Paper short abstract:

The introduction of writing as a divine gift in Hellenistic Jewish Literature solidified the Biblical god as a tech creator deity against the framework of Greek myths. A Christian text combined the Jewish and Greek versions to prove the superiority of the Christian god over the others.

Paper long abstract:

In the Bible, writing is first mentioned when God ordered Moses to “write down in a scroll” the story of Joshua’s victory (Exodus 17.14). Writing was thus introduced as an already existing technology, with its origins unexplained. On Sinai, the commandments were written both by Moses (Ex. 24.4-7; 34.27) and “the finger of God” (Ex. 31.1). While writing was defined as means of communication between a divinity and their people, its status as either a divine creation or as a human invention remained unspecified.

During the Hellenistic period, Enoch, an ancestor of Noah (Genesis 5.24), was described in many Jewish texts as a righteous man who “introduced new kinds of technology among his peers” (Reed and Reeves 2018, 111). In a text dated to the mid-2nd century BCE, Enoch was said to have been “the first among men born on earth to learn to write” (Jubilees 4.17). The phrasing implies that he was taught characters by a divine entity. I will argue that the surprising emergence of Enoch as a full-fledged “cultural hero” can be understood as the result of fruitful competition with the Greek myths that attributed many technological discoveries to either gods and goddesses or heroes.

Indeed, the hero credited with the introduction of writing into the Greek world, Cadmus, was associated with Enoch during Late Antiquity. A 6th century Christian text stated that letters were not invented by men but inscribed on stone by God and learned by a divinely inspired Enoch (On the Mysteries of the Letters 19.20). Cadmus then found the inscribed stone and introduced writing to Phoenicia (Stroumsa 2014). The Christian author of this text aimed at reconciling the Jewish and the Greek versions of the introduction of writing to better prove the superiority of Christianity.