Subject: QUERY: HEBREW PALEOGRAPHY

From: Jean VALENTIN <[email-masked]>
Date: Mer, 1 Oct 97 22:29:27 +0200

This query is a bit special, I hope you won't find it totally off-topic.

Ten years ago, when travelling in the Middle East (to be precise, in 
Syria) I had the chance of acquiring two Hebrew scrolls. They are 
fragments of the Pentateuch, their text has nothing sensational as it is 
the usual consonantal text - No, I'm not announcing you any exceptional 
discoveries! - but I would like to learn more about them.

My problem is: is it possible to _date_ such things? After having looked 
at S. Birnbaum's "The Hebrew Scripts" I understand it's quite difficult, 
as the writing of scrolls, due to its especially sacred character, was 
subjet to nearly no evolution in centuries. But one of my two scrolls has 
a quite unusual, irregular writing quite different from the standardized 
writing of the other one or of most other Torah scrolls (which I've seen 
in photograph or sometimes in real exemplars). So I ask myself why it is 
so: is it old, is it coming from a different backgorund (maybe the 
caraites or some other dissidence?), was it not intended for liturgical 
use? And maybe, because of its different style, it might be possible to 
get some information.

I would like to have the opinion of a specialist about this. As I just 
got a scanner for my computer, I have "photographed" a few lines of this 
very personal handwriting. I thought that may be one of the participants 
to this list has some abilities in hebrew paleography, or has a contact 
(maybe in the university where he's working) with a specialist in the 
field. If such is the case, I am ready to send a graphic file (in the GIF 
format, it's 1.4 Mb) attached to an off-list email.

Thank you for your help.

Jean Valentin - Brussels