Emanuel Tov, "Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert, Revised Second Edition" (Brill, 2025)

Emanuel Tov has been studying the Dead Sea Scrolls for sixty years. In 2024, he published a seven-hundred-page book on the scribes of Qumran, and he is now writing a new one on the textual history of the Pentateuch. But his revised second edition of Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert (Brill, 2025) is something different: a handbook. It is a reference work for anyone who needs to understand the physical and procedural details of the scrolls—what the scribes actually did when they sat down to copy a text. Tov’s goal, he says, is to enter the mind of a scribe.

What changed between editions

The first edition came out in 2004. Since then, Tov corrected a number of his own mistakes and changed his terminology: he no longer calls the writing material “leather,” preferring the more general “skin” or “skin-based material.” He also stabilized his thinking on what he calls the “Qumran scribal practice”—a distinctive set of spelling and scribal conventions that appears in a subset of the scrolls. One of the most welcome confirmations of this idea came from an unexpected source: an AI-driven handwriting analysis project in the Netherlands. Researchers there found that eight scrolls were written by a single scribe, and seven of them shared the same spelling system—the Qumran scribal practice. For Tov, that was external validation of a p