Thanx for your research Harold. Very enlightening! So it seems that they date back to at least Masoretic
times then, eh? But surely the Masoretes would only have made a point of putting the spaces there if they believed them to be an integral and/or significant part of the text? Does anyone know what the testimony of our most ancient fragment say?
Hang on a minute. I've just had a flick through my dead sea scroll Isaiah photocopy and while I can't see any pe's or empty lines there does seem to be many occasions where the rest of a line is left blank. Even multiple times on the same 'page'. Do the Isaiah blank spaces from the dead sea scrolls correspond to the Masoretic Isaiah spacings?
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