Biblical scribes recorded oral traditions and adapted them for their time, but Jeremiah condemned them harshly for their "lying pen." Writing locked stories in place, erasing the variation that existed when tales were told aloud, and scribes sometimes changed the meaning in the process.
Chapters
Scribes were interpreters of the scriptures. They read the Law and the Prophets, and then they reinterpreted it for the time and the culture in which they lived. Jeremiah is the first place in the Bible where scribes are mentioned, and Jeremiah didn't like them very much at all. He wrote this about them in Jeremiah 8:8: How can you claim, we are wise, the law of the Lord is with us, In fact, the lying pen of the scribes has produced falsehood. What the scribes were doing in Jeremiah's time is they were writing down the oral tradition. And when you write it down, what does it do? It locks it in time and place. And there would have been just even maybe 20 kilometers from where you lived, there might be a different telling of when Moses came down from the mountain, just a little bit different. But the way that Uncle So-and-so always said it, the way that Rabbi So-and-so always said it, that would be passed down. And now the scribes are going around and they were capturing these stories. And they were putting them into print. And Jeremiah read them and went, "That's not the way I've told it. That's not the way I've heard it told." And so sometimes they would just say, "Oh, that's just a matter of how you're telling it." But other times, like Jeremiah here says, in fact, the lying pen of the scribes— because the scribes would take those stories and make them mean things different than what they had been taught that they meant in the past.
