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  • From: "Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>
  • To: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Orthography fluidity
  • Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 15:18:26 -0700


Greg,
> Ezra seems a bit early for this, Peter. The Qumran texts show
> great fluidity in orthography. By the first century CE at
> Masada and early 2nd with the Bar Kochba finds a case
> could be made that an MT-type text was standardized, but
> this certainly wasn't the case 1st BCE (unless one wants to
> argue that some subset of the Qumran variety represented
> a standardization which not everyone else yet accepted).
> On fluidity of orthography in copying biblical texts
> see Kutscher 1974 on 1QIsaA, Horgan 1979 on the
> pesharim, DJD editions, etc. etc.
> Qumran has got to be considered the evidence for what was
> happening 1st BCE, rather than considered non-
> representative of what was happening.

Why does it have to be considered normative for what was
happening all over the region and the known world? All we know
about the Qumran texts is that the people who produced them
practiced this fluidity. Given the way plene spellings tend to
abound in various parts of the corpus, it's very possible that some
of the "fluidity" was localized and used for the purpose of
pronunciation in public reading. It's possible to generalize and say
that this may be what was happening everywhere, but until we find
similar documents from other places this generalization must
remain nothing more than an assumption.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"No study of probabilities inside a given frame can ever
tell us how probable it is that the frame itself can be
violated." C. S. Lewis




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