Part One: Methodological Prologue: Textual Transmission in the Ancient World and How to Reconstruct It. Chapter 3: Documented Cases of Transmission History, Part 2

Building on the previous two chapters, this one expands to a survey of four broad trends in documented cases of transmission. This includes further survey of memory variants, an argument for a broader trend toward expansion (including discussion of several potential exceptions to this trend, such as Esdras/Ezra-Nehemiah, the Qumran Community Rule and Chronicles//Samuel-Kings), the frequent partial preservation of earlier traditions (with omission particularly of beginnings and endings of source-texts), and scribal conflation and other sorts of coordination of texts with themselves and other texts in the literary-theological corpus. Some other documented examples of growth discussed include Atrahasis, Etana, Anzu, Assyrian Royal Inscriptions, and editions of biblical texts (e.g. Samuel, Jeremiah; the Pentateuch). Together, despite documentation of variation and occasion omission, these examples show a tendency toward preservation of ancient tradition reflecting elements of scribal ideology broadly shared across the ancient world.