Scribal Habits and Scholarly Texts

My interest in a comparative codicological approach to ancient Jewish manuscripts was preempted by a disjuncture that I had begun to notice between scholarship on two different genres written in Aramaic and recovered from among the literary finds from the Dead Sea. On the one hand, there is an increasing body of scholarship that has related the Aramaic apocalyptic, astronomical and physiognomic material to the direct knowledge of the scribes behind these texts with the Babylonian scholarly tradition.1 On the other, scholars have been reticent to associate the Aramaic court tales with a Mesopotamian horizon—despite the diaspora setting of much of this material— precisely because this literature has been deemed to stand outside of the scholarly tradition, and hence the scribes who produced these texts unable to access Babylonian literature.2 These sort of assumptions have also governed scholarly approaches to biblical texts, with the generic division found in the book of Daniel related to the differing social groups at which the material was apparently aimed: so the high-register Hebrew apocalyptic visions aimed at a scholarly audience; and the low-register Aramaic tales at a lower-class readership.3 Underlying this supposition is the idea that