SCRIBAL PRACTICES AND APPROACHE S ... - Emanuel Tov

5
WRITING PRACTICES
The writing practices reflected in the various texts from the Judean Desert differ internally in
many details. They often show a common idiosyncratic heritage, while other practices sometimes
coincide with writing conventions known from other cultures.
Both sacred and nonsacred texts were written in the same scripts and with identical
orthographic practices, with the employment of the same systems of sense division, scribal
marks, correction, etc. (below, ch. 7a). Also, there are virtually no differences between the scribal
systems used for the writing in the square script and the paleo-Hebrew script excluding the
details mentioned in ch. 7b.
a. Divisions between words, small sense units
(stichs and verses), sections, poetical units, and books
Divisions in the text, whether between words, stichs, verses, sections, larger units, and books are
indicated in a variety of ways in the Judean Desert texts.
(1) Word division
The various languages and corpora of texts from the ancient Middle East employed different systems of word
division, while some had no such division at all. For an overall analysis, see Ashton, Scribal Habits, ch. 7; A. F.
Robertson, Word Dividers; Gordon, Ugaritic Textbook, 24 (vertical wedge); idem, “Non-Word Divider Use of the
Small Vertical Wedge in Yarih and Nikkal and in an Akkadian Text Written in Alphabetic Cuneiform,” in Ki
Baruch Hu, Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch A. Levin (ed. R. Chazan et al.;
Winona Lake, Indiana 1999) 89–109; W. Horowitz, Graphemic Representation of Word Boundary: The Small
Vertical Wedge in Ugaritic, unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Yale 1971; Tov, TCHB, 208–9; A. R. Millard, “‘Scriptio
Continua’ in Early Hebrew—Ancient Practice or Modern Surmise?” JSS 15 (1970) 2–15; idem, “Were Words
Separated in Ancient Hebrew Writing?” Bible Review VIII, 3 (1992) 44–47; J. Naveh, “Word Division in West
Semitic Writing,” IEJ 23 (1973) 206–8. P. Saenger, Space between Words, The Origins of Silent Reading
(Stanford, Calif. 1997) provides an in-depth analysis, but mainly of practices in European languages and literatures.
Scriptio continua
The overwhelming majority of the Judean Desert texts use one of two systems for separating
words in Hebrew and Aramaic, employing either word-dividers of some kind (mainly dots) in
texts written in the paleo-Hebrew script, or spacing between words in the texts written in the
square script. Words in most Greek texts from that area are separated by spacing. Continuous
writing (scriptio/scriptura continua) or that with very few breaks is attested only in some texts or
groups of texts, probably with the purpose of economizing on space, since the texts use final
Hebrew letters, or for aesthetic reasons:
• All the tefillin and mezuzot; see illustr. 9.
• The Copper Scroll (3Q15).
• MurGen, MurExod, and MurNum (same manuscript?), written almost continuously, with minute spaces
between the words.
• MurIsa.
• The Greek Qumran texts of the Pentateuch (DJD IX), as well as hand A of 8H≥evXIIgr (hand B used spacing).