Beyond 'Qumran Scribal Practice'

While Emanuel Tov’s theory of a 'Qumran Scribal Practice' (QSP) calls valuable attention to the signifance of the scribal aspects of the Qumran manuscripts, it does not attempt to explain the diversity of scribal practice even within the group of texts he identifies as written according to QSP. This paper uses the manuscripts of the Temple Scroll as the basis for considering possible influences on the scribal practices attested in individual manuscripts. The preservation of the Temple Scroll in several manuscript copies, as well as the production of one of these copies, 11Q20, by a known scribe, the copyist of 1QpHab, provides important data for examining the role of a scribe’s Vorlage and individual training, as well as factors such as genre and status, on scribal practice. The investigation undertaken here shows that the theory of a Qumran Scribal Practice, as formulated by Tov, can profitably be nuanced and refined by considering small subsets of the Qumran corpus.