Jewish and Christian readers of the Bible have long had a complicated relationship with those ancient Jewish writings that are considered biblical by some but not by others, or that read like biblical texts but are not included in the Hebrew Bible. There are a lot of such texts, and they have increasingly gained visibility in the study of ancient Judaism. Some were preserved exclusively by Christian scribes as the “Old Testament Apocrypha,” others are known as the “Pseudepigrapha” and survived in the libraries of Europe and the Middle East. The explosion of interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls that yielded even more texts, and a more general shift of interest towards texts “Outside the Bible,” as they have recently been labeled by the editors of a massive three-volume collection of ancient nonbiblical Jewish writings, have led to a more systematic reconsideration of how we conceive of ancient Jewish literature in general and what categories and language we use when talk about it.

Eva Mroczek has been at the forefront of this debate. Her debut monograph is imaginative and thoughtful, an eloquent contribution to the rapidly evolving attempt to find new ways of appreciating the meaning and significance of nonbiblical Jewish writings. Others have written about the gradual formation of the biblical canons and the roles played by the ancient scribes (David Carr, Karel van der Toorn, Michael Satlow). In a way, Mroczek is more ambitious—she seeks to redirect the discussion. Her principal aim is to overcome what she considers to be two primary obstacles in our thinking about ancient Jewish texts, or, in her own words, “two kinds of anachronism: a religious one—‘Bible’—and a bibliographic one—‘book’” (4). In other words, Mroczek is not interested in the precursors to the biblical canons in Second Temple times, or in the processes of canonization. Instead, her book is a bold attempt to reconsider the literary imagination in early Judaism. It is a deep, at times poetic exploration of “what the literary world [of Second Temple Judaism] might have looked like to their producers and earliest audiences, before the categories of ‘Bible’ and ‘books’ were available concepts” (5).

Mroczek's focus is on three texts: the Psalms, Ben Sira, and Jubilees—a biblical, an apocryphal, and a pseudepigraphic book, though it is precisely this classification that Mroczek wants to overcome, since it is predicated on a neat division of the ancient texts into categories that are not only anachronistic (surely the authors of Ben Sira and Jubilees would not have understood the bibliographic categories we like to attribute to them), but also revolve around the Bible as the book at the center. What would happen to these lesser-known Jewish books, Mroczek wonders, if they no longer stood in the shadow of Scripture, a new way of reading she calls “a nonbiblicizing approach” (13)?

The results of Mroczek's reflections are often intriguing and open up new perspectives on the old texts. Three of her claims in particular stand out: (a) Together with a growing number of Second Temple scholars, Mroczek argues, convincingly I think, that our perception of early Jewish literature has been unduly dominated by a way of reading that has been shaped by the Bible. To read texts on their own grounds, without the Bible as the center of all things, enables us to appreciate the true diversity of early Jewish literature and “to imagine that sacred writings took fundamentally different shapes” (186). (b) Relatedly, Mroczek argues that the canonical books are not the only writings that were considered inspired (one of her favorite expressions is “written revelation”). She thus calls for a “deconstruction of the identity between canon and revelation” (179). The canonical writings do not contain all of revelation, as texts outside the canon could just as well be considered divinely inspired, serve as vehicles for divine revelation, and be attributed to biblical figures (she is thinking of authorial attribution, or pseudepigraphy). (c) In the end, Mroczek wants to arrive at a new morphology of the ancient Jewish text that is not defined by the Bible or our modern notion of the book. The literary world of early Judaism “was a story about its divinely favored revealers, who traveled across new textual territories. Thinking of it in this way—as a story, not a library—helps us see how texts that do not stand still or cannot be identified are not conundrums to be explained, but actors in an unfolding narrative, where the history of Israel is intertwined with the history of its writings” (188).

Mroczek's innovative reading is important, refreshingly daring, and opens up new ways of thinking. And yet, as she herself would likely admit, it also leaves much unanswered. Is it really as easy, as Mroczek suggests in her introduction, to leave aside orality (and memory studies, for that matter) as a major factor in the production of ancient literature simply by claiming that the focus of her investigation is on “the expressly literary aspects of early Jewish culture” (5)? Does this not reinforce precisely the “bookish” understanding of literature from which Mroczek herself wants to move away? Also, while there is wide agreement that we should not speak of “Bible” when talking about the literature of Second Temple Judaism, Mroczek wants to go further and reconsider what we mean when we speak of the “book.” To her, the “book” is merely “a root metaphor that provides the fundamental structure for our scholarly imagination” (10). To be sure, modern books are not the same as ancient scrolls. And yet, few will dispute that there were inspired, and hence authoritative written scrolls already in Second Temple times. These were physical objects, with religious communities that converged around them. Are not the over eighty Hebrew Qumran texts that contain some kind of scribal marking on them more than mere metaphors? Mroczek's conceptual boundaries can seem a bit rigid. She concludes, for example, that “the literary world of early Judaism was not a library, but a story” (188). Is it really an either-or? Finally, after reading the book, it is difficult for the reader to escape a sense of vagueness, to suppress a yearning for precision, perhaps even for a new vocabulary and sharper categories of assessment. It is clear what in the old paradigm is being dismissed, but it is much harder to articulate exactly what is being offered instead. Mroczek celebrates open-endedness, “the perpetually unfinished nature of writing” (187), as she puts it, and her book is a fine example of just that.