BIBLE AND SPADE
2 (SPRING-SUMMER-AUTUMN 1982)
Copyright ©
1982. Cited
with permission from the author and Bible and Spade
IN PRAISE OF
ANCIENT
SCRIBES
Alan
R. Millard
Every activity concerned with Old
Testament study, owes its
existence
entirely to generations of Jewish scribes, who copied and
recopied the
books of the Old Testament for more than 1,500 years.
Until
recently only the products of the last third of that time were
available, The
most extensive example is the Aleppo Codex. This
manuscript
represents at its fullest the meticulous concern of the
scribes for
the accurate transmission of the sacred text. Their
activity in
copying the text followed long-established patterns,
eventually
codified in tractates appended to the Babylonian Talmud
(Soferim, Masseketh
Torah).
The question of how old these practices,
or the attitudes they
embody,
might be has received only limited attention, partly
because of
the lack of early material, Respect for small details of the
text
characterized the teaching of Rabbi Akiba (died ca.
A.D. 133)
and
Care for the
precise wording of the biblical text is attested
Alan R.
Millard is professor of Hebrew, Akkadian and Near
Eastern Archaeology
at the
the
Expedition
at Tell Nebi Mend (Qadesh
on the Orentes) in
33
BIBLE AND
SPADE 34
therefore, at
the start of the Christian era. The application of this
care to
the copying of texts is thought to have been Jewish imitation
of
Greek custom. In the course of this paper a different origin will be
indicated.
With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the last three
decades have
given scholars the privilege of studying Hebrew
manuscripts of
the Old Testament much older than any previously
known.
Investigations of scribal techniques in the Scrolls have been
published, but
an overall and balanced evaluation has to wait until
all the
texts are made available. In the famous Isaiah Scroll from
Cave I the
obvious corrections display the faults of the original
scribe and
the attention of another. Other fragmentary manuscripts,
varying from
the traditional "Massoretic" text have
given rise to
various
hypotheses about earlier stages of their history and the fluid
situation at
hypothetical. Although earlier copies of any part of the Bible are
denied us,
neighboring cultures can show how ancient scribes
worked, and
such knowledge can aid evaluation of the Hebrew text
and its
history.
Babylonian Scribal
Practices
The most prolific source of ancient
documents is
There the
practice of writing can be observed from before 3000 B.C.
Almost from
the start customs arose which endured until the
demise of
the cuneiform script at the beginning of our era. Scribes
categorized and
listed words in regular order, probably to be learned
by
rote. From the middle of the third millennium B.C. a significant
number of
literary compositions survive, written in Sumerian, but in
some
cases copied by scribes with Semitic names. Their names are
known
because they are given in colophons, concluding the copies.
Here, at an
early date, is a sign of responsibility; a signed copy could
be
traced to its writer for credit or reproof, or to check a source. A
few
works recently assigned to this era, the Early Dynastic III period,
prove to
be the ancestors of several copies previously known from
Old Babylonian times, some seven or eight centuries later. Now the
textual
history of one or two compositions can be investigated. In
editing a
hymn in praise of the city of
that
"there is a surprisingly small amount of deviation" between
copies of
the two periods, and "The Old Babylonian version is a
faithful
reflection of a text that had already been fixed In the
35 SPRING-SUMMER-AUTUMN
1982
Sumerian literary tradition for centuries." The archives of
now
revealing that the basic scribal conventions and textbooks were
common to
that Syrian city as well as to the cities of
2300 B.C.
It is the old Babylonian period, the age
of Hammurabi, that has
bequeathed to
us the largest collections of early literature. The
principal
finds have been made at
that the
material was known over a wider area. So far as can be
determined,
these tablets are the exercises of students in schools.
That is why
many duplicate texts are found, enabling the
reconstruction of whole compositions from numerous incomplete
copies. It
is worth emphasizing the number of manuscripts available
for
individual compositions, in some instances 20 or 30,
occasionally 50 or 60, all of approximately the same date. When
they are
set side by side in a critical edition the scribal errors are
made
plain and they fall into the recognized classes. Large numbers
of
differences appear which are not errors. The majority are variants
in
orthography*; the minority, a relatively small number, are true
variants
which occasionally allow manuscripts to be grouped by
type of
text. Colophons occur in some of these copies, though not
frequently.
Most common is a note of the total number of lines. In a
long
text, every tenth line might be marked, and subtotals entered at
the foot
of each column. Evidently a check was made with an
exemplar
after the copy had been completed. Sometimes a
correction was
made in the text, and if a line was found to have
been
omitted, it was written on the edge of the tablet with a
horizontal line
marking its correct position in the text. (This appears
to have
been done on the Snake Charm text from Ras Shamra.) If a
composition
occupied more than one tablet, the last line of the
tablet
would stand as the first of the next. The Old Babylonian
manuscripts of
the Atrahasis Epic display these points, each ending
with a
comprehensive colophon: 1st tablet, "When the gods like
man"
(the title), number of lines 416, scribe's name, month, day,
year.
Just as third-millennium works were
copied in Old Babylonian
times, so
compositions of the early second millennium were copied
in the
first. Again opportunities arise for comparison of copies made
many
centuries apart. There are compositions which were copied for
a
millennium or more with minimal change. The "Laws of
* Spelling.
--Ed.
BIBLE AND SPADE 36
Hammurabi"
exemplify this. The latest edition lists over three
dozen,
manuscripts,
many only small fragments, ranging from
Hammurabi's days until
Nebuchadnezzar's.
Variations are basically
in
spelling: there are examples of "modernization" in grammatical
forms and
a few small differences of wording. Another example of
faithful transmission
is the poem edited as "The Return of Ninurta to
Sumerian
text attested by 54 manuscripts from Old Babylonian,
Middle
Babylonian, Middle Assyrian, Neo-Assyrian and Neo-
Babylonian periods. Of those 64 variants he stated that "only twelve
can be
said to involve a real alteration of the sense of the line in
question, and
in no case is the sense of the text as a whole
affected."
On the other hand, some works show major differences
between the
earlier and the later copies. In none is this more
obvious than
the Epic of Gilgamesh. However, the differences in this
case are
not simply the result of scribal error; they are due in large
part to
deliberate editorial activity. Reasons for some of the changes
can be
proposed in the light of known developments in religious
thought; for
the majority no reason can be offered, and indeed, it is
hard to
find any significance in them. Perhaps it is pertinent to
observe that
when a manuscript of only one period survives, it is
impossible to
predict whether an earlier or a later copy might or
might not
differ, and if it were to differ, how it would do so. But this
is a
matter that rises beyond our primary concern, the activity of the
scribes as
copyists. The tradition of the colophon persisted
throughout the
first millennium B.C., sometimes with the name of a
scribe's
colleague or senior as the inspector or collator of the copy
following the
scribe's name. In the later period, also, there are added
details of
the exemplar or exemplars; for example "copied from a
tablet from
Certain other points illustrate the
scrupulosity of the scribes in
handling
texts, their traditionalism, and their care as glossators*
attempting to
elucidate texts. First, scribes copying from clay tablets
might find
their exemplars damaged. In some cases they may have
been able
to restore the damaged text and hide the fact from us.
Sometimes
the scribe simply recorded the damage by writing
"break" or "recent break" in smaller script on
his copy, even when
the
restoration seems obvious to us. Second, scribes were careful
not to
split a word between the end of one line and the start of the
*A
"gloss" is an addition made to the text. --Ed.
37 SPRING-SUMMER-AUTUMN
1982
next; in
fact they normally avoided breaking phrases. Where there
were
insufficient words to fill a line fully, the scribe would space his
signs and
ensure that there was one at the end of the line.
Occasionally
two lines of an exemplar might fit onto one line of the
copy.
Third, when the two lines were complete in themselves, a
"colon" in the copy would mark the division. This
"colon" varies its
form
between one vertical or diagonal wedge, and two diagonal
wedges. If
a scribe was forced by exigency of space to break a word
or a
phrase, he could write it below the far end of the line,
sometimes
preceded by the "colon." The "colon" also served to
mark
glosses. From an early date, scribes adopted various
orthographic techniques to ease the reader's task, spelling
syllabically words written with word-signs, for example marking
them off
with this sign. The Amarna Letters and the Ras Shamra
Akkadian
texts provide many examples of Akkadian writings with
words
glossed in a local language, the gloss usually being marked
by the
"colon." Finally, certain copies of literary texts made in the
first
millennium B.C. have doublets: a word is followed by a
synonym or
variant. separated from the main text by the
"colon,"
The
explanation offered is that these are the readings of different
exemplars.
This becomes a regular feature for distinguishing the text
from the
comment in the learned commentaries of the Babylonian
academies.
Throughout the history of cuneiform
writing there was a tradition
of care
in copying. Babylonian scribes were aware of their
weaknesses and
established various conventions to overcome them.
No one could
claim they always succeeded, but it is important to be
aware of
the fact that they tried,
Early West Semitic Scribal
Practices
After the end of the Late Bronze Age (ca.
1200-1100 B.C,),
Babylonian
influence in the
situation was
one cause of this, and another, in the sphere of
writing, was
the rise of the alphabet. With the simple script of 22-
30 letters,
writing ceased to be a scribal monopoly, Nonetheless,
scribes
still held a major place in the production of documents, and
doubtless they
were responsible for introducing and maintaining
various
conventions that are apparent in surviving texts, Unlike the
Babylonian
scribes, early Hebrew clerks and their colleagues did not
BIBLE AND SPADE 38
hesitate to
break a word between one line and the next if space ran
out. The
likelihood of misunderstanding was minimized, however, by
the
habit of dividing each word from its neighbor. Continuous
writing,
without spaces between words, familiar from Greek
manuscripts as a
fruitful source of error, was avoided. This practice
of word
division was noted by some modern Old Testament scholars
but
ignored by others who sought to emend the Hebrew text by
dividing the
words differently. Ten years ago it was demonstrated
that
scribes who wrote Ugaritic, Early Phoenician, Hebrew,
and
Moabite were accustomed to word division by a point. Where
Aramaic
dominated, the word-divider was not usual, but from the
To date, no preexilic Israelite literary manuscript is available. The
longest
early Hebrew text in its contemporary form is the Siloam
Tunnel Inscription. Longer compositions from adjacent regions do
exemplify the
work of scribes using the alphabet. There are many
early
Hebrew ostraca (Andre Lemaire
collected 250 or so in his
valuable
Inscriptions Hebraiques I: Les Ostraca
[
of them
illegible) and several dozen graffiti. Yet strangely, longer
texts are
few. In contrast, early Aramaic texts of some length have
been
found, but few ostraca or graffiti. Only time may
tell whether
this
situation is the accidental result of chance discovery or has
other
causes.
In these longer Aramaic texts some
indications of techniques that
would have
been equally at home in the process of writing or
copying a
book may be seen. One reservation is necessary: texts
written on
stone are likely to have been traced by a scribe in ink,
then
engraved by a sculptor or mason, a technique apparently
visible on
some Assyrian stonework. Therefore, some irregularities
and
errors may not be truly scribal.
The three stelae
from Sefire near
Bar-Gayah king of KTK (a place of uncertain identity) made with
Matiel of Arpad about 750 B.C., are the most extensive inscriptions,
about 175
lines preserved to some extent. In his recent edition of
the stelae, John Gibson has noted "several mistakes,
certain or
probable, by
the stone-cutters." In all he lists fourteen, but the
number that
can be counted as "certain" is very much smaller,
possibly no
more than three or four. The presence of an ancient
correction is
as interesting an error as modern scholars can detect.
Face B of
Stele II reads: "the treaty and favour which the
gods have
39 SPRING-SUMMER-AUTUMN
1982
Facsimile of
an Aramaic treaty text, Sefire stele II, face B,
showing inserted line,
ca. 750 B.C. Copied by J. Starcky, in A. Dupont-Sommer, Les
inscriptions
arameennes de Sefire,
1958.
BIBLE AND SPADE 40
made in Arpad and among its people; and if Matiel
will not obey,
and if
his sons will not obey, and if his nobles will not obey, and if his
people will
not obey " The repetition of "will not obey" lends itself
easily to
the error of haplography., and, in fact, the words "if his
sons will
not obey" in the second phrase were omitted originally.
After the
third line had been incised in the stone, the missing words
were
squeezed in between lines 2 and 3.
A similar error was made by the person
who wrote the Aramaic
dialect text
about Balaam on the plaster of a temple wall at Tell Deir
Alia in
the
Autumn 1977,
pp. 121-124). The first line of the text, as restored
by A. Caquot and A. Lemaire on the
basis of Hoftijzer's edition,
reads,
"The record (spr) of Balaam, son of Beor, the man who saw
the
gods. Now the gods came to him by night..." Writing the text on
the
vertical plastered face of the wall, the scribe omitted "to him"
before
"the gods" and had to insert it above the line. (Similar
omissions were
rectified in two other places.) This restoration
involves an adjustment
to Hoftijzer's edition and is attractive, yet
leaves a
space at the beginning of the first line. Indentation was not
normal at
the beginning of a text, so another word should be
supplied at
the start and the most likely word is the demonstrative
pronoun,
"this" (znh). The narrative might
then commence: "This is
the
record of Balaam, son of Beor, a man who saw the gods
was he.
Now the gods
came to him by night " This inscription from Deir
Alia
probably represents a column of a scroll. It has the upper and
left-hand
margins ruled (the right was provided by the corner of the
plastered
face) and headings written in red ink in Egyptian style. It is
the
nearest we can come to the appearance of a book in
about the
time of the prophet Isaiah.
The oldest actual example of West Semitic
literature in book or
scroll form
so far recovered is the "Proverbs of Ahiqar"
from among
the
papyri from the
has
dated the manuscript late in the 5th century B.C.; thus, it
reflects book
production at the time of Ezra, the time when
traditionally, the Aramaic or square script (called "Assyrian") was
adopted by
Jewish scribes. Here it is interesting to see how the
introductory narrative is written in long lines, each one filled, the
words
separated from one another by small spaces, and not broken
*Hapiography is the skipping from a word or phrase when
copying a text to the
same word
or phrase further on, thereby leaving out a section of the text. --Ed.
41 SPRING-SUMMER-AUTUMN
1982
Facsimile of
the opening section of the Balaam text from Tell Deir
Alia, showing
inserted word
in line 1, ca. 700 B, C, The writing appears to be laid out as a
column of a
scroll. (J. Hoftijzer, Aramaic Texts from Tell Deir Alia, Brill, pl. 29).
between one
line and the next. (The scribe was not concerned to
justify his
left-hand margin!) In the section containing the proverbs
the
scribe often ended one proverb and left the rest of the line blank,
starting the
next one on a new line. Sometimes he marked the end
of a
proverb with an alep-like sign, whether or not the
next proverb
followed on
the same line. Other proverbs are distinguished from
each
other by a horizontal stroke between the lines. The
commencement of each proverb on a new line is not regular.
however, nor
is the insertion of the terminal mark or the bar.
Scribal Accuracy
These diverse examples of extrabiblical documents reveal how
ancient
copyists wrote their texts, and how they tried to write them
BIBLE AND SPADE 42
!so they
would be readily legible to anyone trained in the same
conventions. In
this atmosphere, too, the early copyists of the Old
Testament
books were bred. That they maintained similar high
standards of
careful and accurate copying is proved, at least in
certain
respects, by the following collection of examples.
Within the
Old Testament are numerous foreign names, many of
them
alien to the western Semite. (Foreign names pose problems in
all
languages and scripts; the various spellings of East European or
Oriental
names in our newspapers illustrate that.) Where ancient
!writings of
these names are available, detailed study shows the
Hebrew
writings represent the contemporary forms very closely.
Thus the
names of the Assyrian kings Tiglath-pileser and
Sargon, as
handed down
through the Old Testament, turn out to be accurate
reflections of
the Assyrian dialect forms of these names. Tiglath-
pileser is found in an almost identical spelling
on the
Rakkab
stele from Zinjirli, carved during his reign, or very
shortly
after.
Sargon, occurring in Isaiah 20:1, has become familiar in
Akkadian
dress as Sharru-ken, but in
the sh was pronounced s and the k as 9 as in Tiglath-pileser. These
are normal
sound-shifts between the Babylonian and the Assyrian
speaking
regions in the early first millennium B.C.. They are
demonstrated by the way Sargon s name IS spelled In Aramaic
letters on
two documents. In the Aramaic letter written on a
potsherd sent
to Ashur, the old Assyrian capital city, from
southern
Aramaic seal
of one of his officers, known from an impression found
at Khorsabad, Sargon's new city in
is
exactly that spelling that has been preserved in the traditional
Hebrew text of the Old Testament. A comparable precision can be
argued for
other foreign names throughout the Old Testament, as
continuing
study and discoveries indicate. In a recently published
papyrus
fragment from
king
Xerxes (Ahasuerus) is seen for the first time written
in Aramaic
with
prosthetic alep as in the Old Testament and in Akkadian. From,
the same
age there also survives a seal now in the
According to
its Aramaic inscription, this cylinder seal belonged to a
Persian, Parshandatha son of Artadatha. Where an identical name is
read in
Esther 9:7, the likelihood that the Jewish scribes correctly
preserved a good
Persian name seems high.
Now these minutiae may not seem to be of
great consequence,
43 SPRING-SUMMER-AUTUMN
1982
Facsimile of
a stele of Bar-Rakkab from Zinjirli,
giving Tiglath-pileser's name in
Aramaic
letters in line 3, ca 730 B.C. (F. van Luschan, Ausgrabungen in
Sendschirli 4,
1911, p. 379).
44 BIBLE AND
SPADE
and may
simply show the scribes could transmit names with
precision.
There is a corollary, however, which deserves emphasis:
in each
case mentioned, the Septuagint differs considerably from
the
Hebrew. Sargon, in Isaiah 20:1, became Arna; Parshandatha
was
distorted through Pharsannestain to become two names,
Pharsan and Nestain,
in Codex Vaticanus. These cases, not confined
to one
book, should at least warn against reliance on the Septuagint
for
emendation of proper names in the Old Testament, unless the
evidence
against the Hebrew text is very strong indeed.
Indeed, the purpose of this paper is to
point to the care which
was an
integral part of a scribe's skill in the ancient Near East. The
practices of
scriptoria in imperial
the
complaints of several ancient authors reveal, but the mass
production
techniques applied there were probably never at home in
the
world of the Old Testament. Rather, from the examples
presented, and
from many others, a copying process can be
discerned that
included checking and correction, a process that had
built-in
devices to forestall error. Some of these, the counting of
lines or
words in particular, reemerge in the traditions of the
Massoretes in
the early Middle Ages. That device is so obvious that
a
connection with Babylonian practice is unlikely. It is part of an
attitude
which was common: the copyist's task was to reproduce
his
exemplar as faithfully as possible.
Be Wary of Emendations!
In this light the way the Old Testament
text is viewed by
scholarship
seems to need some modification. The
make
explicit what had previously been supposed by many, that the
Massoretic text
preserves an earlier text-type current in the century
or so
prior to the Fall of Jerusalem. Between the completion of
some
books of the Old Testament and the Scrolls there is a
relatively
short period of time. (How short will depend upon opinions
about the
age of each book.) Only In that period can the great
majority of
the errors textual critics and commentators claim to find
in the
Hebrew text have arisen. Is it conceivable that those who
copied
Jeremiah's prophecy for over four centuries made so many
mistakes as
to require an average four to six lines of textual
apparatus to
every page in the current critical edition of the text, the
Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia? Jeremiah
may be peculiar in respect
45 SPRING-SUMMER-AUTUMN
1982
to its Septuagint
version, but the problems involved are such that to
I emend the
Hebrew on the basis of the Greek would seem a very
risky
business indeed.
The preceding paragraphs suggest ancient
copyists were not
likely to
be so careless. If this is true, then textual emendations
should
become rarities. Before charging an ancient and anonymous
copyist with
error, every possible explanation of the form that seems
objectionable should be sought.
Emendations to remove hapax legomena*
should be a last resort.
As more
ancient texts are recovered, more of the unique words in
the Old
Testament gain satisfactory explanations without
emendation.
Even if there is no alternative evident, any emendation
offered
should be properly supported and compatible with ancient
scribal
practice. Further, there should always be a recognition that
the text
may be right after all. Of course the scribes made mistakes,
and some
of them were perpetuated. It is the scholar's duty to try to
discover them
to correct them; it would be wrong to argue that we
have
received a perfect Hebrew text. The present argument is that
we too
freely underrate the ability and the accuracy of those
copyists to
whom we owe the Old Testament. There are no grounds
for
supposing they were less attentive to their task than those
whose
products have been recovered in modern times.
Scribal Alterations
For the work of scribes as copyists there
is much informative
material from
the ancient world, from which a few pieces have been
used
here. With their copying, reliably or not, the scribes commonly
face the
accusation of altering or modifying the texts they copied.
They are not
reckoned as editors, a more wide-ranging activity and
one
beyond the scope of this study, but as glossators and
interpreters, adding comments and explanations, applying the text
to
current circumstances. Obviously, without manuscript evidence it
is
almost impossible to prove that words have been added or
altered.
Again, the practices of ancient scribes, visible in extant
speciments of their work, suggest caution should
accompany every
claim to
detect glosses or interpretations in the biblical text. Scribes
writing
cuneiform normally signaled the presence of a gloss, as
mentioned
already, although no cases have come to light in early
*Words that
appear only once in the Old Testament. --Ed.
BIBLE AND SPADE 46
West Semitic texts. The commentaries of the Akkadian
scholars
working in
the first millennium B.C. interpreted standard works and
applied them
to the existing situation. But their interpretation and
application were
kept distinct; they were not incorporated into the
text. Now
it is possible that only after a text gained an authoritative
status
would the scribe provide a commentary, a process modern
scholarship
cannot observe.
Turning to the biblical books, it is
noteworthy that the Septuagint
and the
Aramaic Targums also fit the text to their times. The
simplest
cases are the replacements of obscure place-names. In
Isaiah 48:12
Sinim of the Hebrew (=
imaginative
retelling of Genesis than the standard Targums, Kaptok
(
are not
found in the Hebrew text. Therefore, application of the
Hebrew text
to current affairs, having an effect on the text itself, is
unlikely to
have occurred later than the making of the Greek
translation or
the Aramaic paraphrase. How much was done before
those
stages cannot be discovered at present; the customs of the
Babylonian
scribes, if the comparison is valid, suggests there was
little
done, if any at all.
Ancient Scribes Also Were Human!
Everyone who writes and copies is aware
of the likelihood of
mistakes in
their own work. Ancient scribes were equally prone to
failure. The
conventional "introductions" to the Old Testament and
handbooks of
textual criticism instruct their readers in the
categories of
scribal error that appear in ancient manuscripts and
may be
detected in the Old Testament. There is no doubt that errors
were
committed by copyists and have passed into the printed text.
The modern
reader's readiness to detect them should not be greater
than his
readiness to admit that ancient scribes and copyists could
also be
as precise and careful as he and may have known their
business
better than he. The ancient scribes deserve our thanks and
praise!
(Reprinted by permission from the Biblical Archaeologist. Vol. 45. No.3. Summer
1982. pages 143-153.)
This
material is cited with gracious permission from:
Bible and Spade and Alan R.
Millard
Associates for Biblical Research
PO Box 144
http://www.christiananswers.net/abr/
Please
report any errors to Ted Hildebrandt at: