Hebrew soferim, Greek grammateis — professional students, copyists, and teachers of the Mosaic Law. The scribal class emerged in earnest during and after the Babylonian exile, when written Torah became the center of Jewish identity after the temple's destruction. Ezra is the archetype: "a scribe skilled in the Law of Moses" (Ezra 7:6). By the first century, scribes were the intellectual aristocracy of Israel — drafters of legal documents, instructors of the young, debaters in the synagogues, and authorities appealed to on matters of interpretation. Some were Pharisees (the majority), some Sadducees; they were a profession, not a sect.
The Gospels present the scribes as Jesus' constant interlocutors and opponents. He called them out by name: "Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes and love greetings in the marketplaces and the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts, who devour widows' houses and for a pretense make long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation" (Mark 12:38-40). Their besetting sin was loving the appearance of knowledge more than its substance — mastering minutiae while missing the main point. Jesus pronounced woe on them seven times in Matthew 23: they shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces, they crossed sea and land to make a single proselyte, they tithed mint and dill while neglecting justice and mercy, they cleaned the outside of the cup while the inside was full of greed. Not all scribes were hostile — one scribe answered wisely about the greatest commandment and Jesus said, "You are not far from the kingdom of God" (Mark 12:34). The modern parallel is the academic theologian who masters the field but has never bent the knee. Scholarship without the new birth is scribal knowledge in the first-century sense — useful for footnotes, fatal for the soul.