280. “Scribal Characteristics of the Qumran Scrolls,” in The Caves of Qumran: Proceedings of the International Conference, Lugano 2014, ed. Marcello Fidanzio, STDJ 118 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017), 87–95 (submitted manuscript, now published) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Judaean Desert documents (often named 'the Dead Sea Scrolls') constitute the largest corpus of texts in non-lapidary scripts providing information about scribal habits in early Israel relating to biblical and non-biblical texts. They may be compared with other texts in Hebrew and Aramaic in non-lapidary scripts, especially the large corpora of Elephantine papyri and other Aramaic manuscripts from the 5 th and 4 th centuries BCE. These two groups of documents are highly significant as comparative material for the present analysis; among other things, evidence shows that the manuscripts from the Judaean Desert continued the writing tradition of the Aramaic documents from the 5 th century BCE in several respects. For the purpose of this study, the following areas have been singled out from the many scribal aspects of manufacturing and preparing the Judaean Desert documents: the local production of written material in the Judaean Desert, special characteristics of the Qumran corpus, the reasons behind the scribal peculiarities of the Qumran corpus, internal differences between the Qumran caves, and chronological differences between the corpora.
This paper is concerned with the statistical background of and scribal corrections found within the Qumran scribal practice, and not with its linguistic background, which has been illustrated well by Kutscher, Qimron, and Fassberg among others.1 The composite scrolls 1QIsaa and 1qha were copied by more than one scribe, each one writing a part of the scroll within the Qumran scribal practice. The differences between these scribes show that diversity is possible within the same scribal practice, and furthermore that all scribes were inconsistent within their own units. If the figures are taken at face value, apparent scribal inconsistency within these scrolls may sometimes be attributed to the presence of different spelling blocks and in one case from the use of a different source. These possibilities need to be taken into consideration when analyzing the statistical evidence, which as a whole is rather convincing. In the second part of the paper I turn to corrective additions after final letters, such as the he of ע ל י ה ם ה. I hope to have collected all the relevant evidence with the aid of electronic databases. I analyze the questions of how, when, and where these added letters were inserted. I believe that they provide further support for establishing the assumption of a Qumran scribal practice.
At this juncture, it is advisable, I think, to give a brief update regarding the so-called unpublished texts from the Judean Desert. I use the term "so-called unpublished texts," since the terms "published" and "unpublished" mean different things to different people. For scholars, any responsible transcription of a text, together with an apparatus of notes and accompanying photographs, is considered a publication. Such a publication may appear in a dissertation, an article in a scholarly journal, or a book. All these publications provide the public with the essential information needed for further study of the texts under consideration. On another level, however, these publications are considered preliminary, since all the Qumran texts, and actually most texts from the Judean Desert, are to appear in the official publication, namely DJD, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, published by Oxford University Press. That series is to contain the official publication of all the texts, the editio princeps. Things get a little complicated, however, since the editio princeps may be preceded by preliminary publications, and are often followed by re-editions. The usual course would be that the publication in the DJD series improves on preliminary editions, if any, and that re-editions subsequent to DJD improve on DJD.