Reading and Writing in Scripture

At Mount Sinai, God gave Moses the laws that are written in Exodus 20 to 23. Moses wrote them all down. Early the next morning he built an altar at the foot of the mountain, with twelve stone pillars for the twelve tribes.

Then he took the book he had written, called “the book of the covenant,” and read it aloud to the people. A covenant is a binding agreement. When the people heard it, they answered: all that God has spoken, we will do. This is the first time the Bible tells of a book being read to the people.

Before he died, Moses wrote down the Law (Torah) and gave it to the priests. He also gave a command about reading it. Every seventh year, at the Feast of Tabernacles, when all Israel came together, the Law was to be read aloud to everyone.

He lists who should hear it: the men, the women, the little ones, and the foreigner living among them. He gives the reason: so that they may hear, learn, fear God, and keep his words, and so that their children, who had not known it, could hear it too.

After Israel crossed the Jordan River into the land, Joshua did what Moses had commanded. At Mount Ebal, near Shechem, he built an altar and wrote a copy of the Law of Moses on stones in front of the people.

Then, with half the tribes standing in front of Mount Gerizim and half in front of Mount Ebal, he read all the words of the Law, the blessings and the curses. The Bible says he did not leave out one word of everything Moses commanded, and that he read it to the whole assembly, including the women, the little ones, and the foreigners who lived among them.

Josiah became king of Judah at eight years old. By his time, the Law had been neglected for so long that it had been lost. In his eighteenth year, workers repairing the temple found a scroll. Hilkiah the high priest called it “the book of the law” and gave it to Shaphan the scribe, who read it.

Shaphan took it to the king and read it aloud to him. When Josiah heard the words, he tore his clothes in grief, because the nation had not been keeping them. He sent to ask a prophetess, Huldah, what it meant.

Then Josiah gathered everyone, the priests, the prophets and all the people from the least to the greatest, went up to the temple, and read the whole book to them himself. He made a covenant to keep it, and he removed the idols from the land.

Jehoshaphat was king of Judah. In the third year of his reign he sent out officials, Levites and priests to teach the people. They took the book of the Law with them, and travelled from city to city through all of Judah, teaching it.

In the fourth year of King Jehoiakim, God told Jeremiah to write on a scroll every message he had given him, from the days of King Josiah until that day. Jeremiah spoke the words, and his scribe Baruch wrote them down.

Jeremiah was barred from going to the temple, so he sent Baruch to read the scroll aloud there on a fast day, when people from all over Judah would be gathered. Baruch read it from a room in the temple court in front of all the people.

Some officials heard it and were afraid. They told Baruch and Jeremiah to go and hide. Then the scroll was brought to the king. It was winter, and Jehoiakim was sitting by a fire in a brazier, a metal fire pot. As a man named Jehudi read, every time he finished three or four columns, the king cut them off with a knife and threw them into the fire, until the whole scroll was burned.

God told Jeremiah to take another scroll and write it all again. Baruch wrote it a second time, from Jeremiah’s mouth, and many more words were added.

Jeremiah wrote in a book all the disaster that would come on Babylon. He gave it to Seraiah, an officer who was travelling to Babylon with King Zedekiah.

His instructions: when you get to Babylon, read all these words aloud. When you finish, tie a stone to the book and throw it into the middle of the Euphrates River, and say, “Thus shall Babylon sink, and shall not rise again.”

After the exile, the Jews who had come back from Babylon rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem. Then, on the first day of the seventh month, all the people gathered in the square before the Water Gate. They asked Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the Law of Moses.

Ezra stood on a wooden platform built for the purpose, above the people, with thirteen men beside him. When he opened the book, all the people stood up. He read from early morning until midday, to the men and the women and everyone who could understand, and all the people listened.

The Levites helped. They read from the book clearly and explained the meaning, so that the people understood what was read. The people wept when they heard the words. The leaders told them not to weep, because the day was holy, but to eat, drink, share with those who had nothing, and rejoice.

During the Feast of Tabernacles that followed, Ezra read from the book every day for seven days. A few weeks later the people met again, and spent a quarter of the day listening to the Law read and another quarter confessing their sins.

In the book of Esther, the king of Persia could not sleep one night. He ordered the royal record book, the chronicles of his reign, to be brought and read to him.

The reader came to the place where Mordecai had uncovered a plot by two guards to kill the king. The king asked what had been done to honour Mordecai. The answer was: nothing. That one reading in the night turned the whole story of Esther.

Yeshua came back to Nazareth, where he grew up. On the sabbath he went into the synagogue, as he always did, and stood up to read. The attendant handed him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.

He unrolled it, found the place, and read the passage that begins “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” Then he rolled the scroll up, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. Every eye in the synagogue was on him. He said: “To-day hath this scripture been fulfilled in your ears.”

This is the only time the Gospels describe Yeshua reading. It shows how a synagogue reading worked: a man stood to read from a scroll handed to him, and sat down to teach.

In the first century, Jewish communities all over the Roman world had synagogues, meeting houses where people gathered on the sabbath. A regular part of every meeting was the reading of Scripture: first from the Law (Torah), then from the Prophets.

Acts shows this. In Antioch of Pisidia, after the reading of the Law and the Prophets, the synagogue leaders invited Paul and his companions to speak. At the council in Jerusalem, James said that Moses was read in the synagogues of every city every sabbath.

An official from Ethiopia, the treasurer of the queen, had come to Jerusalem to worship. On his way home, he sat in his chariot reading the prophet Isaiah aloud.

Philip, one of the seven men chosen in Acts 6 to serve the church, was told by the Spirit to go up to the chariot. He heard the man reading, and asked: “Understandest thou what thou readest?” The man answered, “How can I, except some one shall guide me?” and invited Philip to sit with him. Philip explained the passage, and the official was baptized by the road.

The letters of the apostles were written to be read aloud to the whole church, not kept by one person.

When the council in Jerusalem sent a letter to the believers in Antioch, the messengers gathered everyone together and delivered it, and when it was read, the people rejoiced. Paul told the church in Colossae to read his letter and then send it on to Laodicea, and to read the letter he had sent there. He charged the Thessalonians to read his letter to all the believers. He told Timothy to give attention to the public reading of Scripture.

The book of Revelation begins with a blessing on “he that readeth” and on “they that hear”: one person reading aloud, and many listening.

Stone was the most lasting surface. When Israel crossed the Jordan, Moses commanded them to set up large stones, coat them with plaster, and write all the words of the Law on them very plainly. Joshua did this at Mount Ebal.

Job, in his suffering, wished his words could be cut into the rock with an iron pen and filled with lead, so that they would last forever.

A tablet was a small flat surface for writing, small enough to hold. God told Isaiah to take a large tablet and write a name on it in plain letters. Zacharias asked for a writing tablet when he could not speak.

Paul uses the tablets of stone from Sinai as a picture. He tells the Corinthians they are a letter written not with ink but with the Spirit of God, not on tablets of stone but on human hearts.

A scroll, which the ASV often calls “a roll of a book,” is a long strip of writing material rolled up. It was written in columns side by side. To read it, you unrolled it with one hand and rolled it up with the other. When the king burned Jeremiah’s scroll, he cut it off three or four columns at a time.

Most scrolls were written on one side only. In Ezekiel’s vision, and in Revelation, the scroll is written on both sides, front and back, as if there was too much to fit.

Zechariah saw a flying scroll twenty cubits long and ten cubits wide: about thirty feet by fifteen feet, the size of a large banner.

Jeremiah speaks of a pen of iron with a diamond point, used for cutting letters into hard surfaces. For writing on scrolls, scribes used ink and a pen. Ezekiel saw a man in linen with a writer’s inkhorn, a scribe’s case for ink and pens, at his side.

Baruch wrote Jeremiah’s words with ink. John, in his short letters, says he has much more to say but would rather not write it with paper and ink or with pen and ink; he hopes to come and talk face to face. A psalm compares the poet’s tongue to “the pen of a ready writer.”

Parchment is a writing material made from animal skin. In his last letter, written from prison, Paul asks Timothy to bring his cloak and his books, “especially the parchments.” The letter does not say what was written on them.

A seal was a carved stamp, often in a ring, pressed into soft clay or wax to close a document and show who sent it. Only someone with the seal could make that mark.

When Jeremiah bought his cousin’s field during the siege, he signed the deed, sealed it, called witnesses, and weighed out the money. Two copies were made: one sealed and one open. Both were put in a clay jar so they would last a long time.

In the Persian empire, a letter written in the king’s name and sealed with his ring could not be cancelled.

Writing was also part of everyday life. The Law told the people to write God’s words on the doorposts of their houses and on their gates. A man who divorced his wife had to write her a certificate of divorce and put it in her hand. Ezekiel was told to write the names of Judah and Joseph on two sticks and hold them together as one.