SCRIBAL PRACTICES AND APPROACHE S ... - Emanuel Tov

APPENDIX 1
CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES
OF THE QUMRAN SCRIBAL PRACTICE
Positive and negative evidence pertaining to the documents found at Qumran and Masada
The appendix records all the relevant evidence regarding the scribal, orthographic, and
morphological criteria, both positive and negative, which are mentioned elsewhere in this
monograph as possible criteria for the recognition of the Qumran scribal practice. These criteria
point to differences between the texts supposedly written in this scribal system and the other
texts within the Qumran corpus. For each text for which a single criterion of this type is
recognized, for example a scribal mark recorded in col. 3, all other criteria are recorded as well,
with relevant positive and negative information. 338
This appendix aims at exhaustiveness in three areas for which positive and negative evidence
is recorded: specific scribal practices, certain orthographic and morphological features (listed in
detail in APPENDIX 9), and the probability of authorship by the Qumran community (‘sectarian
character’). In other words, even if a given scribal practice occurs in a text that was probably not
copied according to the assumed Qumran scribal practice, for example, an Aramaic text, it is
nevertheless recorded. This is to enable the objective listing of all the available evidence for that
scribal practice. By the same token, additional compositions, often very fragmentary, that are
presumed to be sectarian, but which do not reflect positive evidence for a Qumran scribal practice
are listed in § c below, in order to present as complete a picture as possible.
The absence of a remark in a column indicates that the composition does not evidence that
feature, although it is recognized that the fragmentary condition of the texts enables only partial
analysis. Thus the absence of scribal marks in a fragmentary text does not preclude their presence
in the parts of the text that have not been preserved. For example, a notation of the presence
(‘gd’) or absence (‘no-gd’) of guide dots/strokes is only relevant if the beginning or end of a sheet
has been preserved.
The above description implies that the data which follow do not pertain to all the texts found
at Qumran; e.g. 1QIsa a is included, while 1QIsa b is excluded, since it does not contain any
positive information in cols. 1–6. Other information relating to that scroll is included in APPENDIX
8 (‘Scribal features of biblical manuscripts’).
This first appendix records the following types of data in seven columns for the biblical texts
and nine columns for the nonbiblical texts:
1. Section markers section markers except for spacing denoted as ‘y[es]’, including
hyphens and apostrophe signs besides the paragraphos (ch. 5c1)
2. Correction systems
dots cancellation dots/strokes (ch. 5, TABLES 10–14)
cross crossing out of letters or words with a line (ch. 5, TABLE 16)
par parenthesis sign(s) (ch. 5c2)
par (box) box-like parenthesis signs (ch. 5c2)
338 The appendix does not record the data concerning the writing of final letters in nonfinal position and nonfinal letters in
final position (see ch. 5g) since they have not been recorded exhaustively.