Excited to announce that my first book, “The Dismembered Bible: Cutting and Pasting Scripture in Antiquity,” is out.

Here’s a thread summarizing my main thesis…

https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/en/book/the-dismembered-bible-9783161598609

The Hebrew Bible contains many strange cases of textual jumbling. For example, there's a consensus that Gen 7:16b (ויסגר ה׳ בעדו) doesn’t belong where it appears in the Flood story. Here’s Driver:

“The words [‘the LORD shut him in’ (16b)] must have stood originally between v. 9 and vv. 10, 12; for they evidently form the close of J’s account of the entry into the ark.”

But how could three words have migrated from one place in the text to another? Surprisingly, that question has never been asked, let alone answered.

What I’ve found is that this and many other cases of jumbling are the natural outcome of an editorial technique that may sound odd to contemporary ears, but which actually has a storied history: literal cut and paste.

When copying a text, a scribe’s eye will often skip from one spot to another one that looks similar. This is called parablepsis, and it often leads to a section of the text getting accidentally deleted.

Here’s an example of that from a Bible manuscript found in the Cairo Genizah. In this case, five words from Deut 2:31 were omitted (and later reinserted in the margin) when the scribe accidentally jumped from ואת ארצו to את ארצו.

There’s another kind of parablepsis: If the scribe’s eye skips *back* to a passage that’s already been copied, the parablepsis can lead to a section being repeated, rather than deleted. For example, in 2 Kgs 7:13, we find 2 Kgs 7:13:

One of his servants said: Let some men take five of the remaining horses, since those that are left here will suffer the fate of the whole multitude of Israel **that are left here will suffer the fate of the whole multitude of Israel** that have perished already.

What I realized is that there’s a third possible outcome of parablepsis: not deletion, not repetition, but *jumbling.* This outcome, however, only occurs in the context of what I call “material redaction.” That’s what appears to have happened in the passage from the Flood story…

An editor meant to put a snippet containing the phrase “and YHWH shut him in” after the account (from another source) of Noah’s entrance into the ark, but they accidentally put it after a different-but-extremely-similar-looking section. Here’s an illustration:

So it seems the Hebrew Bible’s editors sometimes reworked their texts using material methods, rather than conventional scribal ones. Instead of copying the text of their sources, they pasted sheets—in some cases even snippets—to make collage-like composite scrolls.

Luckily for us, this method left certain telltale marks on the text, including jumbling errors that betray the editors' MO.

As it turns out, material redaction is attested in antiquity, both in descriptions of editorial work and in physical artifacts. Here's a lovely Egyptian composite scroll — the Papyrus of Ani.

Moreover, throughout history, when people have embarked on projects similar to biblical redaction — a Gospel harmony, for instance — they’ve often done so by means of literal cut and paste.

Here are two nice examples, the second of which is the handiwork of Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson even made a parableptic error ("And the"/"And they") that led to him gluing a snippet in the wrong spot — just like what we find in the Hebrew Bible.

I'll stop here. If you find any of this interesting, there’s much more in the book :)