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Updated: May 13, 2025
The official priesthood, with its attention turned toward political power, and intimately connected with it, did not comprehend these enthusiastic movements. It was the middle-class Pharisees, the innumerable soferim, or scribes, living on the science of "traditions," who took the alarm, and whose prejudices and interests were in reality threatened by the doctrine of the new teacher.
The spiritual treasures of the nation were capitalized, and to this process of capitalization solely and alone generations of men have owed the possibility of resorting to them as a source of faith and knowledge. Without the work of compilation achieved by the Soferim, of which the uninstructed are apt to speak slightingly, mankind to-day had no Bible, that central sun in world-literature.
Anthropomorphism was avoided in the Aramaic translations of the Pentateuch, also in certain changes in the Hebrew text which are recorded in Rabbinical literature, and known as "Tikkune Soferim," or corrections of the Scribes.
The object steadily aimed at was the elevation of the whole body of the people to the plane of spirituality, its transformation, in accordance with the Biblical injunction, into a "kingdom of priests." This injunction of civilizing import became the starting point of the activity of all of Ezra's successors, of the so-called school of the Soferim, the Scribes, those versed in the art of writing.
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