Please join us for Dr. Bernd Schipper's upcoming talk entitled Egyptian Papyri and the "Scroll Approach": Reassessing Text Density and Literary Capacities in First-Millennium BCE Manuscripts.
David Carr’s "scroll approach", also called “material historical approach” (Carr 2023) represents oneof the most significant methodological developments in recent biblical scholarship. By focusing on the physical materialities of ancient manuscripts—specifically scroll dimensions, layout, and text density—Carr systematized prior research by scholars such as Menahem Haran and Matthieu Richelle, offering a rigorous material framework for modeling the growth of biblical literature. However,while Carr frequently invokes Egyptian papyrological parallels to support his reconstructive models, these comparative data merit closer empirical scrutiny.
This paper investigates primary material evidence from 1st-millennium BCE Egypt to test key premises of the "scroll approach." It specifically addresses Carr’s assertion that extensive literary compositions could not be accommodated on a single papyrus scroll prior to the Hellenistic era. By analyzing Egyptian Demotic, and Hieratic papyri from the 10th to the 5th centuries BCE with respect to script size, column formatting, and text capacity, the paper demonstrates the existence of higher text densities in pre-Hellenistic manuscripts, thereby offering a more nuanced material baseline for theories concerning the literary formation of the Hebrew Bible.
Bernd U. Schipper has been teaching at the Humboldt University of Berlin since 2010. He previously held professorships at the universities of Bremen and Oldenburg and visiting professorships at the universities of Heidelberg and Harvard. His research interests include the history of ancient Israel, cultural contacts between Egypt and Israel in the 1st millennium BCE, and the Hebrew Bible and ancient Egyptian wisdom literature.