SCRIBAL PRACTICES AND APPROACHE S ... - Emanuel Tov

48 Chapter 3: Writing and Writing Materials
• The Qumran papyri consist of a negligible number of biblical texts (2–6), mainly from cave 6
(TABLE 9).
TABLE 9: Biblical Texts on Papyrus
4QpapIsa p (4Q76)
4QpapGen o or 4QpapJub j ? (4Q483)
6QpapDeut? (6Q3)
6QpapKgs (6Q4)
6QpapPs? (6Q5)
6QpapDan (6Q7)
While the evidence for the cave 4 biblical papyri is very scanty and does not necessarily indicate
the existence of complete biblical scrolls (note that the biblical text 4QpapIsa p contains only a
few words, and could therefore have represented a pesher such as 4Qpap pIsa c (4Q163), the
group of cave 6 biblical scrolls is slightly more significant.
From the point of view of their content, it is difficult to characterize the corpus of the
Qumran papyri which contains almost exclusively non-documentary texts (TABLE 1). The nondocumentary
papyrus texts represent several, if not most, genres of texts represented in the
Qumran corpus. The papyri listed in TABLE 5 reflect these genres, but in the main these texts are
sectarian, as is further underlined by the copies of non-sectarian texts written in the Qumran
scribal practice listed in APPENDIX 2 and analyzed beneath TABLE 6. At the same time, the long
list of texts that are represented frequently among the leather manuscripts of Qumran (TABLE 6)
shows that not all genres of Qumran texts are represented among the papyri. Notably absent
from the corpus of Qumran papyri are eschatological writings and biblical papyri, of which only
a very small minority were found at Qumran (TABLE 9).
We suggest that the collection of Qumran papyri is mainly sectarian and liturgical, and
usually nonbiblical. Most papyri may reflect personal copies owned by members of the Qumran
community, while some may have been imported from other sources.
As far as we can ascertain, the corpus of the Qumran non-documentary papyri does not
reflect any specific content features. Thus, for example, the content of 4QpapMMT e (4Q398)
does not display any features that set it aside from the copies of MMT written on leather.
Notably absent from the Qumran corpus of papyri are texts written in the paleo-Hebrew
script. This probably is no coincidence, since in the Qumran corpus this script was used mainly
for the writing of Scripture texts on leather (Torah and Job). On the other hand, one papyrus
from Murabba>at (Mur 17) was written in the ancient Hebrew script and one papyrus from
Masada (Mas 1o) was written in the paleo-Hebrew script.
The scribal practices reflected in the Qumran papyri can be examined best in a few texts that
were relatively well preserved:
4Qpap pIsa c (4Q163)
4QpapTob a ar (4Q196)
4QpapS c (4Q257)
4QpapAdmonitory Parable (4Q302)
4Qpap paraKings et al. (4Q382)
4QpapMMT e (4Q398)
4QpapH f (4Q432), see E. Schuller, DJD XXIX, pls. XIII–XIV and foldout pl. III
With some exceptions, the scribal conventions used in writing on papyrus are similar to those
used for writing on the leather texts from the Judean Desert, insofar as they relate to the spelling
systems, the use of final letters (ch. 5g), word division (ch. 5a1), paragraphing (ch. 5a3), writing