I have read the Kaifeng Scroll currently at the Austrian National Library and will use this scroll of the base line for the others I plan to read. I know have a list of variants in the VS, and I will use this as I read the other scrolls (I am currently reading the scroll in the British Library). The goal is to create a library of such variants both to see what conclusion I can reach about how the Jewish community in Kaifeng copied their scrolls, and to have a repository of such variants if other researchers wish to use them.
For Deuteronomy, the VS displays the ample employment of plene spellings we saw in other parts of this scroll. Of the 31 variants I found, 24 are plene spellings not found in modern scrolls. There are 7 examples of what I found consider a scribal error, and one example of a defective spelling. Interestingly, there are indications of editing in the HUC manuscripts involving "correcting" defective spelling:
My full notes and the examples can be found here.
Questions to answer in the future: is this reliance on plene spellings a feature of Kaifeng scrolls? So are I have comparative readings of Genesis up to chapter 20 for the HUC Square books, the VS, the Southern Methodist University Scroll, SMU, and the British Library Scroll, BLS. It is too early to tell, but variants appear to cluster across scrolls and codices.
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