scribes

From Secretaries to Scholars

In the Old Testament a scribe is first of all someone who writes: a royal secretary keeping the king's records, an officer mustering an army, a copyist. Baruch writes Jeremiah's dictated scroll; scribes appear in the administrations of David, Hezekiah and Josiah. The pivot toward scholarship is associated above all with Ezra, described as 'a skilled scribe in the law of Moses,' who had 'set his heart to seek Yahweh's law, and to do it, and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel' (Ezra 7:6, 7:10).

By the New Testament period the word denotes a profession of learned interpreters of the Law — men who knew the text, its precedents and its applications, and were consulted accordingly. When Herod wants to know where the Messiah is to be born, it is 'all the chief priests and scribes of the people' he assembles to ask (Matthew 2:4), and they answer from Micah. Scribes were not a sect: they are frequently associated with the Pharisees, whose programme their expertise served, but the Gospels also speak of scribes attached to the chief priests, and the two groupings should not be collapsed into one.

In the Gospels

Scribes appear constantly as Jesus's questioners and critics, and they are named in the standard triad of the body that rejects him (Mark 8:31; Matthew 16:21). Mark notes at the end of the Sermon-like teaching in Capernaum that the crowds were astonished because Jesus 'taught them as having authority, and not as the scribes' — a contrast between a teacher who spoke on his own authority and a profession whose method was to cite precedent.

The Gospels' portrait is not uniformly hostile. One scribe asks which commandment is greatest, agrees warmly with the answer, and is told he is 'not far from God's Kingdom' (Mark 12:28-34). But the sustained critique in Matthew 23, delivered against 'scribes and Pharisees,' is severe, and it is directed at a gap between the meticulous knowledge of the Law and the practice of justice and mercy.

Scripture references

• Ezra 7:6-10 — Ezra, 'a skilled scribe in the law of Moses'
• Matthew 2:4 — Herod assembles the chief priests and scribes
• Mark 1:22 — Jesus taught 'as having authority, and not as the scribes'
• Mark 8:31 — Scribes named in the triad that rejects the Son of Man
• Mark 12:28-34 — A scribe told he is 'not far from God's Kingdom'
• Matthew 23:1-36 — The sustained rebuke of 'scribes and Pharisees'

Further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Scribe