"... Although the term torah originally meant “instruction” and hence originally had an oral context, this oral torah, or “instruction,” is transformed into the textual and written Torah in Second Temple literature. The transformation is implicit as, for example, in Chronicles 16:40: “according to all that is written in the Torah of YHWH which he commanded Israel.” To begin with, the instructions were orally commanded, but these commands were subsequently written down. Hence, the Torah that the priest teaches is now those commands that were written in a document, as we learn in Chronicles 17:9: “And the priests taught in Judah, having with them the scroll of the Torah of YHWH, and they went about among all the cities of Judah and taught the people.” We see in Chronicles both the sacred written text and the priest who instructs the people from the authority of this sacred text. More generally, we witness in the Jewish literature written in the Persian and Hellenistic periods the rise of Scripture. The very idea of “Scripture” depends upon a textual culture. In an oral culture the activities of composing, learning, and transmitting blend together. Tradition is constantly reinventing itself. Writing, on the other hand, freezes tradition. As Plato so astutely observes in Socrates’ speech to Phaedrus, “written words go on telling you just the same thing forever.” ..."

Schniedewind, William M. How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (p. 187) Cambridge University Press, 2004