Shemot - The Vienna Scroll - Some Prefatory Remarks

 

A vav was added to "kol" sometime after the text was written in HUC 958

I have checked Exodus of the Vienna Scroll against modern examples.  In keeping with my other investigations of the VS, Shemot has the greatest number of variants related to plene spelling.  There are 46 examples of plene, or full spellings of words, in the VS Exodus.  This is by far the largest number of variants.  

Rather than document all of these variants, and the others,  I will provide my notes and explain my method, and then sample of certain textual trends.

This packet contains the text of variants of Exodus, and when possible, the corresponding Square Scripture portion, and the modern text.   When all three are available for comparison, I have written this on the Kaifeng Exodus scan:

This shows that the Vienna Scroll, "VS" has the variant, and the Square Scripture "SS" and the Modern Scroll "MS" do not.  Below that is the nature of the variant, in this case, as in most, is plene.  There are 36 of these examples.   If there a more than one on the page, I note this:

So, two examples are found on this page.  Following close behind are these examples, with 30 examples:

Here, the Vienna Scroll has the variant, and the modern scroll does not, and there is no square scriptures extant for comparisons.  This notation is when the VS has what appears to be a scribal error, and the Square Scripture and Modern Scroll do not.

Similarly, this is written when we do not have an extant Square Scripture to compare a seeming scribal error, and there are four examples of this kind:

In four cases, the VS and the SS have a plene spelling, but not the MS:

In one instance, VS and SS have defective or short spelling, while the MS has plene.   There are two instances where the VS has a dagesh in the text.  

In the next entry, we will examine one or two examples of all the above.  We will especially highlight the adding of vavs and yods in the VS - the creation of plene spellings - as they are so prevalent. 

Here is my admittedly sloppy tally sheet of variants:

As we review more books/scrolls, I will develop a neater bookkeeping system.