David Capes
Emanuel, earlier, you mentioned that the scribes are writing on leather. What kind of leather are they writing on?
Emanuel Tov
To be a scribe is a big business. If you’re an apprentice scribe, you have to learn a lot. And I’ve been thinking a lot about this. In the beginning, when I started my study 25 years ago, I thought that the scribes actually performed all the tasks connected with the writing on material themselves. But in the course of the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that another stage must be suggested before that of the scribe, namely that of a scroll manufacturer. Now this is just a suggestion, because there is no way that we can prove this suggestion, but in my lecture, I will talk bit more about this. I think the very technical aspects of the preparation of the material for the writing were performed by a person that we shall call a scroll manufacturer.
He had a kind of a store or shop, and it was he who prepared the hides, the skins, of the animals. Now mind you, we’re still in the middle of research. I can’t tell you exactly, and we would like to know which animals supplied the skins. We say leather, but really leather is the finished product. It’s more like [animal] skin-based products. Sometimes leather was made. Maybe it’s an ibis, or it’s from a calf. There are different options, and we have some research, but we would like to have a database for all the fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In my mind, the most beautiful material for any scroll is that of the temple scroll. It’s a beautiful white skin-like material, written in this case, on the flesh side of the material. All the other scrolls were written on the hair side, because you can imagine that the skin has two sides.
Now, the skins were taken from animals, so they had different sizes. They were, of course, dried. They were prepared with chemicals. It must not have been pleasant for the nose, this process. They would not have been in the middle of a settlement when they were dried and made ready for writing. The manufacturer, I surmise made different columns because the writing was in columns. He made the preparations for different columns. There would normally be 3 or 4 or 5 different columns next to each other. And he used a grid in order to make the lines of each column. And sometimes these lines were precisely next to each other, and sometimes they were not exactly precise. You can see this when you have a long scroll, like the temple scroll.
These were the major items that the manufacturer prepared, and then the scribe who wanted to write a small scroll, or a long scroll went to the manufacturer. And sometimes strange things happened. For example, I can see in the pesher the commentary on Habakkuk, the second sheet of this commentary has margins, but these margins had ruled lines. Well, you don’t need ruled lines in a margin. That’s funny.
So, my suggestion is that the scribe of this scroll went to the store. He ordered material for his scroll, and the manufacturer said, sorry sir, I don’t have anything this size, but I have something larger. But it’s already ruled for a larger scroll. And he used that and it was the appropriate size for him, but the margins were already ruled for a larger scroll. So, he used it. In this exceptional case, you have margins with ruled lines in it and no writing because that’s of course, not needed. Then the scribe had all the material in front of him and he could start writing. Of course, this apprentice scribe had to learn many, many details that we learn today when we go to grade 1 at school. But he had to learn those. I say he, because I don’t think there was a “she”. He had to learn before actually writing a scroll of, let’s say, the beginning of the Bible, Genesis 1.
David Capes
So, the scribes are writing on this leather material. The scroll manufacturer has created the scroll itself. Where do they get the ink to write?
Emanuel Tov
The scribe had to learn many, many things. Creating the ink is also one of the things that he had to learn. This is just my thought, but I don’t know. I think that the scribe did this himself. There has been some research in the last 30 years of the ink, because you have two possibilities with ancient ink. I didn’t do this research myself. This research is for chemists. So, you can have ink with a metal base, and you can have ink based from plants that you burn. And with the soot as a base, you can make ink. Amazingly, after 2000 years, this ink is still beautiful. It has been beautifully preserved, as if it was created yesterday. We still have some inkwells, about 10 different inkwells, and a few inkwells have some remains in them, so we can do research on them.
Now, interestingly enough, about 10 scrolls have the letters negatively written in the scroll. Now, what do I mean by negative? If you have a letter, let’s say the aleph like the English letter A, the ink has eaten through the material. That’s not very helpful. It’s ugly, but we can still read the letter. This happens, for example, in the Genesis, apocryphal scroll. The ink has eaten through the material. This happens with certain type of ink. In the beginning, we thought this was with metal-based ink, but now we think this is actually the copper element. It’s the copper element that was created by a copper ink well. And so that’s what these scrolls that have letters eaten through, have in common. It’s very interesting. And as I said, the scribes had to learn many, many additional things before they were able to write the scrolls in different levels of expertise.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
