A New Method for Reconstructing Biblical Scrolls
Edward D. Herbert · Tyndale Bulletin · 1996
The Qumran biblical scrolls are of crucial importance for developing our understanding of the textual diversity that existed around the turn of the era, and for their text–critical contributions. Biblical scholars have generally depended primarily upon common sense and general scholarly judgement in reconstructing such scrolls. Chapter 1 advances a range of scientifically–based tools for reconstructing biblical scrolls, which will be summarised below under six headings. In the remainder of the thesis, these tools are applied to the reconstruction of the 4QSam a fragments of 2 Samuel. Development 1: Expected Widths. Amounts of text are traditionally measured by counting characters. This constitutes an approximation of the space occupied that takes no account of the widely varying widths of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In 1QIs a , for example, the largest letter (c) is over 2.5 times the size of a z and over 3.5 times the size of a final ˆ. The proposed new measure takes full account of the differing letter widths. It entails calculating, for the scroll in question, the average width of each letter of the alphabet, and, based on this, an ‘expected width’ for each proposed reconstruction is calculated, which is the sum of the average letter widths of its constituent letters. Thus the expected width of la is the sum of the average widths of an a, a l, and the following space. Development 2: Vertical Dividers. A closely linked development is the construction of vertical dividers, which are vertical lines which link points that are directly above each other on an extant fragment. Expected widths are therefore calculated, not just for