What (or do I Mean Why?) a Scribe Really Does (Disparate Things #1)

I enjoy drawing parallels between seemingly disparate things. So how is a scribe, say, like a jar of raspberry jam?

I apologize if today's post is more like a LiveJournal diary entry than one with actual audience appeal, but, regardless, forward I plunge.

Ask anyone what a scribe does, and they'll say a scribe writes. And are they wrong? No. But they are a little beside the point.

The biblical scribes hand-recorded the word of God. Some served as secretaries for specific people, as Baruch did for Jeremiah. They wrote, yes, but to define their function as writing skates on the surface of things; it describes not their purpose but their method. Why did they write? Because, just as the jam maker's purpose was to preserve the luscious berries for future eating, the scribe's purpose was to preserve the word of God for future reading. Scribes accomplished their task of preservation through quills and parchment because that was the recording technology available to them. Yes, this is me saying scribes can and should make full use of the technology available to us--audiobooks, podcasts, websites, apps, social media, and on and on--and that even when we don't put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, when we use these new methods we are still scribing. Because we are recording, archiving, documenting. We are preserving, and while it would be a little weird to call the person canning jam in her kitchen a scribe, it's not as out there as we think. Why do we write? My university once offered an intro course within its writing major called "Why Write?" And though I didn't major in writing, I can now answer the question, 50+ years late: We write to preserve. Whether it's as temporary as the grocery list we toss as we leave the store, or as eternal as the precious Holy-Spirit-inspired word of God, we write something down in order to save it. 

Biblical scribes held two other main functions: they taught the law (the same Greek word is translated "teachers of the law" and "scribes," depending on version), and they governed, usually as members of the Sanhedrin. While scribes are commonly thought of as writers, and a better understanding describes them as writers with gifts of teaching and administration--as it says in my own bio--the real, deep-down, three-fold function of the scribe is preservation, instruction, and governance.