Reading Psalms with the Scribes

Reading Psalms with the Scribes argues for a new approach to the study of the Hebrew Bible, “reading with the scribes,” which puts variation in the ancient witnesses at the center of the endeavor. With a focus on texts from Psalms, Reading Psalms with the Scribes explores how ancient manuscript evidence can impact scholars' thinking about poetics, composition, and interpretation. Whereas most biblical scholarship keeps textual criticism distinct from other kinds of analysis — as a preliminary step that provides one correct version of the text to be studied, for example — the practice of reading with the scribes leverages moments of variation for their insights into the thoughts, practices, and work of scribes. The scribes of the Second Temple period were much more than copyists; they were practiced readers who paid close attention to the poetic features of psalms, competent editors who polished the existing strengths of psalms, talented authors who could add new elements to psalms without altering their compositional unity, and skilled interpreters with robust understandings of the text. Though current scholarship has extensive knowledge of these ancient texts in all their facets, there is much we can learn from the scribes of the Second Temple period. When we focus our attention on the places in the text where the scribes were at work and explore the elements of the text involved in that work — when we explore some of the paths that scribes have made in the text — we can glean methodological insights and consider psalms and other ancient Hebrew texts in new ways.

John Screnock (PhD, Toronto) is Tutorial Fellow in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Wycliffe Hall in the University of Oxford. From 2018-2021 he was Research Fellow in Hebrew Bible at Oxford, and from 2015-2018 he was Kennicott Fellow in Hebrew at Oxford. His research interests include the Hebrew Bible, the Psalms, Dead Sea scrolls, Hebrew linguistics, and textual criticism. He is the author of Traductor Scriptor: The Old Greek Translation of Exodus 1-14 as Scribal Activity (Brill, 2017), and articles in Journal of Biblical Literature, Vetus Testamentum, Biblica, Journal of Semitic Studies, Hebrew Studies, Textus, Revue de Qumran, and Dead Sea Discoveries.