Ancient Scribes and Scripts and the Clues They Leave

Ancient Scribes and Scripts and the Clues They LeaveAuthor(s): Richard Simon HansonSource: The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Jun., 1985), pp. 83-88Published by: The American Schools of Oriental ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3209968 .

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A first-century inkwell from a tomb at Meirop. Courtesy of Eric M. Meyers.

Ancient Scribes and Scripts and the Clues They Leave

by Richard Simon Hanson

egular readers of this magazine are well aware that the potters of old quite unintentionally produced a set of most valuable clues to the

I dating of the various levels of ancient ruins we now excavate. "Pottery reading" is one of the most important daily features of a modern dig. Even small sherds, particularly from certain parts of vessels, can serve as key resources for the dating of a crucial layer, while a survey of unexcavated sites relies heavily on what one discovers from the pieces of pottery that are found on the surface and on the slopes.

What is less well known among lay circles is that ancient handwriting provides us with a similar set of clues. Materials that feature any amount of script-be it a message on a potsherd, an inscription on a stone monu- ment, a missive on a piece of papyrus, an epitaph on an ossuary, or a literary work done on a scroll-leave their own evidence of dating. Handwriting, like the shape or ware of a pot, evolves over time, and this evolution helps

us to determine when it was produced, especially when no other dating clues are available.

The scholar most responsible for establishing the procedures that became a paleographical method was the renowned William E Albright. The leader in that field of study today is Albright's student, Frank Moore Cross of Harvard. Others who have done important work in it include Solomon A. Birnbaum, Yigael Yadin, Nahman Avigad, and Yohanan Aharoni; currently the second most prolific scholar in the field is Yoseph Naveh. My bibliography lists some of the important works of these scholars.

The dating technique that has developed out of the work of the people mentioned above consists of the following steps:

1. Tracing out the letter forms from a given corpus of material, paying heed not only to the shape of each letter but also to relative size and to the angle at which each one is "hung" from the line. (The alphabet used

BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST/JUNE 1985 83



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Traced from Leviticus M

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I ....that occur In the

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Hasmonean coins I

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Hasmonean ~i strcoinsI

by the Judeans and Israelites and some of their neigh- bors was typically written beneath a line rather than atop it.) 2. The laying out of similar lines of script from other materials-of known date if possible-from both prior to and after the time of the script concerned in order to see where that script best fits in the evolu- tionary scheme.

3. Paying most careful attention to letter forms that were obviously in transition at the time of the material concerned in order to calculate as precisely as possible where it is to be placed chronologically.

To illustrate the process, I reproduce here a table of

scripts I drew up to use in determining the date of the

paleo-Hebrew Leviticus Scroll and its fragments from

84 BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST/JUNE 1985



aa u

$ OLt7I i16I

mem lamed I kap yod let b het zayin I waw he dalet gimel bet 'alep

r ~ 3 ~2 ~dI ft II 44 -1 -0 ~C

4~~/ 5Y Z ct LV I -~ ~~ a~s 4 y ~r]

4:i 00

~y ct cro cEl

Ancient handwriting evolved over time and, therefore, can be used as

a dating device.

Qumran Cave 11 (see Freedman and Mathews 1985). Referring to the table, the reader will note that the two lines of script at the top (lines 1 and 2) are taken from materials that were executed just before the Exile, from late in the seventh century B.C. At the bottom of the table (line 8) we see script from other materials of a known date, namely, the Hasmonean coins of the first century




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.

7Wo pieces of the paleo-Hebrew Leviticus Scroll from Qumran Cave 11 containing a portion of Leviticus 18:27-19:4. These fragments are written on tanned leather.

B.C. In between are five lines from the Leviticus Scroll and its fragments. Four of them (lines 3-6) are traced from letter specimens that actually occur; the fourth (line 7) is a reconstruction drawn to represent what was in the mind of the scribe as he did his work with a somewhat less than consistent hand.

Certain letters appear to be crucial. The letter he (fifth from the right) is especially so. One can readily see that the older form, that in the preexilic scripts, is made as a nearly vertical shaft with three roughly horizontal lines parallel to each other at the left. The same letter takes on a somewhat different shape in the coin scripts that are illustrated at the bottom. It is a shape in which the three parallel lines at the left have become a zigzag stroke that can be described as a "z-shape." The letter has evolved. How? The script on the scrolls gives us the answer.

The scribe who produced the Leviticus script seems to have been trying to make the older form- the form (in line 7) that I have proposed was in his mind- but his hand was more often inclined to make the newer form because of a natural, cursive tendency on his part-that is, his hand quite unconsciously sought the "lazier way" to do it.

This tells us that the Leviticus script comes well after the late preexilic forms but sometime before the coins, whose engravers were generally copying the newer, cursive form. The date of our material is, therefore, earlier than the time of the coins.

Other letters give us similar clues to help us determine the date of our material. Each letter is examined in this way and the total evidence is considered in order to calculate a fitting date. A number of factors come into the

process: the relative formality of the script versus cursive tendencies, the effect of the material itself on the result- ing inscription (for example, engraved work was done more slowly than script on sherds), and the idiosyn- crasies of a particular scribe. One can even observe, as Yoseph Naveh has done, how a certain scribe produced older forms than those of the current style because he was older than other scribes. In the case of the Leviticus materials, the author has set the latest date of around 100 B.C. on the hunch that only a few scribes were still using the paleo-Hebrew forms while the majority were turning to the use of Aramaic letters.

An interesting development in the history of the Jewish people is their adoption of the Aramaic script and the gradual loss of the paleo-Hebrew; this happened, according to Naveh, in the Hellenistic period for the most part. It occurred in conjunction with their switch to speaking Aramaic, which served as a lingua franca in the Middle East during the Persian Period and even after. This illustrates the fact that the script itself, as well as lan- guage, can tell us something about general cultural changes.

The scribes, as a class, were of unusual importance in Judean culture. When Solomon set up an administrative bureaucracy, based partly on Egyptian models, they became important as government servants. The work they did has been largely lost, though portions of it are cited in the Books of Kings, where we are referred to "the annals of the kings of Judah/Israel." The Book of Proverbs actually contains two collections that are attributed to them (10:1-22:16 and 25:1-29:27). Their greatest age of importance was the age in which the Scriptures were as-




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7 r.. 4k

01,. t3.?lpljL~ ?~~rr^~ $~)?q71IIIIJ3 l I

~t'l' 4 l

A portion of Leviticus 26:17-26, from column 5 of the paleo-Hebrew Leviticus Scroll. Striking features of the scroll are its uniform spacing of words and its straight horizontal lines, created with the help of rules on which the scribe "hung" his letters.

sembled, and the founding figure of that movement was, of course, Ezra the Scribe.

By no means all the inscriptional materials un- earthed are the work of professional scribes. While such records as the Samaritan Ostraca were likely the work of governmental accountants, many graffiti found here and there are clearly the work of untrained hands. Akin to the scribes, however, were the engravers who often produced elegant forms on signet seals.

At what stage scrolls came into use is hard to say. The bulk of these perished in time and weather. Only those that were protected by unusual conditions have survived at all. The Hebrew term for scroll (megillah) only begins to occur in sources that are late preexilic (see Jeremiah 36) and continue into the exilic and postexilic periods (Ezra 2 and 3, Zechariah 5). Yet in the latter sources we already see the scroll serving as a significant symbol that is at once cultural and religious. With the loss of political independence and the temporary loss of the Temple, the sacred scrolls took on enormous importance. So also did the profession of the scribe. In a culture that did not tolerate the presence of artifacts in a human burial, we do find notable exceptions in the case of scribes, for their writing tools could be buried with them. Examples of this have been found at Meiron and at Qumran.

Such scrolls as those found in the Dead Sea Caves are artifacts of extreme religious and cultural importance, of course - so much importance that they gave status to the very workmen who produced them. These workmen, in turn, left us more clues than they intended when their handwriting proved to be our most helpful clue for the dating of those materials.

Selected Bibliography Albright, W F.E

1926 Notes on Early Hebrew and Aramaic Epigraphy. Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 6: 91-102.

Avigad, N. 1957 The Paleography of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scripta Hierosolymi-

tana 4: 56-87. 1979 Baruch the Scribe and Jerahmeel the King's Son. Biblical

Archeologist 42: 114- 21. Birnbaum, S.

1950 The Leviticus Fragments from the Cave. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 118: 20- 27.

1952 The Date of the Hymns Scroll. Palestine Exploration Quarter- ly 84: 94-103.

1954- The Hebrew Scripts. London: Palaeographia. 1957

Charlesworth, J. H. 1980 The Manuscripts of St. Catherine's Monastery. Biblical Arche-

ologist 43: 26-34. Cross, E M.

1954a The Evolution of the Proto-Canaanite Alphabet. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 134: 15-24.

1954b The Manuscripts of the Dead Sea Caves. The Biblical Archae- ologist 17: 2-21.

1960 The Development of the Jewish Scripts. Pp. 133-202 in The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of William Foxwell Albright, edited by G. E. Wright. New York: Double- day.

1961a The Ancient Library of Qumran. Garden City, NY: Double- day.

1961b Epigraphic Notes on Hebrew Documents of the Eighth-Sixth Centuries B.C.: I. A New Reading of a Place Name in the Samaria Ostraca. Bulletin of the American Schools of Orien- tal Research 163: 12-14.

1962a Epigraphic Notes on Hebrew Documents of the Eighth-Sixth Centuries B.C.: II. The Murabbacat Papyrus and the Letter Found Near Yabneh-yam. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 165: 34-46.




1962b Epigraphical Notes on Hebrew Documents of the Eighth- Sixth Centuries B.C.: III. The Inscribed Jar Handles from Gibeon. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Re- search 168: 18 - 23.

1967 The Origin and Early Evolution of the Alphabet. Eretz-Israel 8: 8* - 27*.

1970 The Dead Sea Scrolls. Pp. 117-19 in Encyclopaedia Britan- nica. Chicago: Benton.

1972 Scrolls from Qumran Cave I, edited with J. C. Trever, D. N. Freedman, and J. A. Sanders. Jerusalem: Albright Institute of Archaeological Research and Shrine of the Book.

1975 Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited with S. Talmon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (In the same volume see his own contribution on pages 147-76, entitled The Oldest Manuscripts from Qumran.)

Freedman, D. N., and Mathews, K. A., editors 1985 The Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus Scroll (11QpaleoLev). Winona

Lake, IN: American Schools of Oriental Research. Goshen-Gottstein, M.

1979 The Aleppo Codex and the Rise of the Massoretic Bible Text. Biblical Archeologist 42: 145 - 64.

Hanson, R. S. 1964 Paleo-Hebrew Scripts in the Hasmonean Age. Bulletin of the

American Schools of Oriental Research 175: 26 - 42. 1976 Jewish Paleography and its Bearing on

Text Critical Studies.

Pp. 561- 76 in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by F. M. Cross, W. E. Lemke, and P. D. Miller, Jr. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Kaufman, I. T. 1982 The Samaria Ostraca: An Early Witness to Hebrew Writing.

Biblical Archeologist 45: 229-39. Meyers, E. M., Strange, J. E, and Meyers, C. L.

1981 Excavations at Ancient Meiron, Upper Galilee, Israel, 1971- 2, 1974- 5, 1977. Cambridge, MA: American Schools of Orien- tal Research. (See especially pages 118 and 119.)

Milgrom, J. 1978 The Temple Scroll. Biblical Archeologist 41: 105 - 20.

Naveh, J. 1965 Canaanite and Hebrew Inscriptions (1960- 1964). Leshonenu

30: 65-80. 1970 The Scripts in Palestine and Transjordan in the Iron Age. In

Near Eastern Archaeology in the Iwentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Nelson Glueck. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

1971 Hebrew Texts in Aramaic Script in the Persian Period? Bulle- tin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 203: 27 - 32.

1975 Origins of the Alphabet. London: Cassell's Introducing Ar- chaeology Series 6.

1980 The Greek Alphabet: New Evidence. BiblicalArcheologist 43: 22- 24.

Porten, B. 1979 Aramaic Papyri and Parchments: A New Look. Biblical Arche-

ologist 42: 74-104. Vaux, R. de

1954 Fouilles au Kherbet Qumran. Revue Biblique 61: 206 -36. Yadin, Y.

1961- The Expedition to the Judean Desert, 1960-1. Israel Explora- 1962 tion Journal 11 and 12. 1963 The Finds from the Bar-Kokhba Period in the Cave of the

Letters. Jerusalem: Judean Studies I. 1965 The Excavations at Masada 1963 -4. Israel Exploration Jour-

nal 15: 1-120.

New from the American Schools of Oriental Research The Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus Scroll (11QpaleoLev)

D. N. Freedman K. A. Mathews

This volume is the definitive publication of the 1 lQpaleoLev materials, a scroll and fragments of Leviticus written in paleo-Hebrew script, of the Rockefeller collection in Jerusalem. They were among the finds from Qumran Cave 11 dis- covered in 1956. Photographs of the scroll and fragments, transcrip- tions, commentary, and a paleographical study by R. S. Hanson make this book essential for anyone interested in the study of these remarkable finds and the history of the Hebrew text.

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