The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

THIRD COPY 179
The arrangement of the text in the columns of the scroll is very free, with
an abundance of vacat and lines left blank, which testify to a well-established
system of interpunction. This is turn reflects, moreover, a prosperous economic
situation in which the price of parchment did not in any way restrict
the practices of copyists, precisely the situation in the Herodian period, but
also that of the Hasmonaean.
The space corresponding to the length of two or three letters, which fulfilled
the function of our full stop, is used rather infrequently: i xiii 24, 2 5,
5 ii 22. Elsewhere small blank spaces are sometimes caused by a fault in the
skin or by scraping of the letters: 5 ii 23 and 26. A blank of four to six letters
separates the items of a list (i ii 24-9) or starts off a new part of a paragraph:
I vi 2, xii 25, 5 ii 21. Such a vacat becomes more important, sixteen to
eighteen letters long, if the transition from one part of a paragraph to the
other is made from one line of the column to the other: i vi 7 and 9. A blank
space of the same length may be left in the middle of the line, but only after
a single final word of the section of the preceding paragraph: 5 ii 29. A halfline
left blank indicates a new paragraph: i v 6-7 and i xiii 29. For the whole
line is left blank if the preceding paragraph completely fills the line (see
En^ I xii 4). At 5 i 24 the last line of the paragraph does not stretch as far as
the intercolumnar margin, and the following line, 25, is left blank none the
less. This extra-long blank space indicates that we are passing from the text
to the Appendix; see p. 208. The same system of interpunction recurs in other
Herodian manuscripts, particularly in the Manual of War, i QM, and previously,
but less regularly, in Hasmonaean manuscripts, such as iQS and iQIs*.
The last word in the line is often detached from the foregoing text and
aligned in the right-hand line of the intercolumnar margin: i v 5 and 8,
xii 24, 25, 27, 28, 29; 5 i 23. This practice seems to be of epigraphic origin;
compare the Greek, Latin, Palmyrene, Samaritan, etc., inscriptions, where
the last word, or else the last letter, is often aligned in this way; see Milik,
RB Ixv (1958), 70 n. I, and Recherches, 79-80. An alternative system, which
consisted of filling in the blanks at the end of lines with any kind of sign
(+, X, o, etc.), is likewise well attested in the Qumran manuscripts and in
inscriptions, for example from Palmyra.
The copy of the text of En*" was made most carefully; the scribe very
seldom made errors, and these he himself at once corrected. Letter omitted
and added above the line of writing: ]*nn i i 25, X'yil
5 ii 30; letter
crossed out and corrected: {lAl}S7!nN i i 24; scraping out of a word: 5 ii 26.