NEW TESTAMENT TIMES
own books. The number of community houses for the four thousand monks was considerable, and the fact of their libraries appears from the evidence of Josephus and Philo, which shows that one of the chief tenets of their sect was that they should keep carefully "the books of their heresy" (and the word for keeping is technically the word used for the keeping of books in a library). They were also said to be extraordinarily zealous about the writings of the ancients (Jos. B. J. II 8, 6) and they used "holy books and prophetic oracles" in the preparation for their own prophetic writing.
Many little things go to show that private libraries were as numerous in New Testament times as they were a little later when Jerome was there. Several quotations (Blau p. 90, Krauss p. 26) tend to show that every school child must own his own book. Many of the Rabbinic questions point in this same direction e.g.
[195]
