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Jewish Scribes in the Second-Temple Period, by Christine Schams. JSOTSup 291. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Pp. 363. L55.00/$90.00.
Modern scholars have tended to overgeneralize their description of Jewish scribes in "the Second-Temple period." Broad, sweeping claims often arise amidst the most credible scholarly work, statements, however, based upon an uncritical conflation of texts of various genres and social-historical contexts. Schams seeks to correct our understanding of the Second Temple Jewish scribe. Her mode is quite simple: to survey specific Jewish textual and artifactual data from the Neo-Babylonian period into late antiquity by taking into account the particularity of the literary context of each reference.
The book's organization reveals the inductive method that Schams seeks to employ. A brief introduction accurately describes the purpose of the study: "a historical investigation into the status and function of scribes during the Second-Temple period" (p. 1). Chapter 1 surveys-and critiques-earlier scholarship. Schams argues that this scholarship artificially imposed the category of the scribe as a "Torah scholar" on a wide variety of references. Schams therefore utilizes what she calls an "exclusivist approach": only analyzing "those pieces of evidence which provide explicit proof that the individuals or groups referred to are scribes" (p. 12)-and, one might add, Yehudian/Jewish. Within these limits, she attempts an exhaustive survey of the data.
Chapter 2 (pp. 36-273) represents the bulk of the study. The chapter moves through material judged relevant through the "exclusivist approach" from Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman times. Schams moves serially through each piece of data, giving a brief introduction to the literary, social, and historical context in which the reference...