SCRIBAL PRACTICES AND APPROACHE S ... - Emanuel Tov

156 Chapter 5: Writing Practices
While many of the poetry texts in the Bible are written as running texts in the medieval copies of
MT, medieval manuscripts presented the t"ma books (Job, Proverbs, and Psalms), some songs of
the Torah, the song of Deborah, and the acrostic in Lamentations, as poetry. The manuscripts
differ among themselves with regard to the systems of presenting the text, and these differences
were multiplied in modern editions. Thus the editions of Letteris (in most of its printings) and
Cassuto present the t"ma books as poetry, while several of the printings of the Letteris edition
present only the book of Psalms as poetry. The layouts of the poems in the medieval
manuscripts and printed editions, as well as their relationship to statements in rabbinic literature,
were analyzed in detail by M. Breuer, The Aleppo Codex and the Accepted Text of the Bible (Heb.
with Eng. summ.; Jerusalem 1976) 149–89.
These traditions as well as additional systems of layout of poetical segments were reflected
already in some texts from the Judean Desert, while other ancient texts containing poetical
segments were written in prose. The practice of a stichographic 209 representation was developed
for the books written in a system of strict parallelismus membrorum, which therefore could
easily be represented stichographically. This pertains also to most Songs in the Torah. Other
poetical books, such as the Major Prophets, likewise reflect such parallelismus, but not in all
chapters, and probably for this reason no stichographic writing tradition has been developed for
them. As a result, most poetical books are not represented in stichographic writing.
The stichographic arrangements of poetical texts reflect a certain understanding by their
scribes of the poetical structure, while it is unclear to what extent these layouts reflect the original
intention of the poets behind the texts. Only in a few instances, and probably at a later period, 210
do these stichographic layouts merely serve a decorative purpose.
The background of the stichographic presentation of some poetical texts is unclear. The
special writing of Psalms as poetry could have been related to liturgical chanting, but on the other
hand a Psalms scroll such as 11QPs a which probably does represent a liturgical collection is not
written in this fashion. Furthermore, the stichographic representation of Job, Proverbs,
Lamentations, and Ben Sira is not consonant with a possible liturgical background (thus also
Oesch, Petucha und Setuma, 334). Therefore, the stichographic representation of specific texts
probably mainly reflects a recognition of the poetical nature of these units. The fact that for
almost every occurrence of a stichographic arrangement there are other scrolls displaying the same
composition in prose shows that the tradition of stichographic writing was not fixed or that
different traditions were in vogue during different periods (see below).
In the Judean Desert texts, a special arrangement of poetical units is known almost
exclusively for biblical texts (including Ben Sira [2QSir and MasSir]), but not for any of the
nonbiblical poetical compositions from the Judean Desert, such as 4QNon-Canonical Psalms A,
B (4Q380, 4Q381), the Hodayot from caves 1 (1QH a,b ) and 4 (4QH a–f ), 4QBarkhi Nafshi a–e ,
4QShirShabb a–f , 4QSelf-Glorification Hymn (4Q471b; 4QM a [4Q491] 11 [4Q491c]), and the
various sapiential compositions (mainly 4Q415–426). 211 The fact that the song in Exodus 15 in
4QRP c (4Q365) 6a ii and 6c, a ‘rewritten Bible’ composition, is written in a special layout may
209 The term is used in the discussion by J. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and its History (New
Haven/London 1981) 119–27.
210 Reference is made to the Samaritan scribal habits and the Masoretic system of writing a ‘half-brick over a whole brick
and a whole brick over a half-brick’ to be mentioned below. For a different view, stressing the decorative function of
stichographic writing also for the Qumran documents, see Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry, 121.
211 The layout of 1Q38 is unclear: the editors of this ‘composition hymnique,’ D. Barthélemy and J. T. Milik, presented this
fragmentary text as reflecting two columns of hemistichs of a stichographically arranged text, separated by spaces.
However, the spaces are large, and it is more likely that the fragment presents remnants of two columns of an otherwise
unknown text. Furthermore, our list does not include 4QBeatitudes (4Q525) col. II which appears to be written in a
stichographic arrangement, but the scribe of this text left irregular spaces in the lines, at different places, after each yrça
statement.