Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

James:

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 6:38 AM, James Christian
<jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>wrote:

> YS: If you will view the photo under magnification, you will see that a
> few darker pixels of the upper portion of the Waw and the Aleph touch each
> other.  It is only a few pixels, and the lighter pixels around them mean
> that under low magnification the display averages them up as a gap, but the
> darker pixels do connect both parts.
>
> JCR: Sounds like digital reconstruction to me. You do go on to mention the
> importance of viewing the originals but as you can't you rely on what those
> who saw them say. You are in essence performing a reconstruction of a
> digital image guided by what you see in the pixels and what people who saw
> the original say about it. If you don't call this reconstruction then...
>
> James Christian
>
> If Yitzhak is doing digital reconstruction, so am I. I enlarged the image
to where each pixel is a small square on my screen. I noticed that the
darker pixels are no darker than other dark splotches in the leather where
there are no letters. The letters are in soft focus, like an out of focus
photograph: is it because the ink faded more on the edges than on the
centers of the strokes, or did the ink spread slightly under the conditions
that preserved that scrap? The latter would explain the darker areas that
appear between many of the closely spaced letters.

For another view, the LXX read it as WR)W with two waws and no yods.

Karl W. Randolph.