Page - 40 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

40 | Mark K. George www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 33–44 on the mountain, then writes them down as the words of Torah (31:9). When YHWH gives him words of a song to teach to the people (31:19), Moses writes them down, then teaches them to Israel (31:22). The writers of Deuteronomy make use of the affordance of fixing and stabilizing words to create a certain relationship between the written text and readers. They present the content of the book as a record of what Moses said to Israel at a certain point in time. The book is both speech and writing. All the “spoken” words would be lost to time if not written down, but writing allows them to transcend time, place, speaker, audience, and context.19 The affordance of fixing and stabiliz- ing words and ideas in writing becomes the reliable means of transmitting Moses’ words into the future. Sanders’ arguments about Hebrew being used in non-royal contexts are helpful here for thinking about writing as a technology. Assuming that by the 5th century BCE Deuteronomy was coming into a shape much like what we have today, this scroll would have appeared at a time when, Sanders argues, Hebrew was being used in contexts other than those of state bureaucracies and thus was not reserved for what might be classified as royal use.20 As peo- ple in Israel learned to write and explored what might be done with this tech- nology, they realized it offered the opportunity to fix and stabilize words and ideas and to share them.21 This is a period in which orality remained impor- tant, even as writing emerged and was more widely used. By presenting Mo- ses as speaking to the people and then writing down his words himself (31:9), the writers of Deuteronomy connected speech to writing and implied what is written is the same as what is spoken. The affordance of fixing and stabilizing words allows that speech to transcend time and place. The affordance of standardization and normalization is realized in Deu- teronomy in several ways. One of the clearest examples is when the deity is portrayed as re-writing the words recorded on stone tablets. Readers are as- sured in the text that YHWH writes “the same words as before” (10:4; NRSV). Writing offers the possibility of standardization: the same words, in the same order, are reproduced from one instance to the next. It comes as no surprise, then, that the future sovereign is to have a copy of “this Torah” written for 19 So also Sonnet 1997, 109. See also 146. Cf. Olson 1994, 135. 20 I consider the Masoretic text form to represent that shape, as do others, e. g. Tigay 1996, xxv; Nelson 2002, 8–9. As Karel van der Toorn argues, this shape likely was set by the end of the 5th century BCE (Toorn 2007, 144–45, 151). 21 Lachish Letter 3 provides evidence of this happening in this time period (early 6th century, c.597 BCE), as Sanders argues (Sanders 2009, 144).