Saturday, September 23, 2023

Emanuel Tov on Scribes at times Copying from Memory

  

Copying from a Written Source or from Memory?

 

Were some readings unintentionally created due to a scribe’s reliance on his memory? The corpora of the texts found in the Judean Desert are too large to provide an unequivocal answer to the question regarding whether scribes wrote based on a written source or based, sometimes or always, on their memory. It is probably a mere impression that all copying was based on written documents. At least, this should be the default assumption that can never be proven (ch. 21.1).

 

At the same time, there are indications that memory played an important part in the copying process. All or most instances of harmonization (§ 4.2.4) are secondary, influenced by the scribe’s memory of different contexts, nearby or remote. In some instances, a scribe was first guided by his memory and subsequently corrected upon consulting his written source. For example, in 11QPSa (Ps 145:1 in § 6.8): in this verse, upon writing יהוה, the original scribe recognized his error, canceled the word with cancellation dots above and below, then continued with the correct אלוהי, “my God.” This is the probable background of the error: Having written אֲרוֹמִמְךָ, it was natural for this scribe to continue the text as אֳרוֹמִמֽךָ יְהוָה since he remembered that phrase from the beginning of Psalm 30 (Ps 30:2). However, he then looked at his base scroll, realized his error, and corrected it. (Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible [4th ed.; Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2022], 298-99)