Contextualizing Israel's Sacred Writings: Ancient Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production

This collection of essays by researchers and internationally recognized scholars addresses the emergence of literary production in the southern Levant. Essays focus on both the development of extensive works as the consequential interplay between orality and literacy and on such productions as prelude to the creation of lengthy compositions in ancient Israel and Judah. These lengthy compositions either represent the most likely progenitors of writings eventually recognized as authoritative religious texts or perhaps were themselves recognized as authoritative by succeeding Jewish communities. The contributors address when, by whom, in what form, and under what circumstances larger written productions such as public display inscriptions, for example, or more fittingly, sizeable scrolls would have been initially executed.