The Ashkar-Gilson Manuscript: Remnant of a Proto-Masoretic Model Scroll of the Torah

What it is about

Two sheets of a 7th–8th-century Torah scroll survive: the Ashkar-Gilson Manuscript (Exod 13:19–16:1, badly damaged) and the London Manuscript (Exod 9:18–13:2). They come from the "silent era" between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the great Tiberian codices. Sanders compares the scroll with the Aleppo and Leningrad codices and other medieval manuscripts on four points: the brick-like layout of the Song of the Sea (Exod 15), the five special lines written above and below the song, the division of the prose into open and closed paragraphs (petuḥot and setumot), and the use of matres lectionis. The scroll agrees with the earliest codices on all four, closely enough that the Tiberian Masoretes probably consulted this scroll or a faithful copy. The Masoretes therefore aimed to preserve the best existing tradition, not to innovate.

Ideas

• I1. The petuḥa/setuma paragraph marks are old (pre-Masoretic) and stable across witnesses; if our WLC source carries them, keep them as a MISC feature on the last token of a paragraph and use them as section boundaries for discourse segmentation, measured against where prag sees speech close or scenes change.
• I2. A sentence in the script chapter: the layout of the songs (Exod 15, Deut 32) and the paragraph marks belong to the transmitted text, with this scroll as the earliest evidence for the Song of the Sea; plene vs defective spelling in it already matches the Leningrad Codex.
• I3. Nothing for the parser itself: the paper is codicology.

For Mova

I1 is a converter feature for tools/macula (if MACULA/WLC exposes the paragraph marks; otherwise a gap in 13-mova-tools.md) and a segmentation cue for Discourse: narrative, speech and the shape of a text. I2 goes into 1. Script and pointing (matres lectionis, layout of the text).

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5508/jhs.2014.v14.a7

@article{sanders2014ashkar,
  title = {{The Ashkar-Gilson Manuscript: Remnant of a Proto-Masoretic Model Scroll of the Torah}},
  author = {Sanders, Paul},
  journal = {Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 14},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.5508/jhs.2014.v14.a7},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs.2014.v14.a7}
}

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