one jabbed his side with a spear.—John 19:31-36; Ps. 34:20.

Jehovah gave Ezekiel, in Babylon, a vision in which he likened Israel to dry bones lying in a valley plain. In the vision, as Ezekiel prophesied to the bones, they miraculously came together and flesh came upon them. Then he prophesied to the wind and it brought breath into their bodies so that they stood up as a great army. Jehovah explained the vision as applying to Israel who, swallowed up in Babylonish captivity, were as people whose hope had perished. (Ezek. 37:1-11) Similarly, Jeremiah likened the king of Assyria, who took the ten-tribe kingdom into captivity, and Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, who carried away Judah, to lions devouring His people and gnawing on their bones. (Jer. 50:17) God had permitted this because of Israel’s apostasy. But Jehovah was going to remember them and put into them his spirit, which would revive and revitalize them, and bring them back to be settled in Palestine.—Ezek. 37:12-14.

After Jehovah’s destruction of Gog and his hordes who come up in attack against Jehovah’s people, there will be continual employment for seven months in marking the places of the bones of Gog’s crowd and burying them in order to cleanse the surface of the earth from all uncleanness and defilement.—Ezek. 39:14-16.

Jehovah figuratively describes the rich blessings he will bring to his people when he wipes out death, saying that he will make for them a banquet of “well-oiled dishes filled with marrow.”—Isa. 25:6.

BOOK

[Heb., seʹpher, book, scroll, letter, writing, document, register; Gr., biʹblos (the center or substance of the papyrus stem), bi·bliʹon, book, scroll].

An early “book” might be a tablet or a collection of tablets made of clay, stone, wax, wood covered with wax, metal, ivory, or perhaps even a group of potsherds (Greek, oʹstra·ka), and so forth. Handwritten scrolls (rolls) were formed of attached sheets of papyrus, parchment (skin of animals, such as sheep and goats) or the finer material vellum, made of the skin of young calves, and, still later, linen, linen paper, and so forth. Finally a book became a collection of consecutive handwritten or printed, folded sheets, strung, sewn, glued, stitched or otherwise fastened together to form a bound volume.

As to scrolls, usually only one side was written on (when on leather, the originally hairy side). The writing material was sometimes wound on a stick. The reader would begin reading at one end, holding the scroll in his left hand and winding it around the stick with his right hand (if reading Hebrew; reverse if reading Greek). If the record was lengthy, the roll might be wound on two sticks, with the middle part of the text visible when picked up to read. Hence the word “volume,” derived from the Latin word volvere, meaning “to roll,” and volumin, meaning a “roll.”

A common size for the sheets that were used in making scrolls was nine to eleven inches (23 to 28 centimeters) high and six to nine inches (15 to 23 centimeters) horizontally. A number of these sheets were joined together side by side with paste. However, the Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah, of the first or second century B.C.E., was made of seventeen parchment strips averaging ten and five-sixteenth inches (26.2 centimeters) in height and varying in length from about ten inches (25.4 centimeters) to almost twenty-five inches (63.5 centimeters), totaling twenty-four feet and five-sixteenth inches (7.32 meters) in length in its present state of preservation. A common length of scroll in the time of Pliny (probably those on sale commercially) was twenty sheets. An Egyptian papyrus roll chronicling the reign of Ramses II, called the Harris Papyrus, is 133 feet (40.5 meters) in length. The gospel of Mark would have required a roll about nineteen feet (5.8 meters) long, Luke, about 31 or 32 feet (c. 9.4 to 9.7 meters).

The edges of the roll were trimmed, smoothed with pumice stone and colored, generally black. Dipping in cedar oil protected the scroll from insects. The writing was usually done on one side of the scroll unless there was more information than could be put on the inside. Then at times some writing might be on the outside or the reverse side. The visionary scrolls containing judgments that were seen by the prophets Ezekiel and Zechariah and the apostle John were written on both sides. This seems to indicate that the judgments were great, extensive and weighty.—Ezek. 2:10; Zech. 5:1-3; Rev. 5:1.

Important documents were sealed with a lump of clay or wax having the impression of the seal of the writer or maker, attached to the document by strings. The apostle John saw in vision a scroll with seven seals, handed by the one on the throne to the Lamb.—Rev. 5:1-7.

Earlier scrolls appear to have had up to four columns per page, while later ones generally contained one column. Jeremiah’s scroll consisted of “page-columns.” As three or four columns were read, King Jehoiakim cut that portion off the scroll and threw it into the fire. (Jer. 36:23) The seventeen strips of the Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah contained fifty-four columns of text, each having from twenty-eight to thirty-two lines.

In the papyrus scrolls the sheets were made of two layers of papyrus at right angles to each other. The sheets were pasted together so that horizontal strips formed the inside surface of the scroll, presenting a smooth writing surface and a guide for level writing. The title on a small strip of papyrus was attached to the top edge, which could be easily read whether the roll stood on end or laid on a shelf. Parchment or vellum scrolls were often ruled to guide the pen of the writer. Such lines appear on the Isaiah scroll.—See PAPYRUS; WRITING.

The scroll form of book served the Israelites down to the period of the Christian congregation. The records in the ancient national archives of Israel and Judah as well as the inspired writings of Jehovah’s prophets, though sometimes called “books,” were actually in this scroll form.—1 Ki. 11:41; 14:19; Jer. 36:4, 6, 23.

Each synagogue, a development after the Babylonian exile, kept and utilized scrolls of the Sacred Scriptures, and there was public reading from them on every sabbath. (Acts 15:21) Jesus himself read from that type of scroll, probably one like the Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah.—Luke 4:15-20.

It appears that Christians used mainly the roll or scroll form of book at least until about the end of the first century C.E. The apostle John wrote the Revelation about 96 C.E., and the book calls itself a scroll at chapter 22, verses 18 and 19. But the scroll form of book was very unwieldy. It would be hard to carry around several Bible books in scroll form. It would be even more inconvenient, in fact, practically impossible, to make quick reference to certain statements in a large scroll. The indications are that the Christians were quick to adopt the use of the codex or leaf-book, because they were interested in preaching the “good news” and consulted and pointed out many references in the Scriptures in their Bible study and preaching.

As to the fact that the Christians, if they did not invent the leaf-book, took the lead in the use of it, Professor E. J. Goodspeed in his book Christianity Goes to Press, pages 75, 76, says: “There were men in the early church keenly alive to the part publication was playing in the Graeco-Roman world, who, in their zeal to spread the Christian message over that world, seized upon all the techniques of publication, not just the old traditional threadbare ones, but the newest and most progressive ones, and made use of them to the full in their Christian propaganda. In doing this they began the use on any large scale of the leaf-book, now in universal use. Their gospel was not an esoteric, secret mystery, but something