Ritual Legitimacy and Scriptural Authority

Western culture has traditionally drawn a dichotomy between rituals and texts, usually favoring texts over rituals. We tend to associate this bias particularly with Protestant polemics aimed at Catholic rituals, but it was already quite strong in the Middle Ages, as Phillipe Buc has shown.1 The elevation of text over ritual has served to distinguish "true" religion from ritualized "magic" throughout much of Western history. Contemporary scholarship has given new attention to ritual to reverse this traditional privileging of text. Theorists of ritual have tried to understand rituals for their own sake. Ronald Grimes, for example, declared, "Ritual studies, unlike liturgies, does not begin with a consideration of traditions and texts. It begins by attending to gesture and posture, the actual comportment of the body in interaction."2 Ritual studies has therefore grown into its own subdiscipline within the study of religion. The academic dichotomy between text and ritual remains entrenched, however, as witnessed by the different (sub)disciplines and their associated journals dedicated to each subject even within a given religious tradition. In this essay, rather than playing down either ritual or text in favor of the other, I want to point out and explain the interdependence of texts and rituals. That interdependence is readily apparent in contemporary religious liturgies and governmental ceremonies that highlight the reading and manipulation of texts. For example, processions with Torah scrolls and Gospel books utilize texts as ritual objects, as do many political and judicial oath ceremonies. William Scott Green explored the historical origin of these practices and observed that scripture took the place of the lost temple in rabbinic Judaism. It was therefore sanctified as a religious object more than as a text.3 Building on Green's work, Thomas Driver concluded: The point is not that scripture took the place of ritual, as some might imagine, but that ritual was modified so as to embrace the Torah texts and exalt them as sacred.... Ritual guides hermeneutics. In Judaism and in many other religions, certain rituals conceptualize the text and secure its place within the ordered world. . . . Among Protestants also, the scriptures are defined by the protocols (mostly unwritten and passed along by tradition) concerning their use. It is these protocols, not the scriptural words per se, that order Protestant life and give it the character that it has.4 Though Driver understates the role that some of the contents of scripture play in Protestant (and Jewish) life, his point is nevertheless well taken. The influence of ritual on beliefs about scriptures has received far too little attention in research. The observations of Green and Driver leave open, however, the question of how texts and rituals came to be associated in the first place. What ritual benefit accrued from using texts in this way? I will argue that old texts were used in antiquity to validate the forms of important rituals. The rituals in turn lent their cultural influence to the texts that prescribed them. The textual authority of Western scriptures had ritual origins. I. Scriptural Authority The problem of how some texts acquired such a high degree of religious authority in ancient Judaism is complicated by the fact that interpreters tend to make a number of unexamined-and unjustified-assumptions about scriptural authority. The first is simply to take scriptural authority as a matter of course and not realize that the Jewish (and later Christian, Manichean, Muslim, Sikh, etc.) reverence for an authoritative book was unusual in the context of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions. The second assumption is that scriptural authority is an outgrowth of the text's status as "law." Because the first Jewish scripture, the Torah/Pentateuch, contains several codes of civil law and religious instructions, people easily conclude that the Bible gained its status by virtue of its legal authority. …

governmental ceremonies that highlight the reading and manipulation of texts. For example, processions with Torah scrolls and Gospel books utilize texts as ritual objects, as do many political and judicial oath ceremonies. William Scott Green explored the historical origin of these practices and observed that scripture took the place of the lost temple in rabbinic Judaism. It was therefore sanctified as a religious object more than as a text. 3 Building on Green's work, Thomas Driver concluded: The point is not that scripture took the place of ritual, as some might imagine, but that ritual was modified so as to embrace the Torah texts and exalt them as sacred. . . . Ritual guides hermeneutics. In Judaism and in many other religions, certain rituals conceptualize the text and secure its place within the ordered world. . . . Among Protestants also, the scriptures are defined by the protocols (mostly unwritten and passed along by tradition) concerning their use. It is these protocols, not the scriptural words per se, that order Protestant life and give it the character that it has. 4 Though Driver understates the role that some of the contents of scripture play in Protestant (and Jewish) life, his point is nevertheless well taken. The influence of ritual on beliefs about scriptures has received far too little attention in research.
The observations of Green and Driver leave open, however, the question of how texts and rituals came to be associated in the first place. What ritual benefit accrued from using texts in this way? I will argue that old texts were used in antiquity to validate the forms of important rituals. The rituals in turn lent their cultural influence to the texts that prescribed them. The textual authority of Western scriptures had ritual origins.

I. Scriptural Authority
The problem of how some texts acquired such a high degree of religious authority in ancient Judaism is complicated by the fact that interpreters tend to make a number of unexamined-and unjustified-assumptions about scriptural authority. The first is simply to take scriptural authority as a matter of course and not realize that the Jewish (and later Christian, Manichean, Muslim, Sikh, etc.) reverence for an authoritative book was unusual in the context of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions.
The second assumption is that scriptural authority is an outgrowth of the text's status as "law." Because the first Jewish scripture, the Torah/Pentateuch, contains several codes of civil law and religious instructions, people easily conclude that the Bible gained its status by virtue of its legal authority. Contrary to modern conceptions of law, however, study of ancient Near Eastern law codes and legal procedures has shown that law codes were not cited as authoritative guides to legal practice. The Code of Hammurabi, for example, which was recopied and distributed through much of the Middle East in the second millennium B.C.E., is never cited, nor are its provisions followed in the many court documents that have survived from those same times and cultures. 5 Though the idea of law functioned as a pervasive social ideal whose normative claims should govern people's behavior, written collections of laws did not function as especially authoritative guides for such behavior.
Other models for the origins of scriptural authority have been identified in treaties, which were expected to be read publicly and their provisions followed, 6 and bureaucratic documents that, in Egypt at least, were consulted to guide the decisions of administrators. 7 Treaties did influence the literary form of the covenant in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, so these practices may indeed have had some influence on the Torah's authority. But unlike texts revered as scriptures in Judaism and later "religions of the book," the ancient use of treaties, bureaucratic records, and royal decrees did not usually emphasize the antiquity of the documents to be consulted and followed. 8 ) was 'skilled in the laws of the palace, the regulations of the ancestors'" (ibid.). 8 A vivid depiction of the politico-religious use of a treaty text can be found in the Assyrian Tukulti-Ninurta Epic (thirteenth century B.C.E.), which depicts the Assyrian king making a legal case before the gods against his Babylonian rival: "I raise aloft, therefore, the tablet of oath between us, and call upon the Lord of Heaven [ ]!" (lines 150-51). " [Kashtiliash] was appalled on account of the appeal to Shamash and became fearful and anxious about what was laid before the most such cases authority lay in the most recent treaty or decree (though it was common to appeal to old royal grants to justify land and tax claims).
Another apparently obvious source for scriptural authority lay in divinatory consultations of oracular/prophetic texts. The Zoroastrians of Persia, as well as the Greeks and Romans, gave great importance to the correct interpretation of oracles and literary texts by professional exegetes for purposes of divination. Their methods and results bear many similarities to the work of Jewish and Christian interpreters of sacred texts. 9 Though the influence of divinatory methods on later scriptural interpretation cannot be denied, such concerns cannot have been the source of the Bible's religious authority in the first place. The most obviously oracular books of the Hebrew Bible, such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and other prophetic books, were not the first to achieve scriptural status. Nor do biblical narratives reflect any interest in ancient Israel in the reading and interpretation of oracular texts. 10 When they mention texts at all, they are rather concerned with the reading and application of Torah. The Bible's canonization began with the Torah, not the prophets as one would expect if divinatory concerns were the primary motive. 11 Thus, neither individually nor together do laws, treaties, bureaucratic regulations, and oracular texts provide a sufficient explanation for the origins of scripture in ancient Judaism, though they all exerted some influence on the way in which scriptures came to be interpreted and used. The reasons for scripture's developing authority must be sought elsewhere. In antiquity, claims for the authority of old texts were more frequently made for ritual texts than for any others. Rather than law or diplomacy or bureaucracy or divination, the use of texts for and in ritual explains more plausibly the origins and development of book religion.

II. Ritual Accuracy and Ritual Legitimacy
Many students of ritual have noted that a concern with "doing it exactly right" typifies many ritual performances, though such concerns for accuracy in  10 The one exception is Jeremiah 36, which describes the scribe Baruch reading a scroll of Jeremiah's oracles in the Temple. But the text here was simply a stand-in for the prophet, who could not preach because he was under house arrest. some aspects of a ritual do not preclude the freedom to improvise others. 12 But how does one know if one is doing it right? How can priests be sure that their tradition of performance is correct? How can participants know that the priests are competent? Concerns for correct performance generate an interest in validating the authority of the ritualists. In antiquity, old ritual texts provided one means of validating or invalidating ritual performances.
There are several explicit examples from different cultures and times of using old texts to revive ancient ritual traditions. Livy, the first-century Roman historian, described a Samnite ritual that was performed ca. 300 B.C.E.: A space, about 200 feet square, almost in the centre of their camp, was boarded off and covered all over with linen cloth. In this enclosure a sacrificial service was conducted, the words being read from an old linen book by an aged priest, Ovius Paccius, who announced that he was taking that form of service from the old ritual of the Samnite religion. It was the form which their ancestors used when they formed their secret design of wresting Capua from the Etruscans. (Livy, History of Rome 10.38) 13 Livy emphasizes the antiquity of the rite that was being revived for this occasion. The priest read the old linen scroll aloud to ensure that the correct words were recited and to validate the accuracy and therefore the efficacy of the whole ritual. Livy does not provide sufficient information to allow us to evaluate the priest's honesty, but his use of the old book suggests that his authority to conduct this ritual or to conduct it in this way may have been contested. The rite required an oath of service in the Samnite army. Refusal meant execution as an offering to Jupiter, a threat actually carried out, according to Livy. So the ritual was clearly performed in the face of considerable social conflict, and reading the old book aloud helped the priest and his supporters to keep the upper hand.
The Samnite's use of a book to revive a ritual is reminiscent of a scene in Jerusalem approximately 150 years earlier, as narrated in the book of Nehemiah. Ezra took "the book of the law of Moses" that he had recently brought from Babylon and read it to the assembled people (Neh 8:1-12). As a result of this reading, the people discovered how to celebrate properly the festival of Sukkot (Booths or Tabernacles; Neh 8:14-17). The story claims that the feast had not been celebrated in this way since the days of Joshua, some eight centuries earlier (though Ezra 3:4 claims that the returning exiles celebrated Sukkot). 14 Again, the situation was highly conflictual, in this case having to do with the ethnic boundaries of the community and the legitimacy of mixed marriages. Ezra used the authority of the book to bring about a mass divorce and the expulsion of foreign wives and their children from the Jerusalem community (Ezra 9-10). 15 Jerusalem had witnessed a similar scene two centuries earlier, when an old book was discovered in the temple. 16 According to 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles, King Josiah read it to the assembled people and on its authority ordered them to celebrate Passover properly, as it had not been celebrated since the time of the judges. In this assertion in 2 Chr 35:14, the Chronicler seems to forget that in this account (2 Chr 30), though not in 2 Kings, King Hezekiah had celebrated such a Passover two generations earlier. The amnesia here and in Nehemiah 8 (see above and n. 14) suggests that ritual books were conventionally associated with claims for reestablishing discontinued festivals. Josiah also celebrated a covenant renewal ceremony and launched an attack on various ritual objects and sacred sites that he regarded as foreign or idolatrous. The liter-ary context in 2 Kings 23 suggests that this took place as a result of reading the book, so in that case the book invalidated certain ritual practices while it validated others. 17 Here again a book is invoked in a situation of conflict, this time explicitly ritual conflict. The account of these events in 2 Chronicles 34-35, however, has the cultic reform precede the discovery of the book, which prompted the covenant renewal and Passover observances only. 18 Interpreters remain divided on the relative historical merits of the two versions. 19 But the link between the book and festival reform is explicit in both 2 Chronicles and 2 Kings, as it is in Nehemiah and Livy.
Thus, each of these three cases (Livy, Nehemiah, 2 Kings/2 Chronicles) presents a situation of ritual discontinuity lasting centuries. The gaps exceeded the life span of even the oldest ritual specialists and so raised the problem of ritual accuracy in an acute form for those proposing to revive the ancient rituals. Each ritual also took place in the context of considerable social conflict: over soldiers unwilling to fight in an upcoming war against the Romans in Livy's account, over the definition of the Jewish community in Jerusalem and intermarriage with outsiders in Nehemiah, and over correct ritual practice and sacred space in 2 Kings/2 Chronicles. Though in each case the ritual specialists were priests (led by a king in 2 Kings/2 Chronicles) who could claim positional authority to prescribe the manner of the ritual, they felt the need to buttress their authority in these extraordinary circumstances. 20 They used ancient books to provide such reinforcement, because texts have the unique property of appearing to "speak" from the distant past. In each case, reading the texts helped sway many, though not all, of the assembled people to acquiesce to both the ritual and political agendas being advanced by the priests who controlled the texts.

III. Ritual Text and Ritual Performance
In all three cases described above, the public display and reading of the text played a key role in stimulating the ritual acts that followed. Some ancient texts mandated that they be used in this way. The text of the Samnite ritual has not survived, so we cannot know what its contents were like. But most interpreters think that Josiah's and Ezra's books corresponded more or less to Deuteronomy and the whole Torah (Pentateuch), respectively. Deuteronomy mandates public recitation of the book (Deut 31), and many pentateuchal passages command performance of their prescriptions as written. Jewish scriptures are by no means unique in this regard. In cultures across the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean, there is evidence that ritual texts mandated that their stipulations be followed exactly as written and that priests and kings were concerned to do so, even to the point that reading and manipulating the ritual texts became part of the rituals themselves.
A number of Egyptian texts mandate verbatim repetition of their contents. For example, the prayers of Pahery, on a stela in Pahery's tomb (Eighteenth Dynasty, ca. fourteenth century B.C.E.), request that those passing by make offerings and recite the prayer for the deceased also recorded on the stela: "say, 'An offering, given by the king,' in the form in which it is written; 'An invocation offering,' as said by the fathers, and as it comes from the mouth of god. , showing the citation of the first lines of the prayers (the first written on the stela, the second not and apparently conveyed by oral tradition "as said by the fathers . . ."). Other translations: "Ye shall say the htp-di-nsw exactly like that which is in writing, the invocation in the speech of the ancestors, like that which emerged from the mouth of god. . . . it is to be done as it should be, as that which is according to the hpw [law, customary rule, prescription] attested on this stela" (Redford, "So-Called Codification," 139, who notes that in many contexts, "like that which conforms to the law" parallels "like that which is in Other Egyptian texts link exact repetition of spells and prayers with detailed ritual instructions, such as an Osiris ritual from the Ptolemaic period (third-first centuries B.C.E.). It records an elaborate liturgy and then ritual instructions that begin, "Now when this is recited the place is to be completely secluded, not seen and not heard by anyone except the chief lector-priest and the setem-priest." 22 Even more than specific recitation instructions, texts from many ancient cultures prescribe the details of various rituals. These include instructions for the proper sequence of rites, for the performance of individual rituals, for the amounts of offerings for various rituals, and for the celebration of special festivals. In some cases, we have clear indications of how such texts were used. The texts from Ugarit (thirteenth-twelfth century B.C.E.) contain not only a number of rituals but also lists of gods and former kings that were used literally to "check off" that the rites were performed for the deities and ancestors in the proper order. The cuneiform equivalents of check marks remain in the margins of the tablets. 23 One Ugaritic omen text, a lung model, specifies the need to eat the sacrifice dbh k . sprt, "in accordance with the documents." 24 Some Hittite texts witness to acute concerns to perform rituals exactly as "is written in the old tablets" and "on account of the old tablets, they do it in exactly that manner." 25 Hittite kings cited their examination of written documents as proof of their ritual fidelity: "And whatever I, My Majesty, discover now in the written records, I will carry out." 26 During a long-drawn-out plague, searches of archives turned up old ritual and treaty texts whose provisions had fallen into abeyance. When oracles confirmed that failure to follow these texts had brought the plague on Hatti (cf. the oracular check performed on Josiah's law book in 2 Kgs 22:13-20), the rituals were reinstated and offerings were made to compensate for the treaty violations. 27 Other evidence for the use of such texts is the fact that inscriptions at or near temples often contained instructions on how to make offerings and especially how much to offer. For example, city authorities in Carthage in the late fourth century B.C.E. set up the so-called Punic Tariffs to regulate the amounts of temple offerings. 28 Such public inscriptions were clearly intended to regulate the ritual practices of the general public, not just priests. Greek legal sources confirm the public function of such inscriptions. Thus a speech by the orator Lysias ca. 400 B.C.E. accused Nicomachus of falsifying legal inscriptions that he was supposed to transcribe: I am merely claiming that he should obey the code established and patent to all and I am surprised at his not observing that, when he taxes me with impiety for saying that we ought to perform the sacrifices named in the tablets and pillars as directed in the regulations, he is accusing the city as well: for they are what you have decreed. And then, sir, if you feel these to be hard words, surely you must attribute grievous guilt to those citizens who used to sacrifice solely in accordance with the tablets. But of course, gentlemen of the jury, we are not to be instructed in piety by Nicomachus, but are rather to be guided by the ways of the past. Now our ancestors, by sacrificing in accordance with the tablets, have handed down to us a city superior in greatness and prosperity to any other in Hellas; so that it behooves us to perform the same sacrifices as they did, if for no other reason than that of the success which has resulted from those rites. (Lysias, Against Nicomachus 17- 19) 29 In ritual matters, the Greeks and Romans and many other cultures usually regarded the ancient local traditions as normative for that place. 30 Old texts provided a public means of validating the accuracy of those local traditions.
It is harder to come by explicit descriptions of rituals that actually incorporated the display and public reading of their ritual texts. The clearest examples are biblical: Moses and Joshua (Exod 24; Deut 31; Josh 8:34-35) as well as Josiah and Ezra read books of laws to public assemblies. These early books presumably included ritual regulations like those in the finished Pentateuch, such as the provisions regarding offerings and the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 1-7; 16, which are addressed formally to "all Israel." Such public instructions, therefore, appeared not only on monumental inscriptions but also on scrolls that could be carried about and read aloud. In addition, other kinds of ancient texts were used or even designed for ritual application: execration texts were covered with curses and then smashed to put them into effect; prayers were written in letter form and deposited in temples; 31 offensive letters could be displayed before the deity to plead for protection or revenge against the writer (2 Kgs 19:14-19).
The Egyptian ritual called "Opening the Mouth" provides more concrete evidence of how ritual texts were sometimes used. This rite for (re-)vivifying divine statues and, in Egypt, also the dead, is known to us in variant forms from both Akkadian and Egyptian sources. In the Egyptian version, one of the officiants at the rite is, according to David Lorton, "the chery-hebet or 'ritualist,' whose title literally means 'the one who holds the ritual' (i.e., the papyrus on which the words of the ritual are written)." 32 Several tomb paintings, reliefs, and papyri illustrate this official presiding over the ceremony, open scroll in hand. 33 Jewish traditions, too, show developments in the ritual use of ritual texts. Ezra ritualized the public reading of the Torah (Neh 8) by surrounding it with blessings and responses, obeisances, and a hierarchical arrangement of the assembled people. The Letter of Aristeas (second century B.C.E.) depicts King Ptolemy doing obeisance before Torah scrolls and, once the new Septuagint Greek translation has been completed, describes how the ceremony unveiling the translation concluded with public curses on anyone who might dare alter any part of that work (Let. Aris. 177).
In summary, texts were used in a variety of cultures to establish correct ritual performance and to legitimize the ritual practices of priests, kings, and temples. Thus, the idea of enacting written instructions, that is, "doing it by the book," involved first of all doing rituals. There is also some evidence that texts began to be manipulated and read as part of the rituals themselves. Therefore, as texts validated the accuracy and efficacy of rituals, rituals elevated the authority of certain texts to iconic status.

IV. The Developing Authority of Torah
In the case of Judaism, the Torah's ritual authority seems to have preceded its authority in other matters. A chronological summary of a series of incidents involving books or references to books illustrates the widening scope of the Torah's authority.
According to 2 Kings, Josiah's reading of a "book of law" in ca. 620 B.C.E. stimulated changes in cult furnishings, the monopolization of the most important rituals by the Jerusalem temple, and the revival of the celebration of Passover (2 Kgs 22-23). However, despite the long-standing critical consensus that Josiah's law book was more or less the biblical book of Deuteronomy, 2 Kings offers no indication that Josiah acted on Deuteronomy's extensive civil and criminal legislation. In fact, the king's active enforcement of ritual mandates actually contradicts Deuteronomy's restrictive view of kingship. 34 The book of Ezra reports that, in ca. 535 B.C.E., the returning exiles built an altar in Jerusalem and celebrated Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles) "according to what is written in the Law of Moses, the man of God" (Ezra 3:3, 5). In 520, they installed the priests and Levites according to the Torah (Ezra 6:18). Here again, Torah regulated the affairs of religious festivals and personnel only.
In the following century, however, Ezra reformed the Jerusalem community's marriage practices on the basis of a "book of the law of Moses" (Ezra 9:11-12 with specific reference to Deut 7:3). Was this the first attempt to mandate the book's legislation beyond temple and ritual matters? Was Ezra the innovator who turned a ritual book into a law book? Perhaps, but other episodes from the same period suggest uneven developments, at the very least. Nehemiah legislated against debt slavery without reference to Torah laws (Neh 5:1-13). The only laws mentioned explicitly in the historical review in Nehemiah 9 are the Sabbath commandment (9:14) and laws against idolatry and blasphemy (9:18, 26). The communal covenant of Nehemiah 10 emphasized separation from neighboring peoples, no intermarriage, Sabbath and sabbatical years (including cancellation of debts), tithes and offerings to the temple, a wood offering (not in the Torah), and so on. So only the issues of intermarriage and separation from foreigners seem to depart from the pattern of invoking the Torah's authority for ritual and temple matters only-and ritual concerns probably motivated these as well. Note that the priests and Levites lead the lists of those who divorced their foreign wives (Ezra 10:18-23), that Nehemiah "drove away" a grandson and brother of high priests because he had married into the royal family of Samaria (Neh 13:28), and that the book of Nehemiah concludes by emphasizing that Nehemiah "purified the priests and Levites of everything foreign" (13:29-30). 35 An explicit reference to Numbers grounds the exclusion of Ammonites and Moabites from the community (Neh 13:1-3), but Nehemiah must "purify" the temple room after expelling Tobiah the Ammonite from it (v. 9), which suggests again cultic concerns behind the policy of exclusion. After all, Leviticus describes the separation of holy and common, clean and unclean, as a chief task for ritual specialists, the priests (Lev 10:10). So the ritual purification of both temple and community focuses naturally on priests and seems to motivate Ezra's and Nehemiah's use of Torah as well. Once again, they used an old text to validate their ritual practices.
Within a few decades of these events, Persian authorities mandated Torah-orthodox Passover instructions for the Jewish community in Elephantine, Egypt. The letters from Elephantine suggest that, at the end of the fifth century B.C.E., the Jerusalem hierarchy extended the Torah's ritual instructions, at least those regarding the date of Passover, to other Jewish cult centers outside Jerusalem. The Elephantine letters, however, show no awareness of an authoritative text, only of the Jerusalem priesthood's expertise in such matters. The Elephantine community also appealed to the Jerusalem priests and elders for support for their temple rebuilding project, but they received help only from Persian governors in Judea and Samaria. Perhaps the failure of the Jerusalem hierarchy to respond to this request reflects their desire to centralize Jewish worship in Jerusalem alone, something mandated by Deuteronomy. 36 The Persian authorities limited the Elephantine temple's offerings to nonanimal offerings, which perhaps also reflected Jerusalem's wish to monopolize animal sacrifice. 37 But even if written Torah was informing these decisions, its authority was not invoked in any of the extant correspondence.
The brother of Jerusalem's high priest was installed in a new Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim in the late fourth century, according to Josephus (Ant. 11.8). 38 The Samaritans also claim the Torah as their scripture. Though Josephus does not link the two, I wonder if the priest and the book traveled to Mount Gerizim together. Both would have served to authorize and validate the rituals of the Samaritan temple on the basis of Israel's ancient traditions. Subsequent controversies between Samaritans and Jews often centered on whose temple and priesthood accorded better with the Torah of Moses. 39 3:109). The principal legal (halakic) concerns of the books of Maccabees revolve around sacrifices, altars, Sabbath restrictions, circumcision, and food laws (kashrut), the latter clearly involving affairs far beyond the temple and its priests. The book of Judith (second century B.C.E.) is notable for highlighting Judith's observance of rules regarding fasting and purity (8:2-7; 9:1; 10:5; 12:2, 7-9, 19; 16:18). She seems to act in accord with Torah regulations, but unlike the story of Tobit, this narrative never refers to written laws. So the source of Judith's knowledge could have been oral teachings. The story of Susannah (ca. 100 B.C.E.), however, tells us explicitly that Susannah was trained in the law of Moses (v. 3). When Daniel proves her accusers to be liars, the community executed them "according to the law of Moses" (v. 62). This story thus explicitly applies written Torah to an issue of criminal law for the first time. It is also in the literature of this time that we first find references to the Torah scrolls themselves becoming the targets of attacks on Jewish ritual practices (1 Macc 1:56-57). What is privileged by ritual may also be desecrated and destroyed as a symbolic means of undermining communal identity. So in the practices and literature of the second century B.C.E., we find clear signs that the authority of Torah was extended beyond the ritual realm to criminal and civil matters, and that Torah scrolls had become symbols of Jewish identity and practice.
Perhaps a better way to put it is this: at that time, the ritual authority of the Torah was extended beyond the temple to other aspects of daily life, which, by falling under the Torah's precepts, were ritualized as well. The sectarian halakah (legal interpretation) of the Qumran scrolls and related materials provide the best examples of this tendency. 40 The Qumran Temple Scroll, likely also a late-second-/early-first-century B.C.E. composition, literally extends the purity laws of the temple to the whole city of Jerusalem. Though the scroll deals with other concerns as well, especially the king, its principal interest remains in temple rituals, purity requirements, and the proper performance of festivals. The sectarian literature's interest in civil procedures seems limited to repeating the Torah's provisions with little amplification, except when it comes to regulating the internal life of the sectarian community itself, as in the Community Rule and the Damascus Document. These documents add many rules of behavior and disciplinary procedures to the biblical mandates. However, when we remember that the sectarians conceived of their communities as reproducing the conditions of purity and holiness expected of the Jerusalem temple but not achieved there, these community rules appear once again to be extensions of the rules of the sanctuary. The temple's rules were applied to people insofar as they are (or should be) within the extended temple community.
Several recent studies have argued that concerns for ritual purity in late Second Temple Judaism were far more widespread than the example of the Qumran Essenes might suggest. Literary and archaeological evidence suggests that bathing and hand washing were not primarily focused on temple rituals but were common Jewish practices both in Judea and in the Diaspora. 41 My argument that the Torah's authority originated in temple ritual and was only gradually extended beyond it does not dispute this possibility any more than it challenges the widespread practice of criminal law in ancient Judaism. It simply points out that mere references to purity practices, as in the book of Judith, were not necessarily meant to invoke the written Torah; they may simply reflect traditional practice as taught by elders and priests. The invocation of written scripture to reinforce or to reform such practices outside the temple seems to have become common only in the Judaism of the second century B.C.E. and later.

V. Conclusion
This article can only sketch broad patterns of practice and outline developments in the ritual use of texts and the textual authorization of rituals in antiquity. Much more detailed research remains to be done on how texts were used to justify ritual practices and how rituals elevated the authority of texts in various cultures and time periods. This initial survey, however, suggests that, more than any other factor, it was the authority of the Jerusalem temple's ritual traditions that established the Pentateuch's prestige. That authority was grounded in the assertion that the priests were practicing the ancient ritual traditions for that local cult. The validity of that claim was defended by invoking a book that claimed to be much older than the disruptions in cult practice caused by the destruction of the first temple and the Babylonian exile. As in other cultures of roughly the same time period, ritual and text supported each other: the prestige of the temple elevated the status of the book, which in turn guaranteed the legitimacy of the temple's rites.
Only when the ritual authority of the Torah was generally recognized did its other materials (civil and criminal laws, stories) gain special "scriptural" status. This development finds no clear parallel in other ancient cultures. It came about because the Torah's rhetorical structure combined lists of ritual instructions with criminal laws, narratives, and sanctions. It did so to persuade Jews to accept it as the Torah of the Jerusalem temple and community. 42 Once that was achieved, claims for its authority gradually increased in scope as various groups expanded the definition and geographic boundaries of the temple community.
Thus, the origin of the religious authority of Western Scriptures derived primarily from the use of old texts and books for validating rituals. The idea of Scripture was grounded first and foremost in the ritual use of texts. The traditional dichotomy in Western, especially Christian, traditions between text and ritual disguises the fact that the authority of the Scriptures originated in ritual concerns and continues to be maintained by ritual practices.

Journal of Biblical Literature 416
This article was published in JBL 124/3 (2005) 401-417, copyright © 2005 by the Society of Biblical Literature. To purchase copies of this issue or to subscribe to JBL, please contact SBL Customer Service by phone at 866-727-9955 [toll-free in North America] or 404-727-9498, by fax at 404-727-2419, or visit the online SBL Store at www.sbl-site.org.