SCRIBAL PRACTICES AND APPROACHE S ... - Emanuel Tov

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WRITING AND WRITING MATERIALS
The texts from the Judean Desert were written mainly on leather and papyrus, on individual
sheets or in scrolls. There are no codices from this area and, indeed, the codex only came into
common use in a period later than that covered by the present monograph. 54
The great majority of the documents from the Judean Desert were written on leather and
papyrus (the latter comprise some 14% or 131 texts of the 930 Qumran texts; see § 3e below). In
addition, a large number of ostraca were found, especially at Masada, but also at Murabba>at
(Mur 72–87, 165–168), Nah≥al H≥ever (8H≥ev 5–6), Nah≥al Mishmar (1Mish 4–8), as well as
at Khirbet Qumran (KhQ Ostraca 1–3) and Qumran cave 10 (10QOstracon). Only the Copper
Scrolls from cave 3 were inscribed on that material, according to Lefkovits, Copper Scroll, 463 in
order to solve ‘the problem of ritual impurity.’ Two texts were inscribed on wooden tablets:
5/6H≥ev 54 (P.Yadin 54) 55 and Mas 743 from 73 or 74 CE (Masada II, 90). 56 For additional
writing materials used in this and earlier periods, see A. Lemaire (n. 57).
The use of different materials at the various sites in the Judean Desert reflects the differences
in genre among the documents found at these locations. The great majority of the literary texts as
included in the corpora found at Qumran and Masada were written on leather, while papyrus,
was used for most of the documentary texts, such as letters and various administrative texts,
found at Nah≥al H≥ever, Nah≥al S≥eat, and the other sites. At the same
time, in ancient Egypt and the Graeco-Roman world, papyrus was the preferred material for texts
of any kind, and writing on various forms of leather was far less frequent (see also Gamble, Books
and Readers, 45–6).
There is no direct evidence regarding the main writing material for long texts used in ancient
Israel before the period attested by the Judean Desert documents. Both leather and papyrus were
in use in Egypt at a very early period (see § b below), but it is not impossible that leather was
preferred in ancient Israel because it was more readily available than papyrus which had to be
imported from far-away Egypt. Thus R. Lansing Hicks, “Delet and M e gillah: A Fresh Approach
to Jeremiah XXXVI,” VT 33 (1983) 46–66, believed that leather was used for the writing of
ancient biblical scrolls. One of the arguments used by Lansing Hicks (p. 61) is that a knife was
used by Jehoiakim to cut the columns of Baruch’s scroll exactly at the sutures since the text
mentions that after each three or four columns Yehudi cut the scroll (Jer 36:23). On the other
hand, according to Haran, “Book-Scrolls,” a few allusions in Scripture suggest that papyrus
served as the main writing material during the First Temple period, even though no biblical
papyrus texts have been preserved from that era 57 and the Qumran corpus contains very few
biblical papyrus copies.
54 On the transition from scroll to codex, see C. H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London 1983); Les
débuts du codex (ed. A. Blanchard; Bibliologia elementa ad librorum studia pertinentia 9; Turnout 1989); I. M. Resnick,
“The Codex in Early Jewish and Christian Communities,” JRH 17 (1992) 1–17; Gamble, Books and Readers, 49–66; E.
J. Epp, “The Codex and Literacy in Early Christianity and at Oxyrhynchus: Issues Raised by Harry Y. Gamble’s Books
and Readers in the Early Church,” CRBR 10 (1997) 15–37.
55 For a detailed description of these slates or tablets, one of which contains one of the Bar Kochba letters, see M. Haran,
“Codex, Pinax and Writing Slate,” Scripta Classica Israelica 15 (1996) 212–22 (Hebrew version in Tarbiz 57 [1988]
151–64).
56 For the use of wood as writing material in the ancient Near East, see K. Galling, “Tafel, Buch und Blatt,” in Near
Eastern Studies in Honor of William Foxwell Albright (ed. H. Goedicke; Baltimore/London 1971) 207–23.
57 Jer 51:63 mentions the binding of a stone to a scroll so that it would sink in the Euphrates River. According to Haran,
this scroll was made of papyrus, since a leather scroll would have sunk even without a stone. In support of this