Writing

Writing in the biblical world is attested from the earliest periods of Israelite history and presupposed as a known art throughout the Old Testament. Exodus 17:14 — "Write this for a memorial in a book" — is the first command to write in the Pentateuch, followed quickly by God himself writing the Ten Commandments on stone tablets (Exodus 31:18; 32:15–16). The ancient Hebrew script (Proto-Sinaitic/Phoenician) was a consonantal alphabet of approximately 22 letters, a dramatic simplification from the hundreds of Sumerian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphic signs, making literacy more widely accessible. Writing materials included stone tablets (Exodus 24:12), clay (Ezekiel 4:1), wooden tablets (Isaiah 30:8; Habakkuk 2:2), papyrus (imported from Egypt), and leather/vellum. Ink made from charcoal or lampblack was used with a reed pen (Jeremiah 36:18; 3 John 13). The New Testament was written on papyrus and later vellum in Greek, the Mediterranean world's common language. The entire biblical canon was produced through the writing of divinely inspired human authors over roughly fifteen hundred years.