The Bible shows one of its own books being written, by a man with a name

The book of Jeremiah, chapter 36: the prophet is banned from the temple, so he dictates. "Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all Yahweh's words." Baruch the scribe then reads the scroll aloud in the temple himself, and it travels up the chain until it reaches King Jehoiakim, who listens to it read column by column, slicing each column off with a scribe's knife and feeding it to the fire in his winter apartment.

The response is not a miracle. It is a rewrite. Jeremiah dictates the scroll again, to the same scribe, and the chapter ends with one of the quietest, most remarkable sentences in the Bible: "and many similar words were added to them." The book grew in the remaking.

A clay seal impression bearing the name "Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu, the scribe" surfaced on the antiquities market decades ago, and for a time it was celebrated as Baruch's own. Because it was never found in a documented excavation, many scholars now doubt its authenticity, and honesty requires saying so. The scene in chapter 36 needs no seal. It is the Bible's own picture of how a biblical book came to be: a voice, a hand, a scroll, a fire that failed, and a second draft longer than the first.

Where to see it: read Jeremiah 36 in one sitting. Watch the penknife in verse 23, and the last line of verse 32, where the burned book comes back larger.