Tov on Torah Scrolls

Emanuel Tov has published a nice piece on the early history of the Torah scroll that describes his take on the origins of the scribal traditions. My main critique is that he follows Haran in supposing that early scrolls only had one book of the Torah, while the complete Torah scroll was a late development of the common era. He understands this as a technological limitation in the earlier periods, but it's difficult for me to see how this could be, since all you really have to do is stitch more sheets on. Indeed, even in the rabbinic periods of complete Torah scrolls, scribes also continued to produce copies of individual books of the Torah. I think you see the same both/and practice in the DSS, so synchronic functional differences seem more compelling to me than diachronic and technological developments.

While I admit that we have no preserved, complete Torah scrolls from the Hellenistic and Roman periods to conclusively demonstrate that complete Torah scrolls were produced at the time, I think the evidence strongly suggests this. Some scrolls indeed only had one book, but many had more. In my study of the Exodus scrolls, fully half of them had concrete evidence for containing more than one book, including the 4QExod-Lev-f from as early as the 3rd century BCE. The large formats of these scrolls were clearly designed to hold very large quantities of text, and even if they contained the entire Torah they would still have been significantly smaller than modern Torah scrolls, so we can hardly discount the possibility of such scrolls. Tov says that maybe these scrolls contained only two books, but other than the much later Rabbinic prohibition of this practice, we have no evidence that this was ever done in the earlier periods. So why discount half of the DSS evidence based on an unattested alternative possibility, rather than simply prefer the more likely explanation that the DSS (just like rabbinic literature) evidence both scrolls of individual books and Torah scrolls?

In a forthcoming article, I do suggest a possible technological development that could have prompted the creation of the Torah scroll, but at a much earlier period. I have observed in a COMSt Bulletin article that the Hebrew/Aramaic script decreased in size significantly in the Hellenistic period (3rd century BCE), making it possible to fit much more text onto scrolls. I think this is the most likely technological impetus for the creation of the Torah scroll, and it is no coincidence that we see evidence for this already in the earliest of the DSS. So it seems to me that the Torah scroll has even deeper roots than Tov is willing to concede.

The History of Colophons

 The most recent COMSt Bulletin has a thematic series of articles on colophons worth mentioning.

Homeric Subliterary Papyri

Valeria Fontanella has put online a useful list of subliterary papyri that build on the works of Homer, such as glosses, summaries, paraphrases, lexicons, and commentaries.

Cuneiform Writing

I just came across two interesting websites that describe cuneiform writing on wax tablets and how to cut a stylus for cuneiform.

Codex Sassoon

Sotheby's has announced the forthcoming auction of the famous Sassoon codex of the entire Hebrew Bible from the late 9th or early 10th century. It is truly a wonderful piece of history, and they expect it to sell for 30-50 million dollars. For more context, see the recent WSJ article.

UPDATE 26 Feb 2023: See now the helpful article by Kim Phillips.

Hornkohl, "The Historical Depth of the Tiberian Reading Tradition of Biblical Hebrew"

Aaron D. Hornkohl has published an open-access volume on The Historical Depth of the Tiberian Reading Tradition of Biblical Hebrew.

Craig Evans on the DSS-Like Fragments

Craig Evans recently posted a video interview suggesting that the post-2002 DSS-like fragments now generally supposed to be forgeries are in fact likely authentic. He bases this on reported claims by Weston Fields that these fragments really did come from the Kandos' vault and that the phenomena that are used to justify rejecting the authenticity of the fragments are common in genuine DSS. For those who are interested, here was my brief (spoiler: skeptical) response to his Facebook post.

Thanks for posting your thoughts on the topic. Surely no one will object to a closer examination of authentic DSS to provide comparanda, but someone would have to pay for it, and I wouldn't expect very positive results. In my own experience (and quickly double checking some of the better preserved scrolls), minor cracks and delamination are almost always secondary when they co-occur with ink. You can often see clearly how the ink cracks with the skin and leaves the lighter interior exposed. When layers of the skin separate, you can see that the ink on the surface flakes off with it, and you would be very hard pressed to find a compelling example (let alone multiple) where an ancient scribe wrote over such an already partially-delaminated surface. The better preserved scrolls demonstrate that the DSS were generally quite smooth when inscribed. When there were issues with the preparation of the skin (holes, cracks, or even rough patches), the scribes usually avoided writing over these spots. So I find it very unlikely that we would find such a high proportion of these sorts of irregularities in the contested fragments if an ancient writer was writing on the skin. And this is in addition to the observation that most of the DSS were not even written on the type of coarse-rubbery leather found in the contested fragments, but were rather stretched, dried, and carefully prepared for writing. The two types of skin preparation are so fundamentally different that I cannot believe most of the contested fragments were ever intended for writing in the first place. So I don’t think this speculation really explains the suspicious phenomena in the contested fragments or warrants further speculations about hypothetical purity rituals. Add to that the many suspicious paleographic and textual features that have been noted, and I think you will have a very hard time convincing many specialists of the authenticity of most of the contested fragments today.

Update 11 Feb 2023

Stephen Goranson informed me of a video response posted by Kipp Davis.

Morag Kersel on Publishing Unprovenanced Manuscripts

Morag Kersel has a great, balanced article on publishing unprovenanced manuscripts entitled To Publish or Not to Publish? This is No Longer the Question. While she is not in favor of publishing such manuscripts, she recognizes that some scholars will continue to do so. Therefore, she argues that these scholars should at least pay conscious attention to issues of provenance and explicitly address it in publications.