The book, the scroll, the thing you can burn

This volume has spent eight weeks on what the Word is. Today, on what it was kept in — because Scripture is unusually interested in the object.

The Hebrew sepher covers a written document of any kind: a legal deed, a letter, a certificate of divorce, a king’s chronicle, and the Book of the Law. The narrower word megillah means a roll — a strip of prepared skin or papyrus wound on itself.

Neither word is holy in itself. That is the first thing to notice. God chose the ordinary document technology of the ancient Near East, the same medium used for tax receipts.

Take a scroll. The instruction is as physical as being told to fetch a bucket.

And a scroll can be destroyed, which the Bible demonstrates rather than denies.

Jehoiakim cut one up with a scribe’s knife and burned it column by column. Antiochus later ordered the books of the law torn up and burned, and anyone found with one put to death. The medium God chose is flammable, and He knew it when He chose it.

Then there are the strange scrolls. Ezekiel is handed one and told to eat it — written on both sides, front and back, with no margin left. Zechariah sees one flying, thirty feet long, going out over the whole land as a curse on thieves and perjurers.

A sealed scroll, and the whole scene stops until someone is found who can break the seals. The Lamb takes it, and heaven sings.

Which is a strange amount of attention to pay to a physical object — unless the object matters.

And this is where the day lands. The Word of God comes to us in things that can be burned, lost in a renovation, cut up by a king, banned by an empire, eaten by a prophet. It has been carried on skin, on papyrus, in codices, in print, and now on a screen you are holding.

None of those is the Word. All of them have carried it.

It also explains a habit worth keeping. Scripture is never squeamish about the physical: a scroll has columns, a knife cuts them, a fire consumes them, a scribe writes another. The Book that claims to be settled in heaven is entirely comfortable being described as an object somebody carried in a bag.

Which is why the burning never worked. Jehoiakim got a longer book. Antiochus got the Maccabean revolt. The medium is destructible and the message has outlived every man who tried to destroy the medium — and the last picture of a scroll in the Bible is one that only the Lamb can open.

Scroll technology explains details readers often skip. A scroll is read by unrolling with one hand and rolling with the other, which is why Luke 4:17–20 describes Jesus unrolling and then rolling up the scroll of Isaiah. Chapter and verse numbers did not exist; a reader found a place by working through it.

The word megillah is the standard term for the five scrolls read at Jewish festivals — Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther. The plural of the ordinary word for roll became a technical name for a specific collection.

Christians were unusually early adopters of the codex — pages bound at the spine rather than a roll — and the reasons have been much discussed: cheaper, easier to search, easier to carry, and easier to bind separate works together. Whatever drove it, the physical form of the Christian Bible was different from the synagogue scroll almost from the beginning.

Zechariah’s flying scroll is given dimensions — twenty cubits by ten — which are the dimensions of the porch of Solomon’s temple. The measurements are almost certainly deliberate and the point is disputed.

Paul’s last recorded request is about physical books. Writing from prison near the end, he asks Timothy to bring the cloak he left at Troas, and the scrolls, especially the parchments. Nobody knows what they were. The detail survives because it was true.

Look it upH5612 סֵפֶר sepher, book, document, scroll · H4039 מְגִלָּה megillah, roll, scroll · G975 βιβλίον biblion, small book, scroll · G976 βίβλος biblos, book

One footnote of English history: our word Bible comes through Latin from the Greek plural biblia, the books — and behind that lies Byblos, the Phoenician port that traded in papyrus. The name of the Book is, at root, the name of the material it was written on.

Where this touchesJeremiah 36 (Week One, Day Four) · Ezekiel 2:8–3:3 (Week Two, Day Two) · Zechariah 5:1–4 · Luke 4:16–20 · Revelation 5:1–10 · 2 Timothy 4:13. The earlier word studies were dabar, theopneustos, logos, torah, graphe, emeth, amen and the messenger formula.