[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: orion Response to F. Cryer

    [The following text is in the "ISO-8859-1" character set]
    [Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set]
    [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly]

One obvious indication of autograph versus copy is lay-out. If a document
is well laid out and disposes carefully of its space, it´s apt to be a
copy, because the corrections and additions and subtractions occasioned in
the process of actual composition of a text entail text running into
margin, substantial interlinear additions, crossings-out and replacement,
etc. All of these things will interfere with lay-out, so if even a fragment
of a text shows a carefully planned attention to lay-out, it´s a copy, not
an autograph. Admittedly, Mozart could keep a whole sonata in his head and
write it down (almost) note-perfect; the rest of mortal men do not.
The sort of corrections we find in the DSS are exactly as Tov has
characterised them: editorial annotations and correction of spelling
errors, plus the odd exegetical or harmonising addition. Even the spacing
of the various Vorlagen is usually reflected to some extent. And this is
true even of the documents like the pesharim, which are one-offs (i.e.,
existing in single mss copies). There are a lot of scholars who do not know
what to make of Naveh´s alleged writing exercise; I´ll confess to being one
of them. With the publication of vol. 27 of the DJD (Cotton and Yardeni´s
fine volume), the few "documents" from the DSS, i.e., actual records of
financial and legal transactions, turn out to have been found by the beduin
in other contexts and sold as DSS, so the DSS are now virtually devoid of
"bumpf". Hence, although it may seem astonishing, there don´t appear to be
*any* of the materials of day-to-day existence present among the mss.


best regards,

Frederick H. Cryer
Assoc. Prof. for Research
Univ. of Copenhagen
Faculty of Theology
Købmagergade 44-46
1150 København K.
e-mail: fc.dss@pop.teol.ku.dk
fax: (045) 35 32 36 52