There has never been a systematic examination of the variants in the Kaifeng Torah scrolls. My work over the next few years is to make an accounting of these variants in order to have a record of them; to try and categorize these variants by type, and understand why they occurred. In the process, I hope to have a firmer idea of how the Jews of Kaifeng copied their Torah scrolls, how they corrected or edited them, all in order to understand their relationship to their books and the Hebrew language generally. Where they rote copyists, as has been asserted, or is their knowledge and interaction with Hebrew more advanced and nuanced?
I have read through the scroll at the Austrian National Library, the Vienna Scroll (VS) and Genesis of both the scroll at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) and the British Library (BLS). I do not have images for the last few chapters of the SMU scroll. I have also referenced the Square Scriptures at the Hebrew Union College Library (HUC). This kind of comparison of texts will give us an idea about the resources available to the Kaifeng Jews regarding their Hebrew books and the accuracy of these books.
I am using a three line system to track variants:
Top Row - Kaifeng Variant
Middle Row - Modern Text
Type of Variant
Looking like this:
Here, the BLS, HUC, SMU and VS share a variant. The MS does not contain this anomaly. The type of variant is most likely the plene, or full spelling of the word. Here are the images:
Here, all the Kaifeng texts have a full spelling. This is an ideal type of variant, as it shows that they Kaifeng scribes were using a source that had such a plene spelling. It seems very unlikely that four scribes made the same error.
The largest group of variants for the four Kaifeng sources are plene spelling. Followed closely by scribal errors. Here is the breakdown:
1. plene spelling, 25
2. scribal errors, 24
3. two words (instead of one), 4
4. one word (instead of two), 2
It is too early to draw firm conclusions about Kaifeng scribal skill, their sources materials, and editing of their works. But we can see some features from this chart:
There is nothing like a one-to-one correspondence to plene spelling in each of the texts, but we can see general patterns. Of the 25 examples, a full 17 are "shared" while only 6 are alone. What does these groupings of plene spellings mean? Are they errors shared by each scribe, or do they indicate the spelling in the sources used by the Kaifeng scribes? I will need the remaining extant scrolls to make such a judgement, but it appears do to the sheer numbers of shared plene examples, that the source contained them, or there was coordination among scribes to render such plene spellings. Here is the full list of Genesis variants.
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