, they were mobile and could be moved around, thereby facilitating experimenting with different structures and patterns before being fixed in mortar, that is, a scroll or quires. And the three-dimensionality of tablets and ostraca must have led to a physical interaction with these texts like tools.72

Experimentation with tablets and ostraca is again a working step that follows upon original planning. Such planning not only has advantages that speak to the soundness and creativity of an author. Rather, once the pattern of the plan is in a stage where it can be communicated or, speaking in terms of weaving again, once the pattern begins to appear on the starting band, others can take up the thread and continue. Indeed, in the historiography of late antiquity, we are confronted with a significant number of people who are never mentioned as taking an active role in knowledge construction but who seem to have been the driving forces behind its material realization, maybe even its conceptualization. Those who first come to mind are, of course, slaves, women, and men of lower social status. Considering

 **68** See Burdajewicz 2020, 66–68.

**69** Tellingly, the only papyrus that may have served as a model book, the "Artemidorus Papyrus," was found in a lump with other papyri, "possibly used to stuff an animal mummy." Burdajewicz 2020, 67. On the ephemeral nature of sketches in the textile industry, see Bogensperger 2016, 259.

**70** On centos, see Mulligan 2018, 242–243; Schottenius Cullhed 2016.

**71** See Harlizius-Klück 2004, 101.

**72** See Pinker 1984, 1–2.

the material givens of the time and the fact that some authors had surprisingly long publication lists, it seems impossible that mega works such as the *Ecclesiastical History* were carried out by a single person. Yet, coauthors and co-conceptualizers are hardly mentioned.73 The same is true for women, who often acted as patrons and sponsors but were generally not mentioned, at least not in terms that made their role as providers obvious.74 Ultimately, it was the anonymous mass of literate people, as well as semi- or maybe unliterate craftsmen, providers of writing supplies, that were responsible for the manufacture of knowledge, its wider circulation and preservation.

### **Chapter Overview**

Asked to engage with knowledge construction, the contributors to this volume have confirmed the stimulating potential of thinking about and along various aspects of knowledge construction. Daniel Picus, for example, looks at how rabbinic texts derive content based on the "vessel" that contains it, its form and shape. At the heart of his investigation are rabbinic interpretations of two prophetic visions of scrolls mentioned in the Bible, one flying (Zech. 5:1) and one that was eaten, "written front and back, and written upon it were lamentations, dirges, and woe" (Ezek. 2:8–3:3). Centuries later, these visions were "read" quite differently from the (probable) original intention of the biblical text, thereby "illustrating both changing conceptions of how knowledge is constructed and transmitted, and shifting networks for power and knowledge."75 The physical aspects of the scroll with which the rabbinic readers are left, and who seem to read the texts in a decontextualized and fragmented manner (maybe not from a scroll?), bring their associations with scroll, front and back writing, lamentations, and dirges to the fore. Picus finds the rabbinic language infused with physicality that connects knowledge to "a thing written and read."76 The scroll, for example, appears to

 **73** This is true for slave work more generally; see Charles 2020. On invisible servile labor with a focus on interpreters, see Moss 2021. The late-antique educational system, however, witnessed a dramatic shift away from the slave teachers of the early imperial period to the professional teacher. That shift climaxed in the fourth century before taking another turn, this time to a "home-schooling" system, especially among Christian families that were skeptical about the content on which traditional pedagogy was based; see Lenski 2019, 134–149.

**74** See Layton 2002, 491–500.

**75** Picus, this volume, 32.

**76** Picus, this volume, 32.

represent "a certain type of authorized, divine knowledge" similar to "the rabbinic idea of the Torah as a 'text' that contains everything."77 The physical form and shape associated with particular knowledge is a crucial part of its reception. It is this container that determines the usefulness and the actual usage of the contained knowledge. Moreover, it is in and of itself a semiotic device that signals content and enables people to know unread books.

Jeremiah Coogan examines an easily overlooked visual tool for knowledge construction: the column-and-row table. Ubiquitous and indispensable today, the use of columns and rows to organize texts seems to be an innovation of the third century CE. Adapted from prior usage in astronomy and other more technical fields, the table was deployed by Origen to correlate the Hebrew text of the Bible with several Greek translations. Eusebius of Caesarea used tables to organize the data of world history for his synchronizing work, the *Chronological Tables*. He further used tables to coordinate parallel passages in the four New Testament Gospels. A set of ten tables allowed for an unprecedented cross-referencing. In all three cases, the table provided an information architecture that could be used by multiple invisible coworkers. The table proves to be a real "textual machine"! Coogan also finds the concept of the column or row (*shitah*) also present in the discourse of Palestinian rabbinic sages, where it is used to refer to rightly situated and coordinated or, conversely, displaced and disorganized knowledge. The *shitah* appears to be such a strong visual aid in the construction of knowledge that it helps organizing and structuring knowledge, even if the table, which the row helps create, is only imagined.

In her paper on the scientific content of the letters by the "sophist turned monk" Isidore of Pelusium (375–435/40 CE), Elizabeth M. Conner addresses a still often underestimated tool for collaborative knowledge construction: the letter. Challenged by *scholastici* outside the monastery, Isidore was forced to navigate between his prior sophistic knowledge and his new Christianized paradigm. This resulted in new interpretations of Hellenistic scientific knowledge from an emerging and still ambiguous Christian-monastic perspective. Thus, Isidore himself is so deeply immersed in the classical categories of knowledge production that he uses Platonic arguments to oppose ideas that conflict Christian doctrine. It appears that the "classical" is an inescapable vocabulary of articulating knowledge in the service of polemic. The continuity of classical arguments appears to have been ensured by summarizing doxographies and catalogues of arguments, as can be judged from the repeated use of the same arguments, often in unsophisticated and compressed form. The likely core of Isidore's epistolary corpus, approximately

 **77** Picus, this volume, 47.

2,000 letters compiled perhaps a century after the monk's death and conserved by the "sleepless monks of Constantinople," suggests again the letters' ongoing contribution to monastic pedagogy.78

The constant reconfiguration of earlier knowledge by authors and readers, and readers turned authors, is also an issue in Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos' paper on one of Isidore's contemporaries: Socrates of Constantinople. His *Ecclesiastical History* is a miscellany composed of textual material as disparate as imperial letters, conciliar documents, and polemical orations. What is original about Socrates's text is, therefore, the arrangement of this prior material, his highlights, and emphases rather than Socrates's own writing. This text is in itself an interesting case of knowledge construction. Yet, Falcasantos moves beyond Socrates's applied compositional techniques and intentions to the reception of the edgy information about the monstrous, bloody actions committed by Bishop Macedonius of Constantinople and Arianizers more generally among Socrates's copyists. It appears that Socrates copied much of the respective material from Athanasius and added to the latter's polemic, thereby pulling his readers "into the orbit of Arian degeneracy."79 Socrates's text is not only full of monstrosities in terms of content but also in terms of the text's form, which left the seams visible between quotation, summary, and Socrates's own commentary. The copyist of Plut. 70.7 used paratextual tools to tame Socrates's "textual monster" and to turn it (again) into a navigable archive for the reader. By atomizing the text by means of *kephalaia* (headings) and annotations in the margins, the copyist seemingly prepared the text for the next "reader turned author" who would want to excerpt information from the text. It looks like the future deconstruction of the assembled piecemeal knowledge is already anticipated.

Nicola Reggiani investigates linguistic, paralinguistic, and nonlinguistic strategies used to structure and enhance medical knowledge as found in papyri. This is a prolific field for looking at knowledge construction, since, to remain effective, medical knowledge must be in a constant discourse with the past, the present, and the possible, anticipated future. Information regarding a certain condition needs to be clearly bundled and allocatable. For this purpose, recipe collections use horizontal lines or line displacements to differentiate optically between two recipes. Monograms were developed to replace words that typically introduced the condition and the therapy, thereby highlighting and separating

 **78** On the habit of retaining and collecting one's own letters, see van Hoof 2017, esp. 114–116; Schwitter 2017; on Isidore's letters and the "Sleepless monks of Constantinople," see Larsen 2017, 296 and 296 n. 98.

**79** Stephens Falcasantos, this volume, 107.

these two distinct parts of the recipe. Medical papyri, whether recipe books (*receptaria*) or more theoretical discussions, further included devices that enabled readers to engage actively with the content of the papyri. Reggiani identifies marginal notes referencing textual variants. This implies that these papyri were critically compared with other manuscripts which contained alternative views about how to cure a particular disease. Corrections of the language used in the papyri similarly testify to an intense interaction with the texts. Several strategies were applied for such interferences, such as interlinear and supralinear interventions and overdots and strokes. Some papyri provide section titles, short summaries in the margins, notes about the usefulness of the passage, or personal notes. Reggiani's analysis shows that, by way of paratextual devices, any text could be turned into a site where knowledge could be constructed by physicians from different places and times. Conversely, knowledge could be deconstructed by way of interference from the margins. It appears that it was not only the human body, or certain *materia medica*, that could be "epistemic objects," that is, objects used to produce knowledge.80 Rather, the medical treatise itself served as an epistemic object.

Obviously, knowledge does not evolve consistently but is a constant backand-forth between success and failure, accident, and taste. The never-ending trial of knowledge is perhaps best illustrated in the realm of applied mathematics, which often comes down to a binary between right and wrong. Courtney Ann Roby makes the case for the utility not of signs of successfully applied knowledge but of failure, that is, mistakes. She uses the latter to dive deep into the reasoning behind some of the miscalculations in the newly published papyrus P. Math.81 These mistakes indicate that the author of this papyrus was a person with solid mathematical everyday skills such as the conversion of measurements or basic arithmetic, who challenged himself (?) with more difficult tasks. For example, he tried to calculate the amount of grain a vaulted granary could contain with the volume of a complicated, uncategorizable shape and with the number of bricks in a tower. An inner monologue becomes visible when the "solver," as Roby calls the author, breaks down numbers after an excessive and obviously wrong result. This breakdown of numbers, which results now in the calculation of an unrealistically tiny granary, was clearly supposed to help the solver verify his strategy. Yet, like contemporary math students, the solver remains tied to the super procedure he chose for solving the problem in the first place, which leads again to the same mistake. Unlike current students, however, our ancient solver seems to

 **80** For the term "epistemic object," see Tybjerg 2017.

**81** P. Math was published by Bagnall/Jones 2020.

have faced these problems alone and without a teacher: the mistakes remain uncorrected. We are left to wonder what the solver's incentives were to push his mathematical competences further. Actual plans to build a granary? Peer pressure or social factors that are nowadays no longer associated with mathematical skills?

Indeed, mathematics, despite having taken a distinctly applied turn in late antiquity, also found their way into the period's rhetorical agon, as Monika Amsler's paper argues. Her contribution is a rather programmatic investigation into diverse factors that may have served as incentives for the composition of numerical maxims as they are found in the Babylonian Talmud. Classified by earlier scholarship as mnemonic devices of arbitrary content, these maxims have not received much attention. Indeed, the maxims, which often appear in thematically associative bundles, are not very gripping. Once made the center of scholarly attention, however, they raise interesting questions about their original purpose, about authorial merits, leisurely activities, continued education, and the significance of numbers in late antiquity. It appears that the maxims may, for example, be the result of creative collaboration when they are placed in the context of games played at dinner parties or public graffiti. It is quite feasible that someone would have taken the initiative and challenged colleagues or passers-by to enumerate, for example, "five things said about garlic," "eight things [that] reduce the semen," or "ten things that cause hemorrhoids."82

Lillian I. Larsen's paper looks at how modern scholarship has shaped accounts of monastic knowledge construction through emphasis or, in this case, neglect in totalizing narratives, particularly that of Henri-Irénée Marrou (1956). A positivistic reading of the sources taught Marrou that monks were more concerned with forgetting their prior, pagan education than with learning, thereby bringing "back into Christian tradition the virtues of the simple and unlettered" (Marrou 1956, 330). Larsen traces Marrou's interpretation of even the most explicit references to school monks and sketches of programs as singular and negligible back to an orientalist view of the unliterate, peasant, and yet mystical Egyptian desert. By contrast, Marrou reads the Western monastic literary remains as evidence of a highly literate community. "Ironically," writes Larsen, "by virtue of climate the richest range of extant school evidence is … 'eastern' … in provenance."83 Larsen goes on to depict the educational program as it can be conjectured from the writings of Eastern monastic leaders and shows how it is corroborated by archaeological finds of school exercises in the monasteries. The program

 **82** b. B. Qam. 82a; b. Git. 70a; and b. Ber. 55a, respectively.

**83** Larsen, this volume, 230.

is, in fact, not unlike the one put forward by Western grammarians and orators such as Quintilian, for example. According to this program, education started with the letters of the alphabet, their shape and sound, and proceeded from there to the syllables needed for reading. Students were then taught how to read names, words — not the simple ones, though — and ultimately sentences and sayings. In writing exercises, students were challenged to turn sentences into sayings, and sayings into short stories. Even complex inquiries into a topic retained this structure and would start with a sentence or saying. Those early "building blocks" obviously remained fundamental in the way individuals constructed their knowledge and negotiated their opinions.

In "Grammar in the School of Diodore of Tarsus," Robert Edwards approaches the remaining commentaries by Diodore of Tarsus not as exegetical texts that provide scholars with a glimpse of his particular method, but as artefacts that were produced to fulfill a role important enough that people invested time, labor, and money. By way of analyzing the content of the commentaries, by tracking down what other people wrote about Diodore's working methods and habits, and by comparing the nature of the extant commentaries with similar ones (e.g., Didymus the Blind), Edwards settles for a school context. Indeed, Diodore's biblical commentaries, often classified as employing a literal exegetical method against the allegorical one used by the Alexandrinians, frequently explain the grammar of a certain passage. Looking more closely at Diodore's commentary on the Psalms, Edwards points out that the commentary is not merely influenced by grammar, as prior scholarship would have it, but that it *is* grammar. The social and discursive nature of Diodore's commentaries and teaching, then, can be gleaned in that the grammatical examples are sometimes repeated, as if to rehearse with the students or to raise the issue again for those who missed a previous class. But then it also appears from various sources that Diodore taught a "polemical theology," a necessary skill for his students in order to successfully defend their beliefs against "heretics." Ultimately, the content of Diodore's curriculum conforms to the Roman area rhetorical exercises, as is to be expected based on the educational biography of the teachers, but the textual basis and the purposes have changed. Like Lillian Larsen's contribution to this volume, Edwards' assessment of Diodore's teaching shows that educational aims have not just been adapted to Christian ideas and customs. Rather, education and the emerging Christianized society with all the challenges it fostered mutually enforced and shaped each other. Ultimately, education does not happen in a vacuum.

The papers engage with the different forms of knowledge as they were identified in theories of knowledge construction, such as tacit, intuitive, explicit,

personal, and social knowledge. Picus's project of describing knowledge associated with a form goes somewhat ahead of the rabbinic sages themselves, who are not aware of their use of collective *tacit knowledge*: knowledge that is undisputed but cannot (or at least not fully) be articulated.84 Tacit knowledge, like exegetical knowledge, is mostly situational. That is why it is often so difficult to connect an author's sound argument in one place to the one made in another and to discern underlying principles. Tacit knowledge is related to *intuitive knowledge*, that is, ideas and imagination that are difficult to express since they are still new. Coogan shows how established and articulated *explicit knowledge* may pass through stages of intuitive knowledge again when confronted with a new technology: the effect that Eusebius's tables will have on the readers of the Gospels could only have been surmised. Conner places the eloquent Isidore of Pelusium on a continuum between the explicit knowledge stored in the ancient archive and his still intuitive knowledge of what Christian education should look like. Falcasantos shows how Socrates of Constantinople struggles to make other people's explicit knowledge seem like his own, deploying it tactically to make it confirm to his own rationale about the succession and importance of events. Roby's P. Math solver works to enrich his *personal knowledge*, which, according to Nakamori, builds on established, available knowledge, intuitive knowledge, and social knowledge. The aim of personal knowledge is to acquire new, valid knowledge for himself.85

As mentioned above, Nakamori observed the process of knowledge construction based on how a chess player develops new tactics. For this purpose (and simply to play chess), the player interacts with the chessboard and figurines but also with the game partner. The development of new tactics is thereby strongly marked by social knowledge. Without the dialectics between game partners, the experience of success and pushback, ideas and impulses cannnot be turned into tactics. This multidimensionality of knowledge construction is illustrated in Larsen's and Edward's papers: while the former engages ancient material to show how Egyptian monks acquired personal knowledge to build and consolidate the social status of their community, the latter maintains that an exegetical method does not exist for its own sake, but is socially constructed. Similarly, Amsler places rabbinic sages in a context of *social knowledge*, in which ideas are validated and put into words by a group through public acclamation and rejection.86

 **84** See Nakamori 2019, 97; Braf 2002, 78. On "collective tacit knowledge," see Collins 2010, 119– 138.

**85** See Nakamori 2019, 95.

**86** On *social knowledge* see further Nakamori 2019, 94–96.

#### **Epilogue**

We cannot, of course, always make knowledge construction and its components the primary focus of our research. But keeping in mind questions of knowledge construction may help reduce the tendency to identify a single cause as responsible for one or even several effects. The awareness of the constructedness of knowledge, not only our own but also the one we investigate, encourages contextual analysis, especially regarding resources. What does the author (or painter, sculpturer, or producer of a mosaic, for that matter) know, and what are they anticipating? What can they know or imagine, and what do they think they know? How does the available technology shape this knowledge?

The latter question has recently been addressed in theories of distributed cognition, which posit that the mind is shaped by things by way of analogy and metaphor drawing. Without physical objects, humans would be stuck, uninspired and unable to invent.87 What appears to be a somewhat basic acknowledgement meanwhile remains a hypothesis, contested by the very strong implementation of the Cartesian divide between the human mind and material things, between subject and object, in Western reason.

Rarely, ancient sources themselves give us a glimpse into such analogydrawing, the entanglement of the human mind with physical objects and with their visual and perceptive affordances. Thus, Andrew Riggsby observed that Varro, before giving the sole instruction recorded in Latin texts to produce a table, "had offered the reader a concrete physical analogy — the checkerboard-like playing surface for the game of latrunculin (LL 10.22). As far as we can tell, the rules of the game assign no significance to the rows and columns as such, so the board is not a table in itself. At the same time, though, it provides the reader with a "scaffolding" and in particular it frames the fully two-dimensional extension of the eventual table."88 Others, like Aelian, realized the importance of visual representation — in his case of tactical theory — for students that learned without instructor (*hyphēgētēs*) and supplied his discussion with sketches.89

The advantages of thinking along the lines of factors of knowledge construction more broadly and, especially, more physically may not necessarily result in a reversal of the initial thesis or of a scholarly consensus arrived at by more monocausal approaches. But it can help to ground these results more firmly and,

**87** E.g., Malafouris 2013.

**88** Riggsby 2019, 78.

**89** Roby (forthcoming). Roby notes the same argument in Ptolemy, *Harmonica* III.3.64–71.

especially, more directly within "the culture we are studying."90 Thinking about knowledge construction could do for historians what the kind reminder on the train does for passengers: both can remind those leaving (either the analysis or the train) to look back and check whether something has been forgotten.

Without corroborating detail, Barbara Tuchman once wrote, "Historical narrative and interpretation, both, may slip easily into the invalid. It is a disciplinarian."91 This "corroborative detail" can be found in the realm of texts, geographical or material givens, artifacts, or social structures. Indeed, unlike texts, which can more easily be forced to agree with the historian's interpretations, material artifacts seem more reluctant in that they simply cannot always do what we want them to.92 Thinking with knowledge construction allows, this volume suggests, a more comprehensive look for such details by the scholar crafting models of broad explication.

What we offer here is ultimately a chessboard and some tokens. May they serve the reader in developing new strategies and in turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge in areas and fields that were, out of ignorance or space restrictions, left out of this volume.

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### Daniel Picus **Better Left Unread: Rabbinic Interpretations of Prophetic Scrolls**

**Abstract:** This paper analyzes classical rabbinic interpretation of two visions from the prophetic corpus of the Hebrew Bible. Both of these visions — one from Ezekiel, and one from Isaiah — involve the unexpected presence and examination of a mysterious scroll whose contents, while known, are never explicitly read. Rabbinic interpretations of these scrolls further this lack of focus on the written contents of the scrolls by emphasizing their material, physical dimensions: their relationship to other scrolls, their size and shape, and their putative relationship to the body of God. I argue that this focus on the scrolls as material objects in later interpretation suggests that the rabbis conceive of the knowledge contained therein as a material component of the world. This hints at a larger set of assumptions at play in rabbinic literature, in which divine wisdom acts as a blueprint for the world.

### **Introduction**

Twice in the prophetic corpus of the Hebrew Bible — the collection of oracles, narratives, prophecies, and poems collectively known to the ancient rabbis as the "*Nevi'im*" — a prophet has a vision of a scroll he does not read.1 These visions are not statements about the literacy of the prophets in question, but rather testaments to the multivalent layers of meaning present in the image of a scroll.2 Neither of the scrolls are said to be blank: both visions provide a general statement about the scroll's contents, but the vision makes it quite clear that it

 **1** Ezekiel 2:8–3:3; Zechariah 5:1–4.

**2** There is a substantial amount of scholarly discourse on the question of early Israelite literacy, but such questions are not of great concern to us here. More important is the widespread understanding of the materials and implements of reading and writing. For an account of the intertwined relationship between literacy and biblical composition, see Schniedewind 2004, 84–90. Schniedewind carefully discusses the lack of images of writing and reading in the earlier prophets, like first Isaiah and Hosea, and the later association of writing with prophetic activity, which is what we see in Ezekiel and Zechariah. Importantly, he also points out that even these earlier prophets made oracles that were recorded, collected, and edited by a scribal class.

is not the writing that lends import to the scroll. It is the scroll itself, as an object, an artifact, and a vision, that carries meaning. These two visions of scrolls and their subsequent reception in rabbinic literature provide us with an opportunity to investigate ideas about the role of texts and written materials as conveyers of knowledge that goes beyond the written word.

The prophet gives meaning to these unread scrolls. He makes them part of a broader message: for Zechariah, the flying giant scroll is a curse, whose effects are all-encompassing and broad, affecting all those in the land who steal and swear;3 for Ezekiel, who consumes his scroll, the scroll is at first "dirges, lamentations, and woe," but it becomes nourishment, comfort, and sweetness.4 The scrolls are not mere symbols, although their symbolic functions surely encompass potential allegorical interpretations. They are the message, material emblems of the transmission of knowledge from the deity to the prophet — and then, put into words and written on text, transmitted from the prophet to the people. They are images that "work" because of the particularities of how knowledge was transmitted in Ancient Israel.5 As the norms for the transmission and production of knowledge change, so too do the images that bolster and underscore the legitimacy of that production and transmission. The images at play in the biblical text itself, rooted in a particular time and place, take on a different meaning in the later rabbinic context, in which the transmission of knowledge occurs in rubrics largely organized by a Roman culture in the wake of the Hellenistic age.6 Such changes remind us that though the significance of a literary image is culturally contingent on a particular reading, the significance is not *limited* to a single reading. The different ways that later rabbis envision the significance of the images at play here are an instructive reminder of this fact.

I use these scrolls and their later materializations in late ancient rabbinic literature as an entry point into thinking about the intertwined nature of materiality and knowledge in late antique Judaism, as overlaid onto similar discourses in the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature. A scroll is a concrete, material object, and in the ancient world, a reasonably common one (at least, among the

 **3** Zechariah 5:3.

**4** Ezekiel 3:3.

**5** Sanders 2017 has argued cogently for a model of Near Eastern knowledge transmission rooted in the structures of the Aramaic scribal class.

**6** Annette Yoshiko Reed has documented much of this transition and its ramifications: see Reed 2020. While her analysis is focused heavily on the 3rd century CE, the complicated lineages she traces are part of the substrate of rabbinic literature.

literate, cultured elite).7 Knowledge, on the other hand, is abstract — or so we often treat it. What can a scroll in a vision, a scroll written about by a prophet, and then interpreted, reinterpreted, and retold by later rabbis, tell us about the way knowledge, writing and prophecy interact? What can this intersection tell us about the rabbis who formulated it? In this essay, I argue that moments in rabbinic literature such as these — the later interpretations of prophetic scrolls — offer glimpses into the rabbis' expansive conception of knowledge as an underlying principle of the material world, contained not only in writing, texts, Torah, the ossification of processes of knowledge transmission, and the ever-controversial books, but also in the forms, contexts, vessels, and shapes of the material world itself. The flying and consumed scrolls of Zechariah and Ezekiel are not symbols or floating signifiers: they are knowledge itself, and knowledge in both the particular and the expansive sense. After briefly contextualizing the rabbinic movement within broader trends of knowledge, expertise, and education in the later Roman empire and introducing the biblical texts in question, I move on to examine classical Palestinian and Babylonian rabbinic texts that take up these prophetic visions in detail. From there, I move to a more expansive discussion of rabbinic texts that conceive of knowledge as embedded in the material foundations, and even origins, of the world, before concluding by articulating how discourses of knowledge transmission are intertwined with, and inseparable from, discourses of materiality.

### **Rabbis, Books, and Knowledge**

The rabbis of the late-antique eastern Mediterranean strategically used discourses surrounding the practice of reading to craft an image of their own authority that transcended, and even claimed to reject, other forms of bookoriented knowledge in the Eastern Mediterranean. This strategy does not mean that the rabbis were unfamiliar with the practice of reading, or even broader, text-based strategies of pedagogy and knowledge production. On the contrary, they were implicated in, and familiar with, the materials, technologies, and practices of reading that were current in the broader Roman Empire and Mediterranean basin of late antiquity.8 The selective use of language involving texts,

 **7** For older, but fuller accounts of the scroll form, see Cavallo/Chartier 1999, especially 83–89. See also the foundational work in Roberts/Skeat 1983, 5–10.

**8** For the most important discussion of early rabbis as Roman provincial elites, see Lapin 2012.

composition, and reading can be understood as a strategy of self-formation and authorization that sets them up as privileged outsiders to an educated world circumscribed, in the early centuries of the Common Era, by the Greek tradition of *paideia*. 9 This particular relationship *to* paideia was tempered by earlier discourses of Aramaic pedagogy that are visible in texts of the Hebrew Bible, as well as other ancient Near Eastern literature. What makes the rabbinic discourse of knowledge transmission distinctive is a particular understanding of transmitted wisdom and knowledge as a material substance, an understanding that is visible at particular moments in rabbinic literature, especially in biblical interpretation.

One aspect of the rabbis' strategic use of reading is in their construction of knowledge in concrete, material terms. The rabbis of the early *midrashim* and *Talmudim* understood knowledge as something physical, rather than abstract. That physicality was present in language that understood knowledge as a thing written and read, present in the accoutrements of the scribe and scholar — but certainly not limited to them.10

In some ways, the prophetic visions under discussion here can be read as standard images of "books" and literary production, but the rabbis derive their message in ways far beyond the writing they contain. Crucially, the rabbis "read" these scrolls *differently* than the ways in which the biblical prophets seem to read them, illustrating both changing conceptions of how knowledge is constructed and transmitted, and shifting networks for power and knowledge. These are both moments, for the rabbis, where the prophet is focused on the object of a scroll as a medium of transmission, and the scroll's location and material qualities as signifiers, as opposed to the textual content therein. The content is ultimately significant as well, of course: but the significance of what is written, according to rabbinic interpretation, does not overshadow the material medium of transmission itself. The scroll itself becomes the message. By considering these texts as texts that construct knowledge in a particular, material way, we have an opportunity to think about the stakes of knowledge as material for late ancient rabbis.

 **9** Brown 1992, 35–70.

**10** This understanding was not limited to the rabbis, of course: the issue is simply that the materiality of rabbinic knowledge has yet to be fully described and analyzed. See Carr 2008 for more on this. My thinking on the materialization of the transmission of knowledge as critical for understanding the materiality of knowledge has been heavily influenced by Annette Reed. See, in particular, the discussion surrounding Reed 2020, 74–75.

The scrolls I discuss here are not, I think, scrolls that the rabbis understood as "actually existing," or as having direct analogues in the extratextual world. This allows us (and the rabbis) to consider them a bit more conceptually in relation to their own construction of knowledge. What can a scroll in a vision tell us about the way knowledge, writing, and prophecy interact? What can this interaction tell us about the rabbis who formulated it? Perhaps most importantly, it tells us that despite a baseline level of suspicion with which "new" written material was typically treated,11 writing provided a useful vocabulary for the rabbis to frame their own understanding of knowledge as a material, concrete element: a literal blueprint and building block for the world in which they lived. Learning involves new knowledge by definition, but the rabbis were careful to frame that new knowledge within particular, specific discourses and settings. When confronted with an image in which the new information conveyed is tied inextricably to written material, the rabbis creatively ensure that the message the scroll conveys is present not in the written text to be read, but the material elements, presence, and movement of the scroll itself.

### **The Scrolls of the Prophets**

Writing and the written word were laden signifiers in the ancient Near East. They were associated with priests and scribes, and a class of religious practitioners whose skills made them uniquely capable of communicating with deities, as well as interpreting their will made manifest in the world.12 Even across the span of the "biblical period" (which is, of course, many periods, and several centuries), writing and reading remain both important markers of a certain educated class status, and links to divine and extra-human knowledge, both within biblical texts and in related literature.13 Scrolls appear as prophetic signs twice in the Hebrew Bible: in Ezekiel 2–3, and Zechariah 5. Scrolls in general, of

 **11** Wollenberg 2017. Wollenberg argues that texts as sources of *new* information were regarded as highly suspicious. On the other hand, texts as receptacles of known information — wellknown, studied, partially memorized and constantly recited stories, poems, and laws (such as the *Tanakh*) — were read in highly ritualized fashions, and understood as sacred, both conceptually and materially. While a Torah *could* be read for new information, as Wollenberg shows in her discussion, the idealized, positively-coded reading practice was either part of a highly formalized study, or a ritual lectionary.

**12** See, for example, Satlow 2014, 31–51, Schniedewind 2004, 34–34.

**13** Reed 2020, 11–21; 87–131.

course, appear much more regularly: Jeremiah's scribe Baruch writes one in Jeremiah 36, Deuteronomy 17 instructs a king to write a scroll of the law to keep with him at all times, and Numbers 5, the ritual of the suspected adulteress (or *sotah*), involves the writing, and then consumption, of a scroll for the performance of the ritual.14 In this section, I will focus on the first two examples, from Ezekiel and Zechariah.

Before doing so, however, it is worthwhile to note that as remarkable as these textual moments seem to us, they are not as out of the ordinary as they seem. While they use images and materials (namely, writing surfaces and implements) unique to themselves, the performance of, and interpretation of, prophetic actions as "signs" was commonplace in prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible.15 In the context of their composition, these textual excerpts should be read as part of the broader realm of textual discourse that uses performed, viewed, and interpreted signs in order to convey divine messages.16

The book of Ezekiel begins with the prophet's vision of the divine chariot leaving Jerusalem, carrying the presence of God with it, bearing it towards the Exile in Babylon. In chapter 2, the Presence of God speaks directly to the prophet, giving him a charge to speak to the Children of Israel.17 His message is contained in a scroll, written front and back, and rather than simply showing it to Ezekiel, the Divine Presence demands that he consume it.  And I looked, and behold, there was a hand extended out towards me, and behold, in it was a scroll. And he spread it out before me, and it was written front and back, and written upon it were lamentations, dirges, and woe. And he said to me, "Mortal, what you find, eat; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the House of Israel." And I opened my mouth, and he fed me this scroll. And he said to

 **14** The biblical text refers to this writing surface as a *sefer*, but given its size and use, it is entirely possible that it was merely a scrap. While this is a likely incomplete discussion of scrolls in particular, there are, of course, other written materials present in the biblical text: the tablets of the Ten Commandments, written amulets, and others. See Picus (forthcoming).

**15** See, for example, Nissinen 2019, 57–64 and Lundbom 2010, 144–145.

**16** Friebel 1999, 14 refers to all non-verbal forms of communication in a prophetic book as a "sign-act;" these actions must be *intended* to relay information. I am grateful to Kerry Sonia for this reference.

**17** Previous interpretations of the book of Ezekiel's beginning have seen the vision of the chariot, or *merkavah*, followed by the scroll, and then by Ezekiel's call narrative at the end of chapter 3, and the language of speechlessness that pervades it, as metaphoric of his ministry as a whole: the move from oral to textual prophecy, and the prophet's own inability to speak prophecies other than those of destruction and woe. Freibel discounts these interpretations, reading the prophet's speechlessness as a sign-act (Freibel 1999, 169–188).

me, "Mortal, feed your stomach, and fill your belly with this scroll, which I am giving to you." I ate it, and it was as sweet honey in my mouth. (Ezek. 2:8–3:3)18

Two elements of this vision immediately leap out as worthy of note. The Divine Presence hands Ezekiel a scroll inscribed on the front and the back. This scroll was presumably made of papyrus: parchment did not become a common or widespread writing surface in ancient West Asia until the Hellenistic period, and Ezekiel's vision pre-dates that by several centuries. Even so, writing appearing on both sides of the scroll would have been significant regardless of its material.19 In addition to making the scroll much more difficult to manipulate and read, most writing surfaces were only prepared for writing on one side.20 Beyond this, a rolled document being written on both sides would run the risk of ink smearing and becoming illegible. This is a text written without regard for the rules of the scribal trade, either written outside of their remit, or using imagined materials that neither smudge nor bleed. The double-sided nature of the scroll as a prophetic sign, of course, is meant to highlight the magnitude of woe and lamentation that Ezekiel will prophesy for the Judahite community in exile but the mechanics of this double-siding are indicative of far more. If we ask ourselves how the image would have resonated with an audience that knew writing, it seems clear that any numinous qualities would have resided in both the writing *on* the scroll, and the double-sided scroll itself. Even if the biblical author is unconcerned with the unreal dimensions and qualities of the scroll, these are elements that matter deeply to the rabbis.

After being presented with this double-sided scroll, Ezekiel is instructed not to read it, but to eat it. This is a powerful metaphor of consumption, but it is also more than that: Rather than reading the dirges and lamentations that are on the scroll, Ezekiel internalizes (and ultimately transforms) them completely. Their

 **18** Translation is author's own, based on the NJPS and NRSV. Hebrew text taken from the *Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia*.

פצה פיך ואכל את אשר אני נתן אליך ואראה והנה יד שלוחה אלי והנה בו מגלת ספר ויפרש אותה לפני והיא כתובה פנים ואחור וכתוב אליה קנים והגה והי ויאמר אלי בן אדם את אשר תמצא אכול אכול את המגלה הזאת ולך דבר אל בית ישראל ואפתח את פי ויאכלני את המגלה הזאת ויאמר אלי בן אדם בטנך תאכל ומעיך תמלא את המגלה הזאת אשר אני נתן אליך ואכלה ותהי בפי כדבש למתוק

**19** Roberts and Skeat are quite clear that scrolls in antiquity could be either papyrus or parchment, and that neither papyrus codices nor parchment scrolls would have gone against ancient expectations (Roberts/Skeat 1983, 5). Even so, papyrus was the more common writing surface in the Levant prior to the Hellenistic era.

**20** See Lewis 1974, 39–69. While papyrus written on both sides certainly exists (see n. 41), Lewis suggests, according to ancient sources, that papyrus was *generally* understood to be inscribed on one side.

nature becomes a part of his prophetic charge in the same way that Isaiah's lips are purified with a burning coal in his call narrative.21 A text is also consumed in Numbers 5, as part of the *Sotah* ritual. Sarit Kattan Gribetz traces this particular image in later rabbinic interpretation, showing how consumption is a particularly gendered way for the rabbis to discuss learning without bringing reading into the equation.22 Ezekiel's consumption of the scroll, if it *is* intended to suggest a gendered mode of knowledge transmission, does so subtly — at least in comparison to the later rabbinic understanding of the *Sotah*, and other late ancient texts that understand eating as a particularly feminized mode of acquiring knowledge.23

The second prophetic image involving an unread scroll comes from Zechariah. Zechariah is a prophet of the Exile proper — his prophecies seem to have been written down later than Ezekiel's. In chapter 5, Zechariah relates a vision of a flying scroll.

And again, I raised my eyes, and I saw, behold, a scroll was flying. And he said to me, "What do you see?" And I said, "I see a flying scroll, twenty cubits long, and its width is ten cubits." And he said to me, "This is the curse which goes out over all the land. For everyone who steals, as is on one side, has gone unpunished, and everyone who swears, as is written on the other side, has gone unpunished. I have sent it out, (oracle of Yahweh of Hosts) and it shall come to the house of the thief, and to the house of the one swearing in my name in vain, and it shall lodge within his house, and utterly end their timber and their stones. (Zech. 5:1–4)24

The image of consumption is gone from Zechariah's vision of the flying scroll, but its double-sidedness remains. Zechariah adds an almost absurd size to the scroll — its width is only half its length, which is rare enough, but that width is already ten cubits: fifteen feet!25 If the miraculous nature of the scroll as high-

 **21** Isaiah 6:5–7. This call narrative, importantly, also takes place during a vision of the heavenly host.

**22** Gribetz 2018. Rabbinic literature is, at times, concerned with keeping women separate from certain elements of Torah study and reading; *consuming* the text skirts this issue completely. Gribetz also notes that similar metaphors arise in early Christian discussions of ascetic women.

**23** See also Boyarin 1994, 126–130.

ואשוב ואשא עיני ואראה והנה מגלה עפה ויאמר אלי מה אתה ראה ואמר אני ראה מגלה עפה ארכה עשרים **24** באמה ורחבה עשר באמה ויאמר אלי זאת האלה היוצאת על פני כל הארץ כי כל הגנב מזה כמוה נקה וכל הנשבע מזה כמוה נקה הוצאתיה נאם יהוה צבאות ובאה אל בית הגנב ואל בית הנשבע בשמי לשקר ולנה בתוך ביתו וכלתו ואת עציו ואת אבניו

**25** It need hardly be stated that this is far beyond the norm for the size of a scroll. Pliny states that there are never more than twenty sheets in a papyrus scroll, with the width varying con-

lighted by being written on both sides is downplayed, its miraculous nature, derived from its sheer size, is front and center. The fact that it is flying, of course, is similarly miraculous, and is an anomalous image. While its doublesided nature, as well as images of consuming scrolls, appear elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, flight is unique.

This was an image that troubled early interpreters even prior to the rabbis. The Septuagint, for example, translates "scroll" (מגילה/*megillah*) as "δρέπανον," meaning "sickle," or "scythe."26 Myers and Myers state this is due to confusion with Joel 4:13, in which the word ל ָגּ ַמ/*maggal*, which contains the same consonants as *megillah*, or scroll, means "sickle."27 The word *megillah* was unlikely to be problematic to the translators in and of itself: other occurrences are translated as "κεφαλὶς βιβλίου." This is a reasonably common term for a scroll in ancient Greek, and certainly a preferred term for various LXX translators.28

The author or compiler of the text of Zechariah itself, of course, knows that this is an image that requires explanation: that is why the angelic interpreter of verses 3 and 4 explains the image's meaning, both to Zechariah and to the reader. The scroll itself is a curse — again, an image and association that we see in Numbers 5. Its size suggests the curse's magnitude, while its flight enables one to imagine just how far-reaching the curse inscribed on it might be. Myers and Myers point out that the length — twenty cubits — is not outside the realm of possibility, but a width of ten cubits is surely symbolic.29 The dimensions of ten by twenty cubits, they argue, carry direct resonances to the dimensions of Solomon's Temple as described in 1 Kings; specifically, we should read it as a reference to the size of the *ulam*, or porch, or perhaps the dimensions of the golden *cherubim* that sheltered the Ark of the Covenant with their wings.30 This is an association that the rabbis will also make.

The actual content of the scroll, beyond extremely vague language, is left undescribed. We know that it is against thieves and those who swear false oaths in the name of God — but very little else, including the actual wording. The

**29** Myers/Myers 1987, 279.

 siderably (but never going over something close to a foot). See Pliny, *Naural History* xiii. 77–78; *apud* Lewis 1974, 37–39.

**26** Rahlfs/Hanhard 2006.

**27** Myers/Myers 1987, 277–278.

**28** The word κεφαλὶς on its own properly refers to the beginning of a column, but combined with βιβλίου seems to indicate an entire scroll. It does seem that the LXX translators use the word metonymically. Cf. Lewis 1974, 78.

**30** Myers/Myers 1987, 280. The porch was symbolic of the meeting between priest and populace, as the only (or perhaps most notable) location where such meetings occurred.

wording of the curse, it seems clear, is not the important aspect: rather, the fact that it was written down, on a scroll, and that the scroll plays a part in Zechariah's vision are the aspects that the text's compiler, and later the rabbis, found most important.

As seen in the resonances between this text and Numbers 5, the *Sotah* ritual, connections between writing and cursing were common in the ancient Near East. Isabel Cranz explores this relationship, arguing that Zechariah 5, in conjunction with Ezekiel 2–3, relies on this widespread logic of cursing.31 She connects these prophetic visions of scrolls to other narrative moments relating written documents and curses; Jeremiah 36:2–4, for example, relates Baruch the son of Neriah's recording of Jeremiah's curses, and the covenant ceremony of Deuteronomy 27–28 involves the establishment of stone slabs inscribed with the stipulations of an extensive curse.32 This close association derives, Cranz argues, from ancient Near Eastern oath-swearing ceremonies.33 Even beyond rituals of covenant and cursing, though, we can see that writing in the Hebrew Bible is never far from the numinous.

Even in the Biblical text itself, these two visions were tied to networks of knowledge that relied both on the establishment of a professional class of scribes and religious professionals, as well as a more casual and widespread understanding of their practices. The association of writing with religious, administrative, and even divine power means that prophetic images of writing were particularly potent, and ripe for interpretive creativity.34 Inheriting a text that was largely constructed under the rubrics of an Ancient Near Eastern scribal pedagogy, but themselves inhabiting a world where knowledge production was largely shifting to a Hellenistic pedagogic model, the rabbis received these images through their reception of the Biblical text. They reinterpret, and indeed, re-understand the function of the scrolls therein in order to make them fit into their own conception of knowledge as hanging precariously between the bookish and the non-bookish, all the while remaining a strikingly material substance.

 **31** Cranz 2016.

**32** Cranz 2016, 411; see also Quick 2017.

**33** Cranz 20016, 415–416.

**34** Satlow discusses the varieties of authority texts and writings could contain: oracular, normative, and literary. See Satlow 2014, 4–5.

### **Rabbinic Interpretations**

#### *Sifre to Numbers*

The earliest rabbinic interpretation of one of these visions appears in *Sifre Bamidbar*, or the *Sifre to Numbers*, a tannaitic rabbinic commentary on the book of Numbers, likely formed in the latter 3rd century.35 This interpretation relates a completely disparate text to the vision of Ezekiel 2–3, and it does so through investigating themes of knowledge and its transmission through material objects. The text being interpreted, or the text of the lemma, is Numbers 12:6, which comes after Aaron and Miriam complain about Moses's prophetic authority: God summons the three of them to the Tent of Meeting and declares, "Listen to my words: If there will be prophets of Yahweh among you, I will make myself known to them in a vision, I will speak to him in a dream."36 The interpretation is long — as rabbinic interpretations often tend to be — but it circles around the themes of prophecy, speech, and writing, by interpreting the scroll written front and back with reference to Moses being denied a vision of God's face (Exodus 33:17–23), while still being referred to as a prophet who spoke to him face-toface (Numbers 12:6). God's body is even brought into the equation. Rather than relaying the entire interpretation at length, I will briefly summarize Sifre Numbers 103:1, and then focus on elements that are particularly important for our purposes.

Sifre Numbers 103:1 is a lengthy discourse interpreting Numbers 12:6–8, both continuously, and piecemeal. It begins by parsing the words the deity himself uses to speak to Moses, Aaron and Miriam, identifying a textual curiosity: when God speaks to rebuke Aaron and Miriam, he does so *politely*. 37 The word נא/*na* in biblical Hebrew, which God uses in Numbers 12:6, is a marker of a polite request — surely Yahweh is not in the habit of making requests!38 As with so many of Yahweh's actions, however, the rabbis interpret it normatively, rather than descriptively.  In what seems like a jump, the passage next turns to prophecy and vision. This isn't a jump at all, however: it is simply a continuation into the next verse, where God is explaining to Moses, Aaron, and Miriam why Moses has a different sort of access to divine knowledge

 **35** Strack/Stemberger 1996, 297.

ויאמר שמעו נא דברי אם יהיה נביאכם יהוה במראה אליו אתודע בחלום אדבר בו **36**

**37** Specifically, he uses the term נא/*na.*

**38** Brown/Driver/Briggs 1906, 609.

than they do — and indeed, how that access works. God speaks to Moses clearly, rather than through visions or dreams. The *Sifre* then claims that he is trusted even more than God's ministering angels, although Rabbi Yose then objects: Moses is trusted the most, with only the ministering angels being trusted more.

Moses's access to divine wisdom is so unique, that Rabbi Yose places his trustworthiness above the trustworthiness of the angels that minister to God himself. The rabbis then argue about the actual mechanics of Moses's unique access to God. God states that he speaks to Moses "mouth to mouth." This phrase suggests a direct conversation between Moses and the deity, but this is tempered with another suggestion on the part of the rabbis: perhaps, instead of a revelation of direct speech from God, Moses spoke with the divine presence. After all, Exodus makes it quite clear that a direct conversation with God can be deadly. This is a significant moment: the rabbis of the *Sifre* (the *tannaim*) are positing the divine presence as a mediator between Moses and the word of God. The actual mechanics of this are difficult, however: the divine presence as a mediator makes some sense, provided it is understood as distinct from God's body itself. Therefore, discussion then turns to what it means for a human being to look at God and not be able to live, a reference to Exodus 33. Unsurprisingly, the rabbis look for puns here: "And live" is understood as being not a verb, but rather a plural noun ("and the living things"): *va-ḥai* becoming *v-ḥayot*. The rabbis move from discussing the mechanics of prophecy to a discussion of death at the hands of a divine revelation, or perhaps a face-to-face epiphany — but they do so entirely within the remit of a prophetic call narrative, Ezekiel 3, while also referencing the *ḥayot*, or beasts, of Ezekiel 1. A verse from the Psalms is brought in to close out this particular portion of the discussion, while still keeping it connected to the broader prophetic theme: The divine presence, the psalm makes clear, makes itself visible to humanity at the hour of death.

The interpretation continues on with the next words from Numbers 12:8. God is still explaining Moses's uniqueness in Numbers, and the rabbinic text moves from riddles, which God does not use for Moses, to the fact that Moses sees God's likeness: his image, or תמונה/*temunah.* It is this "image," or likeness, that finally links our text to the double-sided scroll of Ezekiel 2–3. In Exodus 33, God shows Moses his back instead of his face, and the rabbis, in a remarkable exegetical leap, connect that to the scroll written both front and back. At this point, I quote the *Sifre* itself.

The Torah teaches, "and he beholds the likeness of Yahweh" (Numbers 12:8). This is a vision of his back. You might ask, "What is this, a vision of his back? Perhaps it is a vision of his face?" The Torah teaches, "And I will remove my palm, and you shall see my back" (Ex. 33:23).39

The likeness of Yahweh is not his face, but his back, since Scripture cannot contradict itself,40 and Exodus makes it clear that Moses *never* sees God's face. The rabbis of the *Sifre* make another radical jump, then, into Ezekiel — this time focused on the idea of the "back," a term in Hebrew that can also mean "behind," or "after."

"And he spread it out before me, and it was written front and back" (Ezek. 2:10). And don't even those who are light of intellect, and commoners, act thus, when they are writing [write on the front and back]? Why does the Torah say "front and back?" "Front" is in this world, and "back" is in the world to come." "Front" is the security of the righteous, and their afflictions in this world, and "back" is the gift of the reward of the righteous, and the punishment of the wicked, in the world to come.41

The image of the scroll written on two sides from Ezekiel 2 is transformed in the *Sifre* — if not in content, then certainly in reception. A scroll written on both sides, as noted earlier, is a rarity in the Biblical world, and an indication of something miraculous and fine: an ink that doesn't transfer, a papyrus or parchment that allows for writing on more than one face. Here, however, the rabbis understand it very differently. A scroll with writing on both sides is not a piece of writing to take note of: it is a piece of scrap paper, the province of the simple, or the commoner.42 Even still, the rabbis understand the presence of writing on both sides as symbolic: it represents this world and the world to come, and can likely also be understood as the duality between the righteous and the wicked in both timelines. It is the association with scrap paper, however — and perhaps even of unknown written texts with negative outcomes in general, especially in religious contexts — that adds this vision's next dimension in the rabbinic imagination.

 **39** Sifre Numbers 103:1

ת"ל ותמונת ה יביט זה מראה אחוריים אתה אומר זה מראה אחוריים או אינו אלא זה מראה פנים ת"ל והסירותי את כפי וראית את אחורי

**40** This is, of course, one of the foundational claims of the early biblical interpreters, including the rabbis: see Kugel 2007, 14–17.

ויפרוש אותה לפני והיא כתובה פנים ואחור והלא אף קלי הדעת וההדיוטות עושים כן 103:1 *.*Num Sifre **41** כותבים ומה ת"ל פנים ואחור פנים בעולם הזה ואחור לעולם הבא. פנים בשלוותם ויסורים של צדיקים בעולם הזה ואחור מתן שכרן של צדיקים ופורענותם של רשעים לעולם הבא

**42** A few examples of papyrus scrolls like this exist, called *opisthographs*. See, for example, Perrot 2020.

"And written upon it were lamentations, dirges, and woe" (Ezek. 2:10). The lamentations of the wicked, as it is written, "This is a lamentation, and it shall be intoned" (Ezek. 32:16). "Dirges," of the righteous, as it is written, "To the music of the ten-stringed harp, to the music of the lute, with melody and lyre together" (Ps. 92:4). "And woe," of the wicked, as it is written, "Calamity upon calamity is coming" (Ezek. 7:26).43

The text is particularly terse and difficult to understand here. The implication, however, is that the writing on the double-sided scroll — the dirges, lamentations, and woe — are directly connected to the fates of the righteous and the wicked, which in turn are connected thematically to the rabbinic understanding of God's face, and God's back. The double-sidedness of Ezekiel's scroll is the message: it is the present and the future, the benefit of living in God's presence, and the calamity of living in a world on which God has turned His back. The vision itself is a merism, in which the opposition of front and back with the present world and the world to come, and the extremes of divine favor, serve to contain the extensive possibilities of divine knowledge in a single vision of a single scroll. This is highlighted by the verses the *tannaim* cite: in the midst of a message of woe, the rabbis also cite Psalm 92, a joyous praise-psalm of the Sabbath day, to describe the "dirges" of Ezekiel's prophecy.

It is almost as if the rabbis are trying to impart two messages. The first is that whether a prophet is like Moses, and speaks directly to the deity, or like later prophets who only encounter him in a dream, is unimportant. The content of the message comes from God one way or another; whether it is from direct speech, or a divine image of a floating scroll, the origin of either is the same. As the text says: "The Torah does not say 'Against my servant Moses,' but rather that 'You have spoken against Me,' speaking against my servant Moses."44 The scroll is never *read*, however, despite its presence in this interpretation: the fact of it conveys the prophet's message, and even the biblical verses cited do not appear on it, but rather describe its contents in general terms.

The second message is one of woe and devastation, even in the midst of God's glory. It is a remarkable thematic movement for a passage that begins with a statement about polite speech, but this wide, sweeping movement is also tightly connected: prophetic discourse, polite speech, and the divine presence are all linked through the materiality of knowledge, brought together intelligibly by the image and presence of a scroll written on both sides. The section of *Sifre Bamidbar* just quoted above appears in later sources: we will see it again in

 וכתוב אליה קינים והגה והי קינים של רשעים שנאמר קינה היא וקננוה והגה של 103:1 *.*Num Sifre **43** צדיקים שנא' עלי עשור ועלי נבל עלי הגיון בכנור והי של רשעים שנאמר הוה על הוה באה **44** *Sifre Bamidbar* 103:1.

the Babylonian Talmud, in a tradition that combines interpretation of Ezekiel 2 with Zechariah 5, and it is perhaps one of our clearest indicators of the rabbis' understanding knowledge as material. We move next, though, to a midrash from the subsequent period of rabbinic activity, the amoraic period, which cites Zechariah's giant scroll.

#### **Leviticus Rabbah**

Zechariah's flying scroll appears in a slightly later collection of midrash: Leviticus Rabbah, which is Palestinian, and was likely compiled in the fifth century CE.45 Leviticus Rabbah is typically known as a "homiletic" midrash, as opposed to an "exegetical" midrash, although these distinctions are becoming less and less common.46 The text is composed of two interpretive formats. The first format is what is classically known as the "proem," or *petiḥa*/*petiḥta* in Hebrew and Aramaic. In this highly intricate form, one verse from scripture — often, but not always, from Psalms or Proverbs — is linked through a process of homiletic "chaining" to another verse, with numerous intermediary verses expounded on the way.47 The other format is significantly less crafted: this is a lemmatic commentary, identified by snippets of a verse from the text being commented upon (in this case, Leviticus), and interpretations identified by the word *gufa* (which is also the Aramaic word for "body"), which mark a word or phrase's "meaning."

Leviticus Rabbah 6:3 is an exegesis of Leviticus 5:1, which relates a law about the responsibilities of one with information when someone is publicly ונפש כי תחטא ושמעה קול אלה והוא עד או ראה או ידע אם לוא :reads text The .accused עונו ונשא יגיד, which translates to, "And when a person sins — and one hears a public imprecation, and he is a witness, or has seen or learned of the matter — if he does not testify, he bears the guilt." We can, I think, already see the themes that will connect the flying scroll to this verse from the Pentateuch: the flying scroll is a manifestation of the public imprecation, making it incumbent on all with knowledge to witness and to act. The text in question begins:

Gufa: Do not let a false vow be a light thing in your eyes, for behold Zechariah saw it, "And I raised my eyes and I saw, behold, a scroll was flying," (Zech. 5:1). What does flying

 **45** Strack/Stemberger 1996, 291.

**46** Visotzky 2003.

**47** The classic treatment of the *petihta* is Heinemann 1971. See also Cohen 1981 and Vitotzky 2003, 23–30, where he argues for the essential incoherence of this category.

mean? Floating. As it says, "And it flew to me, one of the Seraphim [and in its hand was a live coal, which he took from the altar with a pair of tongs]," (Isaiah 6:6). "And he said to me, 'What do you see?' And I said I see a flying scroll, [twenty cubits long, and ten cubits wide]." (Zech. 5:2). Rabbi Abbahu said, "Even the skin of an elephant and the skin of a camel are not this size," and you say here "This is the curse which goes out over all the land," (Zech. 5:3), from here it went out from the entrance to the sanctuary, which we learned [a technical term which means this is a reference to the Mishnah] has an entrance that is forty cubits high and twenty wide.48

The flying scroll of Zechariah is initially linked directly to Isaiah's call narrative: while Isaiah was purified, and given a message, by a burning coal touched to his lips, the rabbis are trying to make Zechariah's vision of the scroll into a similarly momentous event. The size of the scroll is, according to them, a direct reference to the fact that it flew out of the entrance of the Temple in Jerusalem which is even larger than this seemingly gargantuan scroll. The explanation continues, explaining why this vision — these two visions, really — are related to a section of the Pentateuch that discusses testimony and false vows.

Rabbi Aibo said, "How come when man swears on a Torah scroll, we bring before him empty skin bottles? To show that yesterday, this bottle was full of sinews and bones, and now it is entirely empty. Thus will one who causes his companion to wear a false oath in the end go out entirely empty of his possessions." Rabi Assa said this is about a false oath, and Rabbi Yonah said this is even in regards to the truth.49

The connection between Zechariah's scroll and Leviticus 5:1 is made clearer here: the practices in question, at least in the rabbis' day, involve swearing on a Torah scroll. Rabbi Aibo references an interesting practice that we don't see elsewhere: whenever an oath is taken on a Torah scroll, empty wineskins are present as well. Functionally, these might be there after a libation, which was common enough as part of oath-taking practices in the ancient eastern Mediterranean — but Rabbi Aibo certainly does not understand them that way.50 The passage continues, but enough of our themes have been revealed to end here. The flying scroll's size is an important element of its physicality, because the

 גופא אל תהי שבועת שוא קלה בעיניך שהרי זכריה חמי ליה ואשא עיני והנה מגילה עפה מה עפה 6:3: LevR **48** שייטא כמה דתימא ויעף אלי אחד מן הש רפים ויאמר אלי מה אתה ראה ואמר אני ראה מגלה עפה אמר רבי אבהו אפילו עורו של פיל ועורו של גמל אינן במדה כאן זאת האלה היוצאת על פני כל הארץ מהיכן יצאת מפתחו של אולם דתנן פתחו של אולם גבהו ארבעים אמה ורחבו עשרים אמה

אמר רבי איבו מפני מה משביעין האדם בספר תורה ומביאין לפניו נודות נפוחים לומר אתמול היה 6:3: LevR **49** הנוד הזה מלא גידים ועצמות ועכשיו הוא רק מכלן כך המשביע לחברו לשקר סוף שיצא ריקם מכל ממונו רבי אסא אמר על שקר רבי יונה אמר אפילו על אמת

**50** See Sommerstein/Torrance 2014.

size associates it with the doorway of Solomon's temple's sanctuary. Its existence as a material scroll written on front and back also places it in direct contradistinction to the empty skin bottles and the Torah scroll used for oaths. Bereft of both their wine and the flesh that once animated them as living creatures, the skin bottles are nevertheless not valueless and empty. Like the giant scroll, they provide meaning in their very presence and materiality.

The wineskins' double emptiness connects to the double significance of the scroll of Zechariah's vision: its flight in Zechariah is the vastness of the curse, although the rabbis connect it to the prophetic call, while the size and the area the scroll demarcates are nothing less than a reference to the Temple itself. It is a powerful hermeneutic. The wineskins are important because of what they lack, and the scroll is important (and perhaps even comprehensible) despite whatever may be written upon it. Again, these might not be unique signs in prophetic discourse or rabbinic interpretation, but they center around a written object while studiously ignoring the fact of writing. This makes them significant elements in an attempt to think about the ideology of writing among the classical rabbis.

#### **Babylonian Talmud**

The final two rabbinic interpretations I will discuss here both come from the Bablyonian Talmud, or Bavli. Bavli Gittin 60a deals with the image from Zechariah, while bEruvin 21a interprets both visions — a fitting conclusion to this section. The Babylonian Talmud is a notoriously difficult text to study. Nominally a commentary on the Mishnah (albeit one that goes far beyond our standard ideas of commentary), the period of its composition, editing, and redaction extends from the 3rd century all the way to the cusp of the seventh or eighth. Each passage is composed of layers that come from different periods of rabbinic activity, and sometimes even different locations: here we attempt to read them holistically, and in the context of the later layers of redaction and editing that would have taken place in Babylonia.

Our passage in Bavli Gittin comes in the middle of a lengthier discussion that involves a variety of material texts and the restrictions and stipulations surrounding them. There is a debate over whether lectionary readings from the prophets, for example, must be read from the scrolls of the prophets, and not lectionary scrolls (the latest layer of the Bavli, the *stam*, mandates that lectionary scrolls are appropriate), as well as whether or not it is appropriate to write out individual portions of the Torah for children to study. Such practices, of course, are familiar to us from the world of monastic education, but the Talmud gives us a glimpse into the debate over them in rabbinic communities.51

This particular discussion stems from an assertion made anonymously, in a *baraita* (a non-Mishnaic tannaitic tradition): that the Torah was given scroll by scroll, which presumably means book by book, rather than all at once, as a single document. The ramifications of this discussion are significant for the rabbis: the mode in which the Torah was transmitted can determine whether or not it is acceptable to copy it down in individual parts, or whether it must always be copied as a whole. This passage, though short, is particularly complex, because it relies on a midrashic association between individual instantiations of words in distinct verses. In this case, the linked words are "scroll" (*megillah*) and "take" (*laqo'aḥ*).

Rabbi Yochanan said in the name of Rabbi Bena'ah, "The Torah was given scroll by scroll, as it is said, 'Then I said, 'Behold I have come with the scroll of the book that is written for me.''" (Ps. 40:8). Resh Lakish says that the Torah was given as a complete/sealed book, as it is said, "Take this Torah scroll," (Deut. 31:26). And on the other hand, isn't it written, "Take?" as well? [The implication here is that Resh Lakish's argument is irrefutable because of this word, so how does Rabbi Yochanan counter it?] That is about after it was joined. And on the other hand, isn't it written, "With a scroll of the book written for me?" This shows that the entire Torah is called a scroll, as it is written, "And he said to me, 'What do you see? And I said, I see a scroll flying.'" (Zech. 5:2).52

This is a remarkable assertion on the part of the rabbis: not only are they claiming to have knowledge about what the content of Zechariah's scroll is, beyond the general indication that it contains a "curse": they are identifying it as the scroll of the Torah itself. This fact is assumed to be so self-evident that it is used as evidence for another claim: that the Torah is only called a "scroll" when the entire manuscript is meant. This could be a reference to Deuteronomy 28 and the broader tradition of covenant curses that are contained in the Hebrew Bible.53 This interpretation, indeed, seems most likely, even if it is not the only one available to us. I think that there is *also* a conflation here between scrolls as

 **51** For an insightful introduction to this monastic material, see Lillian Larsen's contribution in this volume, and cited literature.

א"ר יוחנן משום רבי בנאה תורה מגילה מגילה ניתנה שנא' אז אמרתי הנה באתי במגילת ספר :a60 .Git .b **52** כתוב עלי ר"ש בן לקיש אומר תור ה חתומה ניתנה שנאמר לקוח את ספר התורה הזאת ואידך נמי הכתיב לקוח ההוא לבתר דאידבק ואידך נמי הכתיב במגילת ספר כתוב עלי ההוא דכל התורה כולה איקרי מגילה דכתיב ויאמר אלי מה אתה רואה ואומר אני רואה מגילה עפה

representative of a certain type of authorized, divine knowledge and the rabbinic idea of the Torah as a "text" that contains everything.