a scribe: a royal official trained in writing, who handles a government's letters and records and can be its recognized expert in the law
Persia ran on paperwork, and this is the word for the man who produced it. The scribe was not a copyist tucked away with a manuscript. He was an officer of the government, and it was his hand on a letter that turned an opinion into official business. Ezra 4 puts it plainly: Rehum the commanding officer and Shimshai the scribe are named together as the pair who write to King Artaxerxes, and their letter is what halts the rebuilding of Jerusalem.
Three duties travel with the title:
- he drafted the official letters that carried a government's decisions
- he stood with the other officials when an order from the king was read out
- he was summoned to write out a decree exactly as it was dictated to him
The word also stretches past office work to expertise. When Artaxerxes writes to "Ezra the priest, scribe of the law of the God of heaven," the title marks Ezra as the recognized authority on a body of law, a man the empire could rely on to say what that law required. In that letter he holds two titles at once: the priest's (כָּהֵן), which came to him by birth, and the scribe's, which came by training.
The Hebrew word used of Israel's own court scribes (סָפַר) covers the same ground, and the Greek word the Gospels use for scribes (γραμματεύς) inherits the whole range. The same figure keeps reappearing across the Bible: the literate official whose writing carries weight.
Nuances
What the title "scribe of the law of the God of heaven" designated when Artaxerxes used it of Ezra.
- contestedA genuine post in the Persian administration, roughly a secretary of state for the law of the Jewish community, which is why the title stands in the king's own letter.; H. H. Schaeder, Esra der Schreiber (Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 5; Tübingen: Mohr, 1930)
- contestedA designation of Ezra's standing as a master of the law of Moses within his own community, taken up into the letter rather than coined as a precise administrative rank.; H. G. M. Williamson, Ezra, Nehemiah, Word Biblical Commentary 16 (1985)