Furthermore, language changes—perhaps more slowly in the ancient world, but change is documented in many of the Semitic languages related to Hebrew and in Hebrew itself. A competent scribe would certainly update the language in such cases. Again, we must remember that at this stage the scribe does not think of himself as tampering with a canonical, written text.1 The idea that scribes making new copies of documents would revise the language is actually very helpful for us as we try to understand