From the moment a scribe read or heard the phrase he was to copy down until he finished writing it out, there was a danger that what he held in memory could become distorted in some way. One way seems to have been writing down a synonym for a word that he was supposed to copy. In this case, perhaps the scribe was more conscious of the sense of what he was writing than the exact words themselves.
[Home] [Variations in Sequence] [Index]