The Assessment of Variation

Paleographers differ in considering variation in scribal hands preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mostly formal manuscripts have been used as pegs both in establishing the date of a particular manuscript and in assessing whether different fragments could have been written by the same scribe. However, informal manuscripts are likely to display more variation in arrangement and formation of letter forms. This article proposes to differentiate between formal and informal manuscripts and to assess the degree of variation in both. Such a distinction leads to a reassessment of the manuscript evidence of the Aramaic Levi Document, which this article argues has been preserved in a maximum of three, instead of six, manuscripts in Cave 4.