{N}36,{/}18 {N}THE SCRIPT AND THE BOOK IN BIBLICAL TIMES
THE SCRIPT{/}
It had been twelve or fifteen centuries since scripture had been invented when Abraham went through the desolate lands of Palestine, going around the cities of Canaan or of the Nile delta; that certainly does not mean that nomads like Abraham had any knowledge of it. In the two tips of the "Fertile Crescent", in Babylon and in Egypt, the needs of commerce had accelerated the invention of graphic systems. In Egypt the {N}hieroglyphics{/} (sacred paintings) had been invented, a system of schematized drawings that corresponded to objects or syllables. In Mesopotamia, there was the {N}cuneiform{/} script (in the shape of wedges: Latin, cuneus); its strokes made with reed on clay represented mainly syllables. The Egyptian script was very much linked to their language, and this made it difficult to adapt it to other languages. All the peoples of Mesopotamia, Syria and Canaan on the other hand, adopted the cuneiform script.
Script had become indispensable for diplomacy, commerce and administration. When Moses led his troop out of Egypt, he avoided the way of the forts where there was an officer who daily took note of all entries and exits. Around those same years, the Egyptians of the royal city of Pharaoh Akhenaton used an Egyptian-Babylonian dictionary for their translations. Books circulated and in the excavations of Palestine and Syria, both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Babylonian writings in cuneiform script have been found.
{N}THE ALPHABET{/}
When, in the tenth century before Christ, Solomon gathered the most learned people of Israel, the era of the alphabet had just started. Script had already existed for twenty centuries, but the writing systems were becoming more and more unsatisfactory: too much effort was required to learn how to read and write. After many trials, a novelty was about to prevail: the alphabet of twenty five to thirty letters, with the distinction of vowels and consonants, an instrument that could be adapted to any language. The demands of commerce in Phoenicia, in the lands of Biblos, of Tyre and of Sidon stimulated investigation which produced results. The alphabet - or one of the Phoenician alphabets - was soon adopted everywhere except in Egypt and mainly in the principalities of the land of Canaan. From it derive all the Western or Semitic scripts (like Arabic or Hebrew).
The biblical texts were then written beginning in that epoch in society when the majority did not know how to read, but when the administration and the Temple could not have been without written texts. In the time of the kings any militar post had at least an officer capable of receiving and sending messages. As regards the Bible, after nine centuries of oral tradition (for the history of Abraham), and after three centuries of much more oral than written tradition (for Moses), they were entering the era of the book.
{N}THE BRICK AND THE PAPYRUS{/}
On what did they write? They wrote on anything, on everything they had at hand: bronze, stone, plaster of the sanctuaries, remnants of ceramics, etc. But from the beginnings, that is from the 30th century  before Christ, two great supports of writing appeared: brick and papyrus.
The peoples of Mesopotamia were great consumers of {N}bricks {/}made of baked clay (Gen 11,3). Twenty centuries before Christ there was nothing better than bricks to write poems as well as checks on them. Contracts were written and sealed on a brick which was in its turn wrapped in a new coat of clay on which the writing was repeated, then all of this was left to dry slowly. This wise procedure made fraud impossible. So then the annals of the kings as well as the great religious texts were written for eternity; in the eighth century before Christ, more bricks of written documents had been classified in the shelves of the great library of Assurbanipal than would be needed to build the walls.
The Egyptians on their part had used a somewhat lighter material, the {N}papyrus.{/} From the 30th century before Christ a type of reed from the Nile was debarked and with the strips of bark sheets were made that could reach sizes between 40 and 50 cm. Each sheet was made of two layers: in the first the bark strips were horizontal, and in the second, vertical. The first one formed the right side of the sheet, easier to write on since they wrote horizontally, from right to left, -which reveals a conservative spirit-, and from top to bottom: this was the inner part of the scroll. But it was also possible to write on the other side: the scroll was therefore written on both sides (Ez 2,10). The normal scroll was composed of twenty sheets stuck together one beside the other, its height being one half of the original size, thus making it 20 cm wide and about 7 meters long.
The only disadvantage of the papyrus, and it is not a small one, is that it deteriorates quickly with humidity. It has hardly been conserved except in Egypt, and here only in very dry regions. But then the dryness makes it very breakable (as is the case with the papyruses kept in the museums), although it is firm when fresh. It was possible to wash away the ink and write a new text, the same as it was done with leather. In the excavations of Palestine frequently a clay seal was found that was used to keep together a bundle of papyruses, but the papyruses had disappeared long time ago.
They used to write in ink (Jer 36,18; 3Jn 13) made with soot and rubber, as our ancestors used to do with the Indian ink; they had a cake of hard ink that was diluted at the time it was to be used. For the titles and the marginal notes they had red ink. They wrote with a cut reed, the tip of which had been chewed. The scribe then arrived with his material (Ez 9,2), including the palette on which he wrote, the ink cakes and the reed-pens. Normally they wrote sitting like a tailor or kneeling, until the time when, like in Qumran, they preferred to sit in front of long tables.
{N}THE PARCHMENT{/}
Leather was not much used. It was then called {N}parchment{/} (2Tim 4,13), from the name of the city of Pergamum that specialized in the preparation of skins for that purpose. Its use developed during the Christian era, from the moment the exportation of papyrus to the West was made difficult up to the time when paper began to be manufactured. Paper had been invented much earlier by the Chinese and was introduced by the Arabs. Parchment could be used in scrolls, and the Jews had kept this use. The book made up of stitched sheets was used only for commercial needs and to take notes. The book made of folded sheets of papyrus or parchment, cut and glued, was at the time called {N}codex{/}, from the name of the wooden plates with which the covers were made. The Christians, unlike the Jews, immediately adopted the latter for the biblical texts; doubtless we can see here the sign of the social environment to which many of them belonged: people of middle class and merchants, not illiterates, but more interested in the practical aspect than restrained by artistic or literary scruples.
As regards our biblical texts, most of the documents through which the original text has come to us are {C}codices{/} (plural of codex), and these were parchments. Texts of the New Testament written in papyruses, be it in scrolls or fragments, have been found almost exclusively in Egypt. And these papyruses are frequently much older than our oldest parchments.
{N}THE SCRIBES{/}
The use of papyrus, a perishable material, required the  recourse to many scribes in order to recopy the books and other important documents. In the countries of the Middle East the scribe was a learned person, highly considered, frequently a functionary, like Baruch, the secretary -secretary and minister of the king- who became the secretary of Jeremiah (Jer 32; 35; 43).
It was very different  in the Roman world; cultural tasks were usually entrusted to obscure people there, at times Greek slaves who had a whole tradition behind them. After the barbarian invasions, the work of the scribe was mainly an activity of the monks; they concerned themselves with conserving the riches of ancient thought and that work that demanded as much toil as patience was very suitable to their state. From there comes the Spanish expression: {C}obra de benedictinos (Benedictines' task) {/}to express a huge, long task.
It was always possible for the scribe to commit errors. For that reason, from the highest antiquity controls had been established: thus, for example, every ten lines a mark was placed, and at the end of the book the exact number of lines was noted. Those regulations reached the highest strictness when in the time of Jesus the {N}Masoretes{/} strengthened the controls for any copy of a biblical text. Then all the letters of the book were counted and it was noted which letter was in the middle. This explains how, even when after centuries there may be manuscripts that contain errors, those errors very seldom altered the sense of the text.
The most notable differences between the copies we have available and their originals are often the explanations or annotations added by some scribe to determine exactly the meaning of a word or a phrase that he thought was difficult to understand by the reader. And it would not be strange that the explanation could be erroneous. Usually the scribes showed a great respect for the text, but sometimes they put in the margin either an explanatory note to some expression, or the correction of an error they had committed: a clear example of this is 1Cor 4,6. In the case of the books of the Old Testament it is much more difficult to speak of commentaries, because those books are at times the result of a long gestation. In that case, the most ancient texts were retaken, combined, reoriented by new authors who acted with full responsibility: it is the last daft of the text, as it entered the Bible, which is an inspired book.

