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Re: orion Response to F. Cryer

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fred cryer wrote:

> 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.
>

Dr. Cryer:

    I have seen mss that were obvious drafts fitting the description you
give.  I would
think that the author would then make a layed out well-scribed scroll
following the
draft.  That scroll would still be an autograph.  What also would we
call a text
scribed by a secretary like Jeremiah's ben Neriya?

Jack

--
D’man dith laych idneh d’nishMA nishMA
   Jack Kilmon (jpman@accesscomm.net)


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