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The practices of the proto-MT scribes (including the scribes that preceded them) as well as those of the medieval scribes of MT are better known than that of other scribes. This happened not only because there are many more copies of the medieval MT than of any other text of Scripture, but also because proto-MT scribes as a group (i.e., not individually named scribes) are often mentioned in rabbinic literature (viz. Soferim).

When focusing on the scribes, we refer to their general approach to the text that may be examined with the aid of such criteria as precision, number of mistakes, amount of scribal intervention in the text (corrections, additions and erasures in the text), and the approach to orthography. Included in this group are the scribes of the proto-MT scrolls, the scribes of the medieval scrolls and manuscripts, and the scribes of the texts preceding the proto-Masoretic texts. The scribes of the proto-MT texts from the Judean Desert are well known because they display individual features and they have been well studied.

An important criterion that can be examined for the MT group and not for the other texts is to what extent the scribes changed the texts from which they were copied. This cannot be examined for most texts since we do not know their Vorlagen (i.e., the texts that preceded them from which the scribes were copying), but for the proto-MT texts we think that we know a little more. After all, since these texts display the same text as the medieval MT, by implication they copied their Vorlagen precisely.