מספר הסופרים במגילת ישעיה השלמה: הצעה חדשה: [מתוך המדור: נוסח, לשון ולבלרות]

The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa), notable for its exceptional length and state of preservation, has long attracted scholarly attention, particularly with regard to the number of scribes involved in its production. This question arises primarily from material features evident at the physical and textual midpoint of the scroll, between columns 27 and 28, which are often interpreted as indicating that the scroll is a composite of two originally independent sub-scrolls and, accordingly, may reflect the involvement of more than one scribe. Previous scholarship has also pointed to or the ographic differences between the two halves of the scroll, especially a tendency toward fuller orthography in its second half.This paper reexamines the number of scribes responsible for 1QIsaa.It introduces a two-level statistical approach for identifying distinct‘scribal fingerprints’ through the systematic analysis of orthographic,morphological, and material features. This novel methodology addresses the fundamental challenge of scribal identification where controlled experiments are impossible, allowing us to distinguish meaningful patterns from random variations.In the first stage of the analysis, we map the distribution of plene and defective orthography of selected frequent words in the scroll (כיא/כי; morphological long and short of use the); כה/כוה ;כל/כול ;לי/ליא ;מי/מיאforms of recurring words (הואה/הוא ;ירושלים/ירושלם ;(and variation in the number of lines per column across the scroll. The combined distribution of these features reveals a distinction between three segments in the scroll: columns 1–12; 13–27; and 28–54. To assess whether the observed differences between these segments could have arisen by chance, the second stage of the research applies permutation and bootstrapping tests.Although each test has its own strengths and weaknesses, both yield consistent results, indicating that the distinctions between the segments are statistically significant.