Shemot - The Vienna Scroll & The Plene Examples of the "Corrector"

 

ABS Kaifeng Scroll

The Vienna Scroll has twenty plene or full spelling examples in the Book of Genesis.  Exodus has far more, early sixty-six.  It is difficult to find a conclusive reason or set of reasons for these spellings.  Very many of the examples appear to be insertions after the word was written:

Here we see what appears to be insertions of three vavs and one yod.  But without good quality photographs of these, and other examples (and that does not seem possible), it is difficult to know for certain when these insertions occurred.  Is the ink darker or lighter than the surrounding letters?  Would that tell us conclusively that they were inserted later?

From what I can see at this point, I can say with some degree of certainty that it appears someone came along and inserted these letters after the scroll was written. In nearly every case, they picked a more likely spelling than what was in the Torah.  They were trying to correct a text, the Masoretic version of the Torah, that had already been frozen in state of variant plene and defective "correct and wrong" spellings.  

Did this person simply come along and correct them at will?  This is possible.  But we should note that the opportunities to correct words in this text are legion.  Out of the 25,957 to 31,848 words in Exodus, only 66 words have full spelling.  Can we assume that the Corrector had a text in front of him and employed its spelling?  Either that, or the Corrector had some other rubric. Did the Corrector base it on memory?

What about other texts in the Kaifeng library.  I only have access to the seven Square Scripture / Torah reading books.  In most cases, the spelling of words corrected in the VS were not corrected in the SS books (or vice versa):

And the SS:

Here is a rare example of a vav added to the SS, which matches the spelling of the VS:

But these examples are infrequent.  For the most part, modern scrolls and the SS match, at least in terms of consonantal spellings - at least 32 examples.  The VS also has a small amount of what appear to be scribal errors:

The final letter here appears to be a tav, when it should be a tet:

This word is correct in the SS and modern scrolls.  Generally the SS are more in line with modern Torah scrolls than with the VS.  

As we move forward, it will be interesting to see if the plene trend continues.  So far, there are two example in the first two chapters of Leviticus.  Will this continue? Is this plene trend unique to VS, or is it found in other Kaifeng scrolls?  I have images of SMU Genesis, and in chapter 25 there are only two, and both the SMU and VS agree on the full spelling.  But most of the plene spellings in VS occur after chapter 31.  We will see if SMU follows VS.