Models of Textual Communities and Digital Palaeography of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The present project will make full use of the unique potential offered by the Dead Sea Scrolls to enquire after a micro-society in antiquity organized around a common understanding of texts#a textual community. Analyses of the scrolls# contents indicate heterogeneity and religious diversity within the collection of texts on different levels, which have either been attributed to diachronic developments within early Judaism, or have been related to different models of communities behind the manuscripts. Using the new tool of digital palaeography, the project aims to reveal scribal culture at a micro-level in relation to models of textual communities. New data will validate general inferences about literary heterogeneity and religious diversity#which are, up until now, based primarily on content analysis from general perspectives.