Abstract
The present study concerns the question whether or not the scribal and textual transmission of the Torah and, at an earlier period, the last stage of its editing and literary growth were influenced by the special status of these books in Judaism. To the best of my knowledge, this issue has not been discussed in the literature, not even in surveys of the Torah manuscripts at Qumran.1 The Torah has always enjoyed a greater degree of sanctity than the other Scripture books, but did this sanctity influence its textual transmission and the last stage of its editing? We are faced with multiple forms of the Torah, in Hebrew and translation, and it is possible that some or all of them were transmitted with greater care than the other Scripture books. Ours is not a study on canon or on the reception of the Torah books— a popular term in modern research—but a study on the history of the text. After a certain period, within rabbinic Judaism, the Torah was copied with greater precision than the other books; special scribal rules were instituted for its copying, and we wish to investigate how far back we can trace this increased precision. Our investigation will proceed backwards, starting with the writing of the Torah in the Talmudic and medieval periods and ending with the earlier periods. The areas to be examined are scribal habits applied to the writing of Torah scrolls, their orthographical and textual features, the scripts used for writing, and the degree of variation between the different texts. Our working hypothesis is that the further back we go in time, the less the sanctity of the Torah influenced its textual transmission, and at an earlier stage, its editing. At the same time, even in earlier periods the sanctity of the Torah influenced a few aspects of its
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