Table Of ContentThe Scribe in the Biblical World
Beihefte zur Zeitschrift
für die alttestamentliche
Wissenschaft
Edited by
John Barton, Reinhard G. Kratz, Nathan MacDonald,
Sara Milstein and Markus Witte
Volume 547
The Scribe in the
Biblical World
A Bridge Between Scripts, Languages and Cultures
Edited by
Esther Eshel and Michael Langlois
ISBN 978-3-11-099668-5
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-098429-3
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ISSN 0934-2575
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Table of Contents
Esther Eshel and Michael Langlois
Introduction | 1
Emanuel Tov
Approaches of Scribes to the Biblical Text in Ancient Israel | 3
André Lemaire
West Semitic Royal Scribes ca. 1250–600 BCE | 23
Sara Milstein
The Role of Legal Texts in Scribal Education: Implications for Biblical
Law | 47
Aaron Demsky
Cursing an Authority: Scribal Tradition from Babylonia to Canaan and
Back | 69
Jan Dušek
The ‘Nests’ of the Aramaic Scribal Culture in the Late 9th – Early 7th Centuries
BCE Levant: An Attempt at Identification | 87
Anat Mendel-Geberovich
Judaean Glyptic Finds: An Updated Corpus and a Revision of Their
Palaeography | 115
Stefan Jakob Wimmer
Hieratic Numerals on Iron Age Hebrew Tax Bullae | 139
Aren M. Wilson-Wright
Out of Egypt: Lexicographic Evidence for Egyptian Influence on West Semitic
and Israelite Administrative and Scribal Practice | 163
Tania Notarius
Northwest Semitic – Akkadian Linguistic Convergence: *sipr- and Other Terms
for ‘Writing’ as a Case Study | 183
VI
William M. Schniedewind
Adaptation in Scribal Curriculum: Examples from the Letter Writing
Genre | 203
Esther Eshel
Combining Different Types of Scripts in the Aramaic Texts | 233
Michael Langlois
Theonyms in Palaeo-Hebrew and Other Alternate Scripts on Dead Sea
Scrolls | 249
Paul Mandel
Between רפֵסֹ and רפַסָ: The Evolution of the Second Temple Period
‘Scribe’ | 295
Guy D. Stiebel
Text Case: Writing under Extreme Conditions at Masada | 321
Jeffrey Stackert
Scribal Fatigue in Ancient Revisionary Composition | 343
Esther Eshel and Michael Langlois
Conclusion | 371
Index | 379
Esther Eshel and Michael Langlois
Introduction
During our joint work on the project The Alphabet: History and Development in
the First Millennium BCE Southern Levant, we asked ourselves, “what is the role
of the individual scribe in the writing process?” Much research has been devoted
to the characteristics of scripts in ancient times and to their development. A fresh
look at the status of the scribe in each society, his training, practices, and work
in the biblical world, was still needed.
As part of our research, the idea of having a conference on the question of
the scribe during the biblical period developed gradually. Focusing on the east-
ern Mediterranean region, we invited scholars from various fields to ask ques-
tions such as: What was the scribe’s role in these societies? Were there rival
scribal schools? What was their role in daily life? How many scripts and lan-
guages did they grasp? Did they master political and religious rhetoric? Did they
travel or share foreign traditions, cultures, and beliefs? Were scribes redactors,
or simply copyists? What was their influence on the redaction of the Bible? How
did they relate to the political and religious powers of their day? Did they possess
any authority themselves? Though we may have been unable to fully answer all
these questions, these theoretical concerns were central to the preparation of this
volume.
The conference was held at the University of Strasbourg on June 17–19, 2019,
with the participation of scholars from Europe, Israel, and the United States, as
well as an audience of students and interested laypersons. The conference served
as the basis for this publication.
This book includes fifteen articles dealing with the various questions men-
tioned above and covering a wide geographical and chronological range, from
Late Bronze Age royal scribes (André Lemaire) to refugees in Masada at the end
of the Second Temple period (Guy Stiebel). The heart of the conference was the
Hebrew Bible and the people who wrote it; accordingly, the first article, written
by Emanuel Tov, outlines the varying—and even individual—approaches of
scribes to the biblical text.
To better define what a scribe is or can be, Tania Notarius and Paul Mandel
each focus on the word רפס itself: Tania Notarius looks at origins and parallels
in other Semitic languages, while Paul Mandel studies the evolution of רפֵסֹ and
רפַסָ in later periods.
Moving out of Canaan and focusing on the influence of other cultures, Aren
Wilson-Wright looks at Egyptian influence on West Semitic and Israelite scribal
2 | Esther Eshel and Michael Langlois
practice. Stefan Jakob Wimmer also shows the influence of Egypt on Hebrew
scribes through the use of hieratic numerals on Iron Age tax bullae.
Besides Egypt, one may also consider Mesopotamian influence. Sara Milstein
searches for the origins of biblical law from the perspective of scribal training in
Mesopotamia. Aaron Demsky follows scribal traditions from Babylonia to Canaan
and back, focusing on the practice of cursing an authority. Jeffrey Stackert pre-
sents evidence for, and implications of, scribal fatigue in revisionary composition
from the Gilgamesh epic to the Pentateuch. William M. Schniedewind looks at
letter writing in West Semitic literature and the Hebrew Bible.
Scribal training is also reflected in the use of various scripts and their evolu-
tion throughout time and space. Anat Mendel-Geberovich presents an updated
survey of Judean Glyptic finds which has implications for ancient Hebrew pale-
ography. Jan Dušek looks at the Aramaic script and attempts to identify nests of
scribal cultures in the Levant from the 9th through 7th centuries BCE. Esther Eshel
focuses on the combination of different types of scripts in Aramaic Lapidary in-
scriptions. Michael Langlois examines the practice of writing theonyms in paleo-
Hebrew in Dead Sea Scrolls that otherwise use the Jewish Aramaic script.
The conference was supported by a Maimonides grant from the Israeli Ministry of
Science and Technology, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International
Development, and the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research. It was
also supported by Bar Ilan University, the University of Strasbourg, the Jeselsohn
Epigraphic Center for Jewish History, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Stud-
ies and the French Research Center in Jerusalem. We want to thank these institu-
tions and the wonderful people who run them. We also thank all of our colleagues
who joined us for this project, as well as Thibault Foulon, who helped us organize
the conference.
Emanuel Tov
Approaches of Scribes to the Biblical Text in
Ancient Israel
1 Introduction
I’ve always philosophized about the existence of two basic scribal approaches to
the text, a free or popularizing approach and a conservative approach with sev-
eral intervening shades. A free approach could come to light in the insertion of
many small changes (additions, omissions, content changes), in freedom in mat-
ters of orthography and language, and in scribal procedures. A careful or con-
servative approach usually disallows changes in content, language, and orthog-
raphy, and is also observed in scribal precision. These two basic attitudes are also
visible in ancient translations. Some translators tried to stay close to their Hebrew
parent text without inserting exegetical elements, while other translators al-
lowed for translational freedom. This time I turn to the ancient scribes, wishing
to examine whether the attitudes that are observable in some groups of texts can
also be identified in individual scrolls. I want to investigate the little that is
known about the approaches of individual scribes to the biblical text. Maybe I
want to do the impossible when attempting to enter the mind of a scribe in order
to examine what he considered was his task in copying the Scripture text. We
could not do the same with regard to the Masoretic Text of the Middle Ages, be-
cause that text is not the product of an individual but the collective product of
generations of anonymous scribes. Likewise, we can’t know the minds of the
scribes of the Samaritan Pentateuch and those of the Vorlage of the Septuagint,
because they too could be collective products. We can try to identify individuality
only in creations by individuals, but possibly even that is a hazardous enterprise,
because what was the background of that individual? I realize the difficulties in
assessing the scribes’ intentions.
I am focusing on scribes who were copyists.1 Yet other scribes were author-
scribes; many authors copied their own words and therefore should also be con-
sidered scribes. For example, David was named a sopher in 11QPsa XXVII 2 as that
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1 The so-called Sopherim that transmitted the Masoretic Text with great care are a group of such
scribes, but only one group of them, and we should not be misled by assuming that all scribes
were similar to them.
4 | Emanuel Tov
text refers to his many psalmic compositions.2 Copyist-scribes gave further shape
to the books in transmitting the finished compositions while also inserting occa-
sional changes. Early scribes were thus far removed from the medieval copyists
and the sopherim of the Masoretic Text, because these scribes were mere copyists
who did not intervene in the text at all.3 Our analysis starts with scribes who are
known to us from the scrolls or manuscripts they left in caves or libraries, and in
the case of Scripture we can go back no further than the earliest Qumran evidence
dating to around 250 BCE. In a way, this is a relatively late group of scribes.
All the technical aspects of the copying have been studied in great detail by
myself in my monograph Scribal Practices of 20044 and by several other scholars.
These aspects have been studied more than the approaches of scribes to the texts.
It is much easier to examine technicalities than approaches; scholars have usu-
ally refrained from doing the latter, and when they did, their statements were
often based on unproven suppositions. Indeed, there are objective problems in
the description of scribal intentions because of lack of information. An approach
of a scribe can be described best when we know the text from which he copied;
in that case, the scribe’s changes or lack of changes can be evaluated most easily.
However, such ideal conditions are not encountered in our area. Only rarely do
we recognize that the text of a scribe A is exclusively close to source B, but even
in such cases there is no certainty that one depended on the other, since there
could have been intermediate stages between A and B. For example, it has been
suggested that 1QIsaa was the base for quotes from the book of Isaiah in
4QTanḥumim, but I believe that there must have been an intermediate stage be-
tween the two sources.5 A few additional examples of quotations from this scroll
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2 תואמ ששו םיפלא תשולש םילהת בותכיו ...ןובנו רפוסו שמשה רואכ רואו םכח ישי ןב דיוד יהיו etc.
3 On the other hand, Alan R. Millard, “In Praise of Ancient Scribes,” BA (1982): 143–53 opined
that scribes in the ancient Near East meticulously represented their Vorlagen, allowing only for
minor orthographic variations. However, that description does not address the whole spectrum
of the reality in antiquity.
4 Emanuel Tov, Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean
Desert, STDJ 54 (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
5 However, Flint assumes a direct connection, especially in frgs. 8–11: Peter W. Flint, “The Inter-
pretation of Scriptural Isaiah in the Qumran Scrolls: Quotations, Citations, Allusions, and the
Form of the Scriptural Source Text,” in A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James
C. VanderKam, Vols. 1–2, ed. Eric F. Mason et al.; JSJSup 153/1 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 1:388–406
(403). According to my count, the two agree four times in small details, and ten times in spelling:
According to Flint, 4Q176 agrees in eight of its fourteen “alternative” readings with 1QIsaa. My
tabulations are different, but indeed among the variants of this scroll four remarkable readings
stand out. In line 8 the two agree in a plus of the Tetragrammaton against MT 54:6, in line 10
they agree in the reading ידסחבו against MT 54:8 דסחבו, in line 11 they agree in a plus of דע
