Heard But Not Seen: The Representation of ‘Books’ in the Old Testament

In this paper I argue that it is anachronistic (1) to incorporate ‘books’ mentioned in the Old Testament into theories that understand the emergence of the written texts as the suppression of the oral, and (2) to translate as ‘book’, while neglecting to consider its other connotations such as ‘legal document’, ‘letter’ and ‘register’. I also argue that to reconstruct the history of Old Testament books (for example, to locate the ‘book of the law’ or the words of Isaiah or Jeremiah in the existing texts of the Bible) is to mistake a rhetorical feature of the literature for information