In Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, David Carr explores a new model for the production, revision, and reception of ancient texts. The Gilgamesh epic, Homer's Iliad, and the Bible, he shows, were first and foremost intended as educational texts. The primary focus was not on writing such texts on tablets or papyrus, but inscribing hallowed writings, word for word, on the hearts of elite members of society. Carr begins by examining the key concepts of orality, cultural memory, and literacy, and then synthesizes scholarship on writing and education in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Israel. He shows how each of these cultures formed elites by having young people (usually male) master a body of ancient texts, often written in an archaic dialect or foreign language. By this process, whether or not it occurred in a formal educational setting, select members of society were trained for leadership by learning to read, write, recite, and/or sing this body of texts. We can see the marks of this process in secular and religious educational institutions even today. Elite secular education is still prone to cultivate mastery of ancient, esoteric cultural knowledge, even if the focus has broadened from the Iliad to a range of core literary texts. Moreover, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been profoundly shaped by early Jewish educational practices, which focused on mastery of the Hebrew Bible defined in opposition to the Greek curriculum and Greek culture. emerged as a support for an educational process in which These ancient forms of education, Carr demonstrates, have much to teach us not only about the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israelite culture, but about how religious and secular groups are formed by having ancient, cherished traditions "written on the heart" of the next generation.

"Writing on the Tablet of the Heart is a stimulating analysis of classical religious texts that were essential to the enculturation of elite transmitters of tradition. Its adept handling of the data implicit in comparative texts from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece, together with those from Qumran, illuminates the emergence of the Bible and suggests a way to revitalize Scripture today."

"In Writing on the Tablet of the Heart David Carr draws on a vast range of evidence to explore writing and the socialization of elites in the ancient Near East and the Hellenistic world. This impressive work contributes vitally to breaking down the distinction between literacy and orality which has often clouded discussions of cultural and administrative institutions in the ancient world, and reaches significant conclusions that will have an impact far beyond its core area of Biblical Studies."

"Carr spans the ancient Near East with enviable ease, bringing together scholars and debates from diverse disciplines. His cross-cultural analysis will stimulate new insights into areas which readers know well, while it also offers intriguing glimpses into new territory."

"David Carr's Writing on the Tablet of the Heart provides a fresh and highly readable account of the contexts and conditions which progressively shaped ancient Israel's textual heritage as scripture. Carr adroitly employs an impressively broad range of comparative and theoretical perspectives to argue for the centrality of an oral-written textual practice in the educational process of cultural formation and socialization in elite Israelite circles. While this book is must reading for students and scholars of the Hebrew Bible, both in its literary formation and social reception, Carr's reach extends to other cultural fields in which orality and textuality are performatively bound."

"David Carr has given us an extremely thorough study of the modes of textual transmission that has far-reaching implications for our study of the Pentateuch and the composition of biblical literature. Using a comparative and anthropological approach, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart breaks new ground in understanding the implications of orality and literacy in the formation of Scripture. This well-written and carefully researched book deserves to be a standard work for anyone interested in the Bible."

David M. Carr is Professor of Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He is the author of The Erotic Word: Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Bible (OUP, 2003) and several other books.