Song of Songs
Mar. 24th, 2013 03:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cremainsSo, I finished writing and correcting Shir HaShirim; tomorrow I'll be able to sew it up. It's written on gewil, which is not really parchment but the whole skin of the animal, like moccasin material. Gewil is beautiful to write on, soft and smooth, but truly hideous for dealing with any mistakes. You can write with 99% accuracy, but that 1% of the time when you miswrite it will basically definitely look like ass, no matter how you fix it. Often you can get a "decent" erasure by wetting a cloth and rubbing at it carefully but hard; however, this still leaves a smudge and often the letters come out thicker and less elegant on the erased surface, like so:
The Talmud assumes and indeed urges that most writing will be done on gewil rather than parchment (which dominates ritual writing today, especially in the Ashkenazi world), and accordingly favours non-erasure-based error correction, such as allowing one or two letters to hang off the edge of the margin (as opposed to demanding perfect justification). If you forgot words, Talmudic halakhah tells you just to write them small above where you need them, rather than trying to erase and jam in. Like so:
However, strangely and happily, a lot of this scroll was done without any mistake (probably due to heightened attention caused by fear). Below the cut is an excerpt.
Above is the text:
I just realised it's 4:00 am so there will be no more translation, but the last full line in the picture stops with "your neck a tower of ivory, your eyes pools..." in the seventh chapter.
The Talmud assumes and indeed urges that most writing will be done on gewil rather than parchment (which dominates ritual writing today, especially in the Ashkenazi world), and accordingly favours non-erasure-based error correction, such as allowing one or two letters to hang off the edge of the margin (as opposed to demanding perfect justification). If you forgot words, Talmudic halakhah tells you just to write them small above where you need them, rather than trying to erase and jam in. Like so:
However, strangely and happily, a lot of this scroll was done without any mistake (probably due to heightened attention caused by fear). Below the cut is an excerpt.
Above is the text:
"What is your beloved more than another's, most beautiful of women? What is your beloved more than another's, that you make us promise this?"
"My beloved is clear and red, raised high above ten thousand
his head a gold stain
his curls tight, crow-black
his eyes doves by streams of water
washed with milk, set well
his cheeks spice-beds, heaps of herbs
his lips roses, overflowing myrrh."
I just realised it's 4:00 am so there will be no more translation, but the last full line in the picture stops with "your neck a tower of ivory, your eyes pools..." in the seventh chapter.
