University of Groningen Postdoc and PhD positions

The Hands that Wrote the Bible: Digital Palaeography

The ERC project The Hands that Wrote the Bible: Digital Palaeography and Scribal Culture of the Dead Sea Scrolls invites applications for a 4-year PhD position and a 3-year Postdoc position. This ERC project is hosted by the Qumran Institute at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. For more information on the two positions, the application procedure and deadline, reference the dedicated web advertisements (PhD) and (Postdoc).

The main objective of this interdisciplinary project is to shed new light on ancient Jewish scribal culture and the making of the Bible by investigating two aspects of the scrolls’ palaeography: the typological development of writing styles and writer identification. The combination of new C14 samples and the use of computational intelligence as quantitative methods in order to assess the development of handwriting styles and to identify individual scribes will be used to cluster manuscripts as products of scribal activity in order to profile scribal production and to determine a more precise location in time for their activity, focusing, from literary and cultural-historical perspectives, on the content and genres of the texts that scribes wrote and copied and on the scripts and languages that they used. 

The goal of the Postdoc subproject is to describe the processes of and developments in three to four centuries of copying the biblical manuscripts found in the Judaean Desert in relation to palaeographic dating and writer identification. The major research question is how variant forms and editions of biblical manuscripts can be correlated to palaeographic dates, to identification of writers, as well as other variables such as scribal practices and different find-sites. Previous scholarship has explained textual variety in terms of chronological developments or sociological differences, or both, based on traditional palaeographical dates, or on models of a Qumran scribal practice, and generally on a smaller sample of manuscripts. On the basis of a database of all substantial biblical manuscripts from the Judaean Desert, the Postdoc researcher will select one more confined group of manuscripts (most probably either Deuteronomy or the Psalms), and qualitatively analyse the differences between the manuscripts as well as in relation to the authoritative text forms of the later traditions, in order to plot such variants against the developing time and the different find places and correlating these not only to traditional text-typologies of text, but also to occurrences of rewriting and so-called Fortschreibung, and to the various scribal practices.

[Application deadline is 31 March 2016.  The annual salary appears to be about € 25,000-33,000 for the PhD position and € 30,000-60,000.  This post is adapted from an advertisement on the NTEditions list.]