NAUGHTS AND CROSSES: PESHER MANUSCRIPTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE FOR READING PRACTICES AT QUMRAN
2000; Brill; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1163/156851700509869
ISSN1568-5179
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Linguistic Studies
ResumoHistorians of Judaism and Christianity would very much like to know how Scripture was read, explained, and understood in the synagogues and house churches of the first century CE; unfortunately, the available sources preserve precious little information on this subject. Our understanding of reading practices may be broadened, however, by a careful study of manuscript evidence. Formal aspects of ancient manuscripts reflect the pressures exerted on them by the concrete reading circumstances in and for which they were produced. To invoke a musical image, we may treat these Jewish and Christian manuscripts as for textual performance, scores inflected for concrete occasions of performance and appropriation. The trove of documents from Qumran offers a rich body of evidence for this type of study; the pesher commentaries in particular contain many suggestive clues for scholars interested in reading practices at Qumran. In the present study, I will consider the significance of two paleographic features in the pesher manuscripts: first, the separation of lemmata and comment by the use of vacats (open spaces of two or more letterwidth spaces within a line) and second, a scribal mark that cancels open spaces. Close examination of such details shows that readers and scribes took special care when formatting these documents. This suggests that pesher commentaries were publicly performed at Qumran and that a proper performance of these works owed much to a carefully formatted score.
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