BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Mind the Gap!

How ancient Hebrew manuscripts tell stories with white spaces

If one were to open a modern printed edition of the Hebrew Bible to a random page, one would encounter a complex layering of information. In addition to the 22 consonants of the Hebrew alphabet, one would see a variety of dots and other markings around, between, and within the letters that convey crucial information about pronunciation, sentence structure, and even the proper way to sing the text.

All of these notations, however, are the product of the medieval period, culminating in the ninth and tenth centuries with the work of the Masoretes, scribes and scholars who developed systems to record a wide range of information associated with the correct utterance of the biblical text. They are the ones responsible for the base manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible on which modern editions of the text are based: the St. Petersburg (or Leningrad) Codex, the Aleppo Codex, and the shorter Cairo Codex, which comprises only the prophetic books.

In earlier periods, however, written copies of biblical texts—such as those among the Dead Sea Scrolls—lacked all of this detail, and consisted only of the 22 Hebrew letters. Consequently, a clear understanding of how to read or recite the text in these earlier periods relied extensively on the instruction of one oral tradent to another.

There is, however, one element that was in use already by the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls that was carried forward into the later work of the Masoretes and beyond: the use of white spaces within the text that served as paragraph breaks. In their article entitled “Mind the Gap! Telling Stories with White Spaces,” published in the Fall 2026 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Gary A. Rendsburg and Matthieu Richelle take a deep dive into the function and nuance of these important textual elements, demonstrating how they help to structure and illuminate the information transmitted by the text.

A Torah scroll showing a section from Leviticus, with both setumot (“closed” paragraph breaks) and petuhot (“open” paragraph breaks) visible throughout the text. The Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY 4.0 International.

In ancient, medieval, and modern Hebrew texts alike, there appear two types of paragraph break: petuhot (singular: petuha), “open” breaks that extend all the way to the left margin of the Hebrew text; and setumot (singular: setuma), “closed” breaks where, following the white space, the text resumes on the same line. These two types of breaks follow the intuitive pattern, with setumot denoting smaller subparagraph breaks and petuhot indicating more significant separation between sections.

Rendsburg and Richelle shape their discussion by splitting it into two sections: one in which they address places in the text where a paragraph break is expected based on the content, and another in which they highlight the use of paragraph breaks in places where one might not expect to encounter them.

Their first example comes from 2 Samuel 3. At this point in the text, the biblical author is hard at work discussing the escalating war between the Houses of Saul and David; Saul and his son Jonathan have recently died, but there is significant bloody conflict before David secures his hold on the throne in the ensuing chapters. Yet tucked away within the introductory material in this chapter is a sequence of four verses, 2 Samuel 3:2–5, that steps outside of the overarching war narrative to list David’s sons and their respective mothers. Sure enough, in the Dead Sea Scrolls—and in the medieval text of the Masoretes—this brief interlude is set off at the beginning with a “closed” setuma break, and at the end with a more substantial “open” petuha break before the war narrative resumes in verse 6. This division of the text clearly was a part of the ancient tradition and survives up to the modern day.

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The same is true of Rendsburg and Richelle’s second example, which comes from the story of David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11–12. In chapter 11, David sleeps with Bathsheba, then proceeds to have her husband killed in combat so that he can claim her as his wife. Chapter 12 commences with the prophet Nathan approaching David and castigating him for his actions. Readers familiar with the story may recall Nathan’s cutting declaration at the climax of the episode: “You are the man!” (2 Samuel 12:7). In both the Dead Sea Scrolls and in subsequent materials, Nathan’s utterance is set off in the text with a pair of setuma breaks, one before and one after the prophet’s statement, adding weight to Nathan’s words and inviting a brief pause in the course of reading the text to consider the power of his message to David. Then, after Nathan pronounces his devastating judgment on David, the king responds meekly, “I have sinned against the Lord” (2 Samuel 12:13). Here, too, David’s contrite acknowledgment of his own wrongdoing is set off with setuma breaks before and after it.

These examples provide vital insight into the millennia-old traditions underlying the practices of writing and reading the biblical text. It is remarkable to see how the reading traditions preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls carry through the work of the Masoretes centuries later, and then on to the modern versions of the Hebrew Bible text that exist today.

Subscribers: To learn more about white spaces in the text of the Hebrew Bible and how they help to convey meaning and significance within the text, read the article “Mind the Gap! Telling Stories with White Spaces,” by Gary A. Rendsburg and Matthieu Richelle, in the Fall 2026 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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