Abstract:
What does a sacred text look like? Are religious books materially different from other
books? Does materiality matter? This article deals with three different aspects of material
variance attested amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls, Ancient Jewish religious text fragments, of
which were found in the Judean Desert. I suggest that the substitution of the ancient
Hebrew script by the everyday Aramaic script, also for Torah and other religious texts, was
intentional and programmatic: it enabled the broader diffusion of scriptures in Hellenistic
and Roman Judea. The preponderant use of parchment for religious texts rather than
papyrus may be a marker of identity. The many small scrolls which contained only small
parts of specific religious books (Genesis, Psalms) may have been produced as religious
artefacts which express identity in the period when Judaism developed into a religion of
the book.
