Mind the Gap! Telling Stories with White Spaces

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In ancient Hebrew manuscripts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, one encounters a minimal presentation consisting only of the 22 Hebrew letters, with no additional markings to aid the reading. But one element does appear in these manuscripts even in antiquity: gaps within the text to indicate paragraph breaks. These white spaces carried important information about how a text was meant to be read.

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Endnotes

1. The seminal study remains François Langlamet, “Les divisions massorétiques du livre de Samuel,” Revue Biblique 91 (1984), pp. 481–519.

2. For further discussion, see Matthieu Richelle, “Scribal Punchlines: The Masoretic Divisions as Witnesses to Narrative and Rhetorical Sensitivity of Scribes in the Books of Samuel,” in Sébastien Morlet and Béatrice Oiry, eds., 2 Samuel / 2 Règnes: Textes, histoire, réceptions (Leuven: Peeters, 2023), pp. 97–114; and Gary A. Rendsburg, 1 Samuel: The JPS Bible Commentary Series (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, forthcoming), which highlights and explains every single paragraph break in the Masoretic text of the book of Samuel.