Paleographers differ in considering variation in scribal hands preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mostly formal manuscripts have been used as pegs both in establishing the date of a particular manuscript and in assessing whether different fragments could have been written by the same scribe. However, informal manuscripts are likely to display more variation in arrangement and formation of letter forms. This article proposes to differentiate between formal and informal manuscripts and to assess the degree of variation in both. Such a distinction leads to a reassessment of the manuscript evidence of the Aramaic Levi Document, which this article argues has been preserved in a maximum of three, instead of six, manuscripts in Cave 4.

古文字学家在考虑死海古卷中保存的抄写手的变化方面存在分歧。大多数正式手稿已被用作确定特定手稿日期和评估不同片段是否可能由同一抄写员撰写的钉钉。然而，非正式手稿可能会在字母形式的排列和形成方面表现出更多的变化。本文建议区分正式手稿和非正式手稿，并评估两者的差异程度。这种区别导致重新评估阿拉姆列维文件的手稿证据，本文认为该文件最多保存在第 4 窟的三份手稿中，而不是六份。