However, I don’t think that when we find duplicate texts in the Pentateuch, we are looking at the same phenomenon that you are describing. For one thing, you are talking about letters, which are a different genre than narrative. They employ different practices. And I can understand a scribe clarifying a sign that their readers might misunderstand, but that is not what is happening in Hebrew narratives either.

As for the repitition that is found in other ANE texts, there we usually get an exact repitition of events which seems to be stylistic. And, the repititions occur within stories. It is an internal thing.

This is not what we find, for example, in the wife-sister stories in Genesis 12, 20, and 26. Here, we have the story told three different times, but there are difference. The purpose is not stylistic, and there are other reasons to see these stories as coming from different hands. It seems to be a process of midrash where the story is reinterpreted through retelling. That is why the details are different.

The question I was discussing above had more to do with what we do when reading these texts together in a canonical text. Why did the redactor place these stories side by side. Obviously, they knew that these were three versions of the same story but chose to put them in. The question is, why was this done. The answer, it seems to me, has theological implications.

It is of course the case that Israelite scribal practices might be different than ours. But we cannot simply assign everything to this category. If we have evidence for different scribal practices, we should take that into account. But the redactional production of texts is also different from how we do things today, and it is a process for which we have parallels. I think source critical answers remain the best explantion for what we see in the Pentateuch.

Even by my low standards, this is a little off the wall. I agree that there is some parallelism in Hebrew prose. What I am about to suggest does not apply (at least I think it doesn’t) to the long parallel accounts that occur side by side but the short ones consisting of a few words or a single sentence. There is a scribal tradition, seen most clearly in the glosses in the Amarna letters from Canaan of “repeating a thought” sometimes in the same language as the letter (more or less peripheral Akkadian) or in the local language (Canaanite). One would guess they did this to increase clarity or to emphasize the importance of the point being made. These glosses are actually marked off by a special gloss mark. The same thing happens occasionally in the Akkadian texts from Ugarit and elsewhere where they are most commonly used to define a logogram that the scribe thinks his reader may not understand. What I’m wondering is if some portion of the parallelism in Hebrew prose can be attributed to scribal practices that seem awkward to us but were perfectly fine, even expected, at certain places in a text in antiquity. I’m not suggesting anything more (or less) than an ongoing scribal tradition of using glosses on occasion. Perhaps it is nothing more than a “good trick,” meaning something that comes up with some regularity but each instance is totally independent of the other. The Hebrew scribes certainly didn’t know anything about how Late Bronze Age scribes went about their business. This is likely not an original thought and I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable of the literature to know. For instance, van Seders’ book is on my ever growing “to do” list. If this idea has any merit, the “glossing process” may not be evidence of redaction nor of differing sources.