When the Seleucids lost the Jews' papyrus

Davila points to The Biblical Review, on Nathan Mastnjak's Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel’s Prophetic Library. The book looks good. Beyond that...

Mastnjak argues for an understanding of sefer as a multivolume work. Before parchment, seferim were scribbled ad-hoc in papyrus. Why not, given that Egypt was right next to Madinat-Yahud (as Persians called it) and - after Cambyses II - incorporated into the same Persian Empire. I'm thinking of Jeremiah here. These smallish scrolls could enjoy their own independent life; they were not yet "anthologies". (More on that, anon.) Prophets and their followers could move around in tabernacles; Jerusalem held no monopoly, then.

This post so far has discussed Persians and papyrus - not (animalhide) parchment. Mastnjak says the move to parchment happened under Hellenism. A good target I think is the Seleucids, which detached the Greek Judaia from the Nile.

For Mastnjak, parchment occasioned the formal anthology. Once such is that of the Lesser Prophets, including (for instance) Jonah which is an antiprophetic satire if anything. We could add: the Psalter(s). "Isaiah" is clearly arranged likewise: an Isaiah-themed collection including anonymous prophets, not a book by the historical Isaiah. Be aware the volumes in Late Antiquity don't always follow the divisions which modern scholarship would reconstruct - see once more, Isaiah. Be further aware that the Lesser Prophets don't all exist in the order which we have today.

The loss of papyrus, forcing books onto parchment, would have weighted the production of books into a richer class. As it happens Jerusalem had a sacrificial cult such that the Temple's cost to produce books was cheaper than elsewhere. On Pesach, they butchered lambs. Lambskin makes for excellent writing.

The era of Antiochus III onward, is coincidentally about when Yonatan Adler posits the start of Judaism as a widely-accepted religion; Kugel The Great Shift before him. Adler mostly fingers the Maccabees but the Maccabees couldn't have gotten started absent a pool of supporters to which they could appeal. That pool of support looks like ~200 BC; before Daniel, the Animal Apocalypse, and Jubilees (as we know them), maybe around the Aramaic-Levi era.

BACKDATE 1/4, now I've read Davila.