1.5 Is the Bible a Book?

Glad you are here for today’s episode of The Bible Unthumped. I am your host, David K. Thanks for listening. So far in this podcast, we have been looking at a few basic topics about the Bible. We first looked at the inconsistent number of writings that have been collected among Christians and called Bible books. We have looked at the languages in which the Bible was written, mostly Hebrew and Greek. And, in the last episode, we talked about how the Bible wasn’t originally subdivided into chapters and verses and so where those came from. 

We are continuing in the next couple of episodes to look at questions that are big-picture and that relate to the whole scope of the Bible. We are not down in the details too much at this point, and in some ways the question we address today will be an especially fundamental question about the Bible and one that might, at first glance, seem very strange to ask. The question for this episode is, “Is the Bible a book?”

To answer that question, we clearly need to know what a book is. And since you, the listener, almost certainly can’t remember a time in your infancy before you knew what a book was, we need to start by taking note that books haven’t always existed. They are a technology no different from a bicycle or a microwave oven. 

In the ancient world, at the time of the writing of the Bible, the book hadn’t been invented yet. 

So, what is a book? In the way that we experience books, they are a collation of pages with writing on them, almost always sandwiched between a front cover and a back cover. Obviously. But, when we talk about an ancient book, let’s say the book of Job in the Old Testament—well, that was not originally "a book”. It was not written on collated pages, and it didn’t have a front and back cover. 

So, if there were no books in the ancient world, how were things written down, physically speaking? Well, there were various materials used in the Ancient Near East, the lands where the Bible comes from. Writing might be carved into stone, like on a building or on a tablet. It might be pressed or scrawled into wet clay that would then dry. Writing might be applied with ink to bark or pottery—very commonly on pottery, in fact. Inks would be made of a variety of animal, vegetable, or mineral matter that would color a liquid. 

For a long text, you needed plenty of space to write—not shards of pottery—and coming up with a material that provided a sufficient writing surface and that wasn’t so heavy it was impossible to transport was a technological challenge. Long texts from the ancient world show up carved or painted across entire walls of important buildings—tombs or temples—or on monuments. So, how do you write something that can actually be shared and disseminated in any pragmatic sense?

Well, by around 3,000 BC, long before the Old Testament was written, long texts started to be written on papyrus, a sort of proto-paper invented in Egypt and made out of layers of reed fibers. Papyrus could be produced in sheets and was lightweight and transportable. An alternative to papyrus was parchment, sheets made out of dried animal skins. Papyrus and parchment were the materials on which the books of the Bible were originally written. 

A quick aside here that was we know as paper, made from plant pulp, dates back roughly 2000 years to China, and it didn’t show up in the Middle East until the 700s or in Europe until the 1200s AD. 

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So, the writers of the Bible, for intents and purposes, had mostly papyrus and sometimes animal skin parchment. Here’s the problem with papyrus as a technology—you can’t fold it. To fold it is to splinter it into fibers and break it. But, you could roll papyrus without ruining it, and so, in the ancient world instead of books, they used scrolls, long sheets of papyrus or parchment, rolled up on sticks. Sheets on sticks provided enough surface for long-form writing, and it was lightweight and transportable—a major achievement in the history of writing. To read, you would slowly unroll a scroll from its stick on one end of the sheet, revealing part of the written surface, and simultaneously roll it back onto the stick on the other end of the scroll. Presumably most of you have seen a demonstration of how scroll-reading works. 

But, here is the thing about scroll-writing technology. There are reasonable physical limits to how long a sheet of papyrus can be. So, you couldn’t reasonably write the entire Old Testament out on a scroll. Rather, you could only write out something as long as, say, Genesis, or Exodus, or Isaiah.

Scrolls are not stored like books. The scroll of Genesis, and the scroll of Exodus, the scroll of Job, the scroll of Daniel would have been physically separate scrolls, not bound together. So, you’d engage with them separately. You’d pick one up and read it and then put it back on its separate shelf or cubby hole or whatever. You would not physically just flip some pages from one to the other to make comparisons or to corroborate thoughts or doctrines.

By contrast, a book with binding makes it seem like one thing, a unity. Whereas separate scrolls naturally convey that the content of each is also separate. One scroll, a distinct physical object, would be separate from any other scroll, a different distinct physical object. Only upon the invention of the pages-with-covers version of a book—a single physical object, that is—do disparate writings seem to take on close relationships with each other. It’s sort of the difference between having a single book on a shelf with the words “Holy Bible” on the front cover and a table of contents instead of having 66 little booklets with 66 titles scattered around your shelves that you’d pick up and read individually. 

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So when did books, pages with covers, get invented? Roughly 2000 years ago they start to show up in the Roman Empire. These early books were called codices, plural for codex, and they were mostly written on parchment or animal skin sheets and then pulled together with rings or strings with covers of leather skins, wood, or metal. Within 500 years of their invention, codices or books had completely displaced scrolls as a way to put together, store, and disseminate writings. The book represented a new way of engaging texts, and there were implications, particularly for the Bible.

Whereas scrolls were separate objects, preserving a sense of distinction between the contents of one scroll and another, if you took the contents of both scrolls and put them together on pages between covers, you’d start to view those contents as having a certain sort of unity that they lacked when they were first written and separate. The bookbinding creates the unity. The bookbinding creates the relationships. Not the texts themselves.

So, when you take 66, or whatever number, of ancient writings—some of them stories, some of them histories, some of them collections of wisdom or songs, some of them letters—and you put them all together on turnable pages bound between one front cover and one back cover, you have invented a sort of unity, or at least a perception of unity, for the person who reads it. 

You have also created a sense of exclusivity, because any writing that doesn’t appear between those covers—anything that didn’t make it in, that is, appears NOT to have a relationship to the contents that DID make it in. 

Remember in our episode on the number of Bible books, we noted that it was during the 4th century AD that the first kind of standard Bible book lists show up. Well, from that time period, we have, as artifacts, manuscripts in the form of books—codices—that start to show up and that still exist today. Four particularly famous manuscripts—writings copied by hand, that is—can be dated to the fourth and fifth centuries.

Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Ephraimii collectively known to scholars as the Great Uncials, are the earliest examples of Bibles in the form of collections of pages bound between covers, the ancestors of the Bibles as you know and read them. But, the contents, the lists of books that these four codices represent, are not quite the same as yours—variously leaving some of the Pauline epistles and/or Revelation out of the New Testament and adding some Bible books you’ve likely never heard of such as Clement, Barnabus and the Shepherd of Hermas, and always including the seven extra Old Testament books that Protestants have specifically excluded since the 16th Century. Remember that in the 4th and 5th centuries, the time of these earliest book-Bibles, standardizing the Bible’s contents was still a fresh idea.

So, what do we call a collection of different kinds of writings that are, for whatever reason, put together? It’s an anthology. A collection of selected literary works. Those collected works, if put together on pages between covers, we might engage with as a book, we might shelve it like a book, but we wouldn’t think of Pride and Prejudice and The Last of the Mohicans as one book, even if we physically were to bind them together. Genesis and Job are not parts of the same book, literarily speaking. Rather, they are two separate books that ended up in the same anthology. 

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So, back to the question for this episode, “Is the Bible a book?” The answer could very well be, no, it’s not. It was written at a time when there was no such thing as books. Later, when technology allowed, it was turned into a book in terms of its physical format, but literarily speaking, the Bible is an anthology of books, not really a book itself. For most intents and purposes, it should be engaged as 66 (or however many) distinct writings. 

A final note. In the last episode, we discussed how the inventions of chapters and verses helped fragment the Bible into bits that are too small to capture context or, therefore, much meaning and how these fragments in the wrong hands lead to prooftexting. The artificially small bits are less than the sum of their parts. 

But, the opposite happens with the book format, which leads to artificial enlargement. What are, in fact, lots of different books of different types, get combined together into something that now looks to be more than the sum of its parts. No serious scholar would engage with the book of Revelation as though it were part and parcel with the Psalms or the Book of Ruth or something just because bookbinding got invented in the meantime. 

As we wrap up this episode, I want to remind you that in a couple of weeks, we will plan for a Q and A episode where we look at questions that you, the listeners, have submitted and that are related to the topics we’ve covered in these first episodes. Email any questions you might have. 

Thanks for listening. Less thumping. More understanding. Please subscribe and share. See you next time.