The Role of Memory in Vorlage-based Transmission: Evidence from Erasures and Corrections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article argues that the act of Vorlage-based copying involves a dynamic interplay between both memory and Vorlage. While numerous scholars argue that memory played a significant role in textual transmission in ancient Israel and early Judaism, few have explicitly discussed the role that memory plays in the act of copying a manuscript. This article identifies with greater precision the point in the copying process at which a scribe may rely on long-term memory, rather than his Vorlage. The article will examine three erasures in three Dead Sea scrolls that demonstrate the phenomenon of memory-cued errors, in which a scribe’s long-term memory caused mistakes in the copying process. Not only do these memory-cued errors illustrate the role of memory in the copying process, they also allow for a much clearer and more nuanced understanding of the nature of textual transmission.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.268 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".