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Scholars are more and more realizing the importance of scribes in the production of ancient texts.
Scribes are not only the faithful transmitters of a rigid text but take part in the elaboration, production and creative transmission of ancient texts, both orally and textually.
Scribal creativity may be the most important part in the textual production and evolution.

This shift of paradigm is the result of  the recent evolution in research in several areas:
(1) the focus on the final stage of the Pentateuch;
(2) the publication of the “biblical” Dead Sea Scrolls, which shows the alteration and actualization of texts, thereby justifying the concept of textual fluidity;
(3) Septuagint studies, where the process of translation is more and more identified with a scribal process of transmission;
and (4) the pseudepigrapha and other DSS containing original texts as well as commentaries and the rewriting/reworking of authoritative texts.

Even the so-called “fixation” of the text should be studied from this point of view: scribes had to choose between different oral and textual versions to produce a new text, believing it to be more “authentic.”
Moreover, the early Jewish revisions of the Greek text, which aligns it more closely to one particular Hebrew tradition, may be formative to the process of the fixation of the Hebrew text.

The purpose of this conference is to provide a forum for scholars across the disciplines to discuss and debate the significance of the scribal figures and practices in Biblical studies
and the Ancient Near East.