'A sj-napofue roll must be written on the ekins of clean aninmlij, prepared for the particular use of the syno^o^e by a Jew. These must be fastened to^'ether with Btrin^fstaken from clean animals. Every skin must contain a certain number of columns, etjual throughout the entire codex. The length of each column must not extend over less than 48 or more than 6u lines ; and the breadth must consist of tliirty letters. The whole copy must be first lined ; and if three words be written in it without a line, it is worthless. The ink should be black, neither red, green, nor any other colour, and be prepared according to a definite receipt. An authentic copy must be the exemplar, from which the transcriber ought not in the least to deviate. No word or letter, not even a ynd, must be written from memor}', the scribe not having looked at the codex before him. . . . Between every consonant the space of a hair or thread must inten'ene ; between every word the breadth of a narrow consonant ; between every new parriahdh, or section, the breadth of nine consonants ; lietween every book, three lines. The fifth book of .Moses must terminate exactly with a line ; but the rest need not do so. Besides Uiis. the copyist must sit in full Jewish dress, wash his whole body, not begin to write the name of Qod with a pen newly dipped in ink, and
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fio. 2. — ntrriRKW msTATKrcn cooKx, Oni cent. (Brit. Mus. MS Or. M46, reduced).
The old characters remained In use on coins of the Maccab.t"an jieriod, but they had fallen out of use for literar>' jmrposcs long before the time of our Lord, and there can be no doubt th.at the book.s read by Him (e.g. Lk 4") were written in the square alphabet, in which the smallness of the letter ytid justilied the metaphor of Mt 5".* The square characters of the earliest period were not identical in form with those of the MSS now extant, but they were their direct ancestors. So far we have very little light a.s to the appearance of the MSS in which the Hebrew Scriptures were prestjrved ; it is only when we reach the period of the Talmud (c. 300-.500) that we find those principles being laid down which, stereotyped by the Massoretes, have
fiven us the MSS now extant (l''ig. 2). Minute irections are given for the copying of the Scrip- tures, especially of those volumes of the Law
• An Isolated survival of the old alphal»et occurs In the case of A(|iiila, in whose Greek OT the name Jehovah was regularly written in these characters. Origen's stateniont to this effect has been conflrmed by the fragments of Aouila recently dis- covered at Cairo, and nowat Canibridge (fturliitt. /''ra^m*nfs qf AqvUa, 18B7, ct. Taylor, Omizah FragmimU, p. 20 f.).
should a king address Mm while writing that name he most take no notice of him' (S. Davidson. Text of the OT '', p. H»).
Vowel-points are never added in synagogue rolls. Originally absent from Hel)icw writing altogether, vowels were first represented, wlien some special need required their indication, by the semi-vowels 1, ', n, and sometimes n, technically known as matrts lectioni.i. The insertion of these signs gives what is known as the scriptio plena, their omission the srriptio drfrrtivn. The date of the introduction of tliis device is uncertain, but it must be later than the production of the LXX. The more complete and satisfactory .system of vowel-points was introduced about the 7th century. An alternative .system, in which the |M)iiits are supraliniar instead of infralinear, is found in the oldest dated MS (the St. Petersburg Codex of the Prophets, A.D. 1)16), and in some others : this is sup- posed to have been practised at IJabylon (but not exclusively even there), but never gained general acceptance. Vowel-points are habitually inserted in MSS other than synagogue rolls, but it was a rule that the consonautal text should be written
950
WRITI^^G
WRITING
independently, and the points added by a different scribe. — Acceiituation was probably introduced into Hebrew writin" at about the same date as vowel-points (5th-7th cents.), and used to denote the logical interrelation of the several words in the sentence, as well as their vocal modulation in pub- lic reading. — Separation of words is effected in the Moabite and Siloam inscriptions by the insertion of a dot ; but the frequent mistakes in the division of words in the LXX, and the subsequent intro- duction of the ' linal letters,' show that in early MSS Hebrew writing, like Greek and Latin to a much later period, was undivided. The use of the five ' final letters,' to indicate the ends of words, belongs to a date intermediate between the version of the LXX and the Talmud, a period in which most of the minuticB in the practice of the scribes probably originated. — Divi.iions of the text in Hebrew MSS are of various kinds. The larger divisions, corresponding roughly to our chapters, are the ' open ' and ' closed sections. Open sections begin a new line in the MSS ; and if the previous section has ended at the end of a line, a whole line is left blank before the new section begins. Closed sections follow on in the same line as the end of the previous section, a blank space only being left between ; or, if the previous section ends too near the end of a line to admit of this, the next line is indented. Late MSS sometimes insert the letters s or o in the blank space, to indicate an open or a closed section re- spectively. In the Law the MSS agree generally in their distribution of open and closed sections, but in the Prophets and Hagiogiapha there is considerable divergence, indicating difierence of tradition in diflerent Massoretic schools. This section-system was certainly introduced before the time of Jerome, and probably before the period of the Mishna. — Another form of division was into sedarim, or lections suited to a three-years' cycle of the reading of the Law. The Pentateuch is divided into 167 sedarim, while of the other books, which were similarly divided, the Former Projihets have 77, the Later Prophets 107, and the Hagio- grapha 81. Side by side with this was a one-year cycle of the reading of the Law, which was in use in Habj'Ionia, involving a di\-ision of the Law into 5i pCird.ihiij6th. These are indicated in the MSS, with a mnemonic mark to show the number of verses in each parasha. Verse-division is rarely found in synagogue rolls ; in MSS in book form having accents and vowel-points it is regularly practised. The earliest method of indicating the end of averse is by placing a sUluk (■') beneath the final letter ; subsequently the double point or colon (soph paiiik) was introduced. The verses were carefully numbered by the Massoretes, as a pre- caution against interpolation ; but the systems of division practised by the Babylonian and Pales- tinian Jews respectively differed considerably, and the one now in use differs from both of these, being apparently due to the Massoretes.