Deuteronomy 6:4-10 English Standard Version
4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
10 “And when the Lord your God brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you—with great and good cities that you did not build,
We must not allow confusion to shake our faith.
God gives Israel instructions to write His commandments on the doorposts and gates to homes they do not yet have. They are living in tents in the wilderness at the time. Putting that aside for the moment, let us move forward to a time in which they have taken possession of that promise.
Moses writes the history of Israel in the first five books of the Old Testament. Deuteronomy has a lengthy list of commandments. Surely the doorposts are not large enough to contain all the instructions, nor would the gates to their homes.
Given that Moses wrote one copy of the Pentateuch and an estimated 600,000 families took up residence there, how would those families obey the command without a copy of their own?
The logical answer is a vast number of copies would have been made.
Deuteronomy 17:18-19 English Standard Version
18 “And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests. 19 And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them,”
This is the only scripture I could find that indicates copies were made and approved by the priest. It indicates who would approve them.
2 Chronicles 34:13 were over the burden-bearers and directed all who did work in every kind of service, and some of the Levites were scribes and officials and gatekeepers.
The word for scribe here is סָפַר çâphar, saw-far’; a primitive root; properly, to score with a mark as a tally or record, i.e. (by implication) to inscribe, and also to enumerate; intensively, to recount. Perhaps this is not a title here as much as an action. Scribe became a title later.