SCRIBAL PRACTICES AND APPROACHE S ... - Emanuel Tov

6 Chapter 1: Introduction
documents found at other sites in the Judean Desert. The scribal practices used in the Nabatean-
Aramaic, Greek, and Latin documents from Masada, Nah≥al H≥ever, and Murabba>at are covered
less fully in this monograph.
At the scribal-practice level, very little distinction was made between the writing and
production of biblical (sacred) and nonbiblical (nonsacred) texts (ch. 7a), and therefore a combined
discussion of the two types of texts is justified in this monograph. Throughout, the term ‘biblical’
refers to the canonical books of Hebrew/Aramaic Scripture. Even though this usage is
anachronistic for the Judean Desert texts, it is made for the sake of convenience. Special attention
is given to noncanonical authoritative writings (Jubilees, Ben Sira, Enoch, as well as Qumran
sectarian writings) if perchance their scribal features reveal traits in common with the canonical
biblical writings. This seems to be the case with scrolls of very large dimensions (see ch. 4e).
When relevant, the nonbiblical 4QReworked Pentateuch is listed with the biblical texts (e.g. ch. 4,
TABLE 10).
Since the documents were written in different periods and localities, they reflect a variety of
scribal practices. For the present purpose, however, these different groups of documents are
described as one large, somewhat artificial, corpus, whose common practices are described in the
main section of this monograph. At the same time, the analysis in ch. 7 focuses on a few specific
groups: (a) biblical texts; (b) texts written in the paleo-Hebrew script; (c) tefillin and mezuzot; (d)
texts written on papyrus; (e) texts written in Greek; and (f) pesharim.