Be Still, and Know

We've seen that all Scripture is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16) - but God worked through human means to bring it to us: We've seen who the authors of the Bible are, and how sometimes they use assistants called amanuenses who wrote as the author dictated. So then who are scribes, and why did they matter? The printing press wasn't invented until the 15th century. Before that, if a text needed to survive, someone had to copy it by hand. Scribes were those people - they were skilled copyists who reproduced documents by hand. It wasn't just a hobby, these people were trained professionals. Alphabetic writing may have started as early as 2000BC. In a typical Mesopotamian scribal school, an apprentice would start with the alphabet, progress through vocabulary lists, legal formulas, and eventually in the advanced levels, they would memorize and recite proverbial sayings and canonical compositions. By the end, they were skilled not just at copying, but at understanding and contex...

Read this: "THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD; I SHALL NOT WANT." Now try this: "THELORDISMYSHEPHERDISHALLNOTWANT." Is it still readable? This is closer to how ancient readers encountered Scripture. Early biblical manuscripts were written in a style called scriptio continua  - continuous writing with no spaces between words. This was simply how writing worked in the ancient world. The oldest copies of the New Testament, the Hebrew Old Testament manuscripts, the Greek Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures), and even the codices that we saw in the last episode - all follow this pattern. Word spacing only became common several centuries later, with Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes in the 7th and 8th centuries often credited with popularizing it in the West. The Old Testament manuscripts added another layer of complexity entirely. Now take that spaceless text and remove the vowels: "THLRDSMYSHPHRDSHLLNTWNT." Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic were writ...