Seite - 35 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 07/01

Writing, Affordances, and Governable Subjects | 35www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 33–44 humans a set of possible uses.2 For instance, a printed book offers me the op- portunity of reading the ideas and arguments of a scholar to whom I have no other access, but it also might serve as a useful paperweight or doorstop. The first use might appear to be the “natural” use of a book, but it is an affordance of writing, because the fixed and standardized form of those ideas becomes available to me in a different time and space. The second is a use of the book in a particular circumstance, one most writers do not intend. It is the governmental possibilities of writing and books for Israel’s sub- jectivity in Deuteronomy that are my concern in this article. Writing and the texts produced by it offered the writers a set of possibilities that were rela- tively new in history, a result of what Seth L. Sanders calls “the invention of Hebrew”.3 Sanders argues that written Hebrew, a vernacular language, de- veloped in the 8th–6th centuries BCE and was put to a variety of uses beyond those of a royal administration or temple complex and its concerns (annals, records, and the like).4 These included the processes that led to the writing of the books of the Hebrew Bible, which not only recorded oral narratives but also provided a mechanism by which communities could be formed. The historical context Sanders describes for how Hebrew came into use in ancient Israel is the one within which the book of Deuteronomy was formed. Most scholars place the core of the book, chapters 12–26, in the late 7th cen- tury BCE and associate it with the “book of the law” that inspired the reforms of King Josiah (2 Kings 22:3–23:25).5 The rest of the book came together in the 6th century BCE.6 Writing as a technology was becoming part of the writers’ environment as Deuteronomy developed. The affordances of this new tech- nology therefore were on offer to them as they worked. Another resource of the environment that they appropriated and used was the so-called suzerainty treaty, a diplomatic form from ancient Near Eastern international relations, where a dominant power (the suzerain) entered into a formal agreement with 2 Heidi Overhill provides a succinct summary of the adaptation of Gibson’s term across different disciplines and the categories of affordance theory that developed. My use here corresponds with social affordance, of a cascading variety. Overhill 2012, 1–4. 3 Sanders 2009. 4 Sanders 2009, 125–30. 5 This view goes back to the work of W. M. L. de Wette in 1805. More recent proposals date the core of the book to the first half of the 7th century (e. g. Otto 2012, 2016; Steymans 1995). For overviews of the history of scholarship on Deuteronomy, see e. g. Christensen 2001, lxviii–lxx; Tigay 1996, xix–xiv; Edenburg and Müller 2019. 6 I use the term “book” for convenience. Deuteronomy refers to itself as a scroll, spr, one of the technologies of that time. The codex, or book, is a later technology.