The literature on the Hebrew skills of the Kaifeng Jews stresses their supposed lack of Hebrew proficiency. Most of the literature on this topic is very vague. The small amount of research done on their Hebrew texts fails to their Hebrew skills in a comparative fashion. What were the Hebrew skills of other, Asian Jewish communities like in comparison? What does it mean to have adequate Hebrew skills? To write letters or books? To chant Torah? To copy scrolls? What kind of skills did they require?
So far I have examined the Vienna Scroll, VS, and most of the British Library Scroll, BLS. I have found many variants in spelling, and examples of what I presume are errors in spelling, either because the scribe made a mistake, or the text the scribe worked from had the variant. How can we tell the difference? If scrolls share a variant, then it is likely the error originated from variants in the copy text. If that is the case, are they errors at all?
But this example is firmly scribal error.
This is Numbers 35, verses 31 and 32. Here, the scribe copied the first verse correctly:
The next verse, 32, begins with the same three words, and this caused an issue for the scribe:
After copying verse 31, they probably looked up from the text they were copying, and then when the looked again at the copy text, their eye caught the previous line, with the same three initial words, and the scribe recopied line 31. See the blue arrow above. The scribe completely rewrote verse 31, began and finished verse 32. The BLS scroll has many examples of entire lines and sections removed and written, such as this from Column 196:
But this example was not caught, or at least, not corrected. Are there other such examples in the five other extant Kaifeng Scrolls?
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