Did 'Scripturalization' Take Place in Second Temple Judaism?

Endemic to biblical scholarship is the presumption that the documents later included in Tanak were widely disseminated among Jews in Second Temple times. Given the largely illiterate population of those centuries, it remains an open question as to how such dissemination could have taken place. Using recent research from cognitive studies and social anthropology as a model for the discussion, this paper reexamines the ancient data and argues that neither the scrolls nor the content of the scrolls had been disseminated prior to the Hellenistic era. From Ptolemaic times into the early Hasmonean period, some limited dissemination of texts began, but widespread Jewish familiarity with themes, tales, and poetry we know as ‘biblical’ emerged only gradually from Hasmonean to Roman times.