The most characteristic feature of both the entire corpus and the col-
lections of the individual caves is that virtually all the manuscripts contain
texts of a religious nature or touching upon religious issues. Only a few,
badly preserved fragments are the remnants of nonliterary texts such as
letters, accounts, or deeds, and it cannot be excluded that some of those ac-
tually stem from NaFalμever.
The present inventory of Dead Sea Scrolls lists around 930 items. In
most cases one item corresponds to one manuscript, but in view of the
many unidentified fragments that have not been included in the lists, it is
plausible that the materials known to us stem from more than a thousand
different manuscripts. Only in a few cases do substantial parts of manu-
scripts remain, and often a manuscript consists of no more than a few
identified fragments.
Most Dead Sea Scrolls were written on skins of domesticated goats
and ibexes. Some exceptionally thick scrolls, like 11Q5, might be calfskin.
Ten to fifteen percent of the manuscripts were written on papyrus. The
Cave 3Copper Scrollis the only text written on metal. Both in and near the
caves (Caves 4, 6, 7, 8, and 10), and at the site of Qumran, jars and shards
with inscriptions or incisions were found. Notable are the ostraca found at
Qumran, as well as a small limestone plaque of five lines with what may be
a literary text (KhQ 2207). Some fragments, both of skin and of papyrus,
were found to be written on both sides.
The majority of the manuscripts are written in Hebrew. About 12 per-
cent (or 17 percent of the nonbiblical, nondocumentary texts) are written in
Aramaic. Almost 3 percent of the inventory items are written in Greek, but
the percentage drops to less than 1 percent if we bracket out Cave 7. All but
two Aramaic manuscripts and most Hebrew ones are written in the so-
called square or Aramaic script. Two Aramaic manuscripts are written in a
Nabatean script. Some Hebrew texts use the Paleo-Hebrew script, or several
kinds of so-called cryptic scripts, the most common one being referred to
as Cryptic A. The square script is attested in formal, semiformal, and
semicursive hands, and a few of the documentary texts are written in a cur-
sive hand. Some Hebrew texts display the orthography and morphology
known from the Masoretic manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible; others have a
distinct full orthography and special morphological features that are unat-
tested or rare in Hebrew texts outside the corpus. Many manuscripts with
those morphological features also have specific nontextual scribal features,
so Emanuel Tov has proposed that we have within the corpus a large group
of documents written according to a special “Qumran scribal practice.”206eibert tigchelaarEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:04:03 PM