So I was impressed to find that, in Matthew Morgenstern's recent article on JBA (Jewish Babylonian Aramaic) in magic bowls, he makes extensive use of scribal errors. The kind of thing that editors focused on publishing new material tend to overlook - words that the scribe began writing, but then stopped midway because he realized he made a mistake, and then wrote afresh. Morgenstern reads these self-corrections as a sound-bite of the scribe's own pronunciation.Indeed.
My thought is simply that the increasing proliferation of published magic bowls, including at least two recent books, allows for a higher level of textual scholarship. Yet another reason why it is important to publish rabbinic texts from manuscript, and why that job should not be left solely in the hands of amateurs. The more texts are published, the more scholars will be able to focus on reading them carefully.
He also draws attention to the important recent manuscript discoveries of the so-called European Geniza (i.e., non-Cairo Geniza) project.
What scholars refer to as the European Genizah is actually a phenomenon evidenced throughout Europe, where discarded manuscripts were used as pastedowns, fillers or binders for other books or volumes of notarial documents. Sometimes the manuscripts used were musical notations, or earlier Latin documents. Sometimes, they were Hebrew books. Usually they were large parchment folios, best suited for this kind of thing.Lots of Talmudic fragments have been recovered, and at least some from the Mishnah and the Tosefta. Cool.