The Story of the Scrolls
Page 9
In fact, to those familiar with the Qumran editorial problems and with the editors who were put in charge, the mystery of their procrastination was not a mystery at all: it resulted from the combination of three defects. The edition of the Qumran texts was a complex operation which required good organization and strategy – and de Vaux’s plan was inadequate. The original team assembled by him was too small for the enormous task and was not kept under strict control. When progress proved slow and unsatisfactory, the editor-in-chief did not enlarge his staff. Some of the untried editors did not possess the publishing expertise that was expected of them, and should have resigned or been dismissed. Finally, in the absence of a strong hand overseeing the project, obstinacy was allowed to prevail among inefficient editors. They were determined to resist outside pressure; instead of asking for help from a multitude of willing hands, their attitude was ‘Keep off our patch!’
The truth is that the delays in publishing were due not to machinations and conspiracy from Church authorities, but to very ordinary human failings on the part of Roland de Vaux and his over-privileged, obstinate and uncooperative ‘international and interconfessional’ team of editors.
Part Two
VI
What is New in the Non-Sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls?
The rehearsing of the heated debates about the Dead Sea Scrolls, written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and retrieved from eleven Qumran caves, has never ceased to be fascinating, but exhilaration was occasionally mixed with anger and despondency. These negative reactions were provoked by human weaknesses. The ideal course of action inspired by scholarly zeal was often interfered with by obstinacy, jealousy and plain selfishness. Viewed from the perspective of six decades of study within the multicoloured background of the ancient world, how do the Qumran texts appear today and what have we learned from them? I will try to provide an answer under three headings:
1. What has Qumran taught us about ancient Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts?
2. Have we discovered anything new about works previously known in Jewish literature?
3. What kind of novelty have the hitherto unknown Dead Sea Scrolls, which contain no sectarian ideas, revealed to the interested public?
The contribution of the manuscripts which mirror the particular preoccupations of the authors representing the Qumran sect will be examined in chapter VII.
1. Qumran and Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic Manuscripts
The most amazing novelty of the Dead Sea Scrolls consists in their sheer existence. Ancient Jewish leather and papyrus manuscripts, dating to the period preceding the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 CE, or more precisely to the epoch between the last quarter of the second century BCE and 68 CE, the presumed capture of Qumran by the Roman army, is to all intents and purposes unparalleled, or almost unparalleled. Before 1947 we had only a small Hebrew papyrus fragment from that age, the Nash papyrus, variously dated from the second century BCE to the first century CE, which contained brief extracts from the Bible, including the Ten Commandments. By contrast, Qumran has yielded a variety of over 900 original compositions, most of them written on leather, about 14 per cent (131 texts) on papyrus, and a handful on broken pottery known as ostraca. Of course, we had some idea from rabbinic writings of a later age, especially from the post-Talmudic tractate Soferim (Scribes), about how manuscripts, above all biblical manuscripts, had to be produced, but it was at Qumran that scrolls originating from the era preceding the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem came to light for the first time and disclosed how in reality the scribes of antiquity practised their profession.
The technical term describing the process of manuscript-making is ‘codicology’, but in the Qumran context the word, though regularly used, is strictly a misnomer. Codicology refers to the production of codices or books, consisting of leaves of leather or papyrus sown together into a volume. But in the Dead Sea manuscripts the texts are inscribed only on one side of the sheets and they are then rolled up. They are scrolls, not books.
What kind of writing material did the scribes use? Most of the manuscripts were penned on sheep or goat skin specially prepared by craftsmen. According to Roland de Vaux, both at Qumran and at the nearby Ain Feshkha there was a tannery which, among other things, could produce leather suitable for manuscripts (see chapter II, pp. 35, 38). Once prepared and smoothed down, the skin was cut to varying sizes. The scribe, having chosen the correct number of sheets, appropriate for the length of the work he was to copy, first proceeded to line them horizontally for the writing of the text – the letters hanging from and not written on the lines – and vertically at both ends of the columns, thus determining their width. On average, a Qumran sheet carried five columns of text. The scribes used vegetable ink which was kept in inkpots. Some of these were made of baked clay, others of bronze. The latter could affect the chemical composition of the ink, which in time could damage the leather, as was the case with several columns of the document known as the Genesis Apocryphon from Cave 1.
When a work, written on several sheets of leather, was completed, the scribe or some other craftsman stitched them together to form a scroll. To ensure that the sheets would be sown together in the correct order, the scribe discretely numbered them, using the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet at one of the top corners. Some of these marks have survived. Also, to safeguard the text on the opening sheet of a scroll, the scribe left a broad unwritten margin at the beginning to protect the first column of writing from obliteration by repeated finger-marks. Finally, to indicate the identity of the document contained in a rolled-up scroll, the title was written on the outside, as a few surviving examples demonstrate.
Codicological features have been used by scholars in the interpretation of the contents of manuscripts. The Aramaic Genesis Apocryphon, just mentioned, lost both its beginning and its end. As it now stands, the early biblical story starts with the birth of Noah and the narrative breaks off soon after the beginning of the section dealing with Abraham. It had been supposed that not a great amount was missing from the opening of the document until a hawk-eyed young Anglo-Israeli scholar, Matthew Moshe Morgenstern, noticed the Hebrew letter pe, which is the seventeenth letter of the alphabet, at the top of column 5 of the surviving manuscript. The next sheet carried the eighteenth and the following one the nineteenth letter. These observations led Morgenstern to the conclusion that no less than sixteen sheets were missing from the beginning, leaving ample space for a detailed retelling of the accounts of the creation of the world, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Enoch, etc.
On one occasion, a codicological feature also helped me to explain a peculiarity distinguishing one of the ten Cave 4 manuscripts of the important Community Rule (4Q258) from the complete scroll of this document found in Cave 1 (1QS). The latter is made up of an introductory section describing the ritual of the entry into the covenant (columns 1–4), the main body of the rules (columns 5–10), and a final hymn (columns 10–11). By contrast, the Cave 4 manuscript in question (4QSd or 4Q258) begins directly with the rule section, corresponding to column 5 of the Cave 1 Scroll, but it is preceded by a wide blank margin which suggests that this was the start of the manuscript. This peculiarity, combined with characteristic linguistic details, appears to imply that this version of the Community Rule represents an earlier – possibly the earliest – version of the writing and that its placement between the introductory liturgy and the poetic conclusion of the Cave 1 manuscript represents the augmented final edition of the text.
2. Qumran and Previously Known Jewish Literature
Thanks to the Qumran discoveries, three classes of ancient Jewish literature, the Bible or Palestinian Jewish Holy Scriptures, the Apocrypha or books added to the Hebrew Bible in Greek-speaking Jewish circles, and the Pseudepigrapha, or influential Jewish religious writings written in Hebrew or Aramaic that failed to enter the Palestinian or the Hellenistic Bible, can now be seen in a totally fresh light. Our survey will first consider the list or canon of the Jewish scriptural
books and afterwards the text of the official or canonical Hebrew Bible.
(a) The canon of the Scriptures
What constitutes the Bible is nowhere strictly defined in the ancient literary sources of Judaism. It was the privilege of the successive religious authorities (Sadducee chief priests, Pharisee leaders and rabbis) to determine the list of books. It was later called the ‘canon’, using Christian terminology from the Greek word meaning ‘rule’, which in various places, circles and ages formed the authoritative sources of the Jewish religion. Traditionally the canon is divided into two or three sections. We encounter in several of our sources, including the New Testament, the twofold designation referring to Scripture as the Law and the Prophets, but at the end the rabbis settled for the threefold TeNaK, the abbreviation or acronym of Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim, or Law–Prophets–Writings. About the end of the second century BCE, the grandson of Jesus ben Sira, author of the Book of Ecclesiasticus, translating into Greek his grandfather’s work, speaks in his foreword of ‘the Law, the Prophets and the other books’, while Jesus of Nazareth is quoted in the Gospel of Luke as alluding to ‘the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms’ (Luke 24:24), the Psalter being the first work in the third section of the Hebrew canon, the Ketuvim or the Writings. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ‘Some Observances of the Law’ (MMT = Miqsat Ma‘ase ha-Torah), also attests a formulation similar to St Luke, namely ‘the Law and the Prophets and David’. However, none of the surviving Qumran documents or any other Jewish writing of the period defines the content of the canon by actually enumerating the titles of all the sacred books. Owing to this absence of a list and to the fact that even in the early second century CE questions were raised in rabbinic circles about the canonicity of the Song of Solomon (too erotic for the liking of some rabbis) and Ecclesiastes (because of the apparent doubts expressed in it regarding God), more than one Qumran scholar maintains that no proper canon of the Old Testament existed until some time after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.
Such academic scepticism, arising from the lack of positive evidence of an official canon, fails to pay sufficient attention to a statement of the most reliable witness of first century CE Judaism, the generally well-informed historian Flavius Josephus, who himself belonged to the upper class of the Jerusalem priesthood. On one occasion he expressly declared that among the Jews only twenty-two books enjoyed confidence, implying that only they were held to be authoritative or canonical, and no other writing was worthy of equal trust (see Against Apion I:38). Without citing individual titles, Josephus lists the five books of Moses, thirteen books of the Prophets and four books of hymns and wisdom (I:38–40). According to St Jerome (c. 342–420), who lived for many years in Palestine and was well versed in rabbinic traditions, the figure twenty-two was commonly accepted by Jews – and not only by Josephus – as representing the number of books in the biblical canon. In his Prologue to the Books of Samuel, Jerome presents the Jewish account of the books of the Old Testament as follows: (1–5) Law of Moses, (6) Joshua, (7) Judges + Ruth, (8) 1–2 Samuel, (9) 1–2 Kings, (10) Isaiah, (11) Jeremiah + Lamentations, (12) Ezekiel, (13) Twelve Minor Prophets, (14) Job, (15) Psalms, (16) Proverbs, (17) Ecclesiastes, (18) Song of Solomon, (19) Daniel, (20) 1–2 Chronicles, (21) Ezra + Nehemiah, (22) Esther.
So assuming that the traditional Palestinian Hebrew canon of the Bible was already in existence in the first century CE, or maybe even in the first century BCE, – the last composition to slip into the canon was the finally edited Book of Daniel around 160 BCE – what can one learn from the Dead Sea scriptural documents regarding the state of the Bible in the age of Jesus?
The first obvious conclusion one may draw is that the Dead Sea scriptural manuscripts do not represent a Samaritan collection since the Samaritan Bible consisted only of the Law of Moses. (The Samaritans were the inhabitants of the central region of the Holy Land between Judaea in the south and Galilee in the north, who cut themselves off from the Judaean Jews after their return from the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE.)
Next, since the eleven caves have proved the presence of all the books of the Bible except Esther either in scroll form or as fragments, it may be deduced that these books commanded at Qumran the same respect as in the rest of Palestinian Jewry. In other words, there was no difference between the Qumran Bible and the Hebrew Bible of the Palestinian Jewish population at large. Whether the absence of Esther is significant – it is missing also from the canon of the Greek Old Testament of Bishop Melito of Sardis (who died in 180 CE) – or merely accidental, is impossible to decide. From the fact that Cave 4 yielded remains of a writing akin to Esther, a kind of Aramaic proto-Esther (4Q550), published by J. T. Milik, we may infer that the Book of Esther was not deliberately excluded from the Qumran canon.
There are Scrolls experts, for instance the compilers of The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible (Martin Abegg, Peter Flint and Eugene Ulrich), who presume that at Qumran the Scriptures included works considered non-canonical in mainstream Judaism. As has already been stated (see chapter V, pp. 88–9), they suggest that Ecclesiasticus and Tobit from among the Apocrypha, the Books of Jubilees and Enoch from the Pseudepigrapha and some apocryphal psalms included in the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11, had attained canonical status among the Qumran people. The hypothesis is not unthinkable, but it is in no way compelling either. After all, the Letter of Jude (verses 15–16) in the New Testament quotes a prophecy of Enoch without necessarily implying that for universal Christianity the Book of Enoch counted as Holy Scripture just as it did for the Ethiopian Church where it was held to be canonical.
The number of copies in which a biblical book is extant among the Dead Sea Scrolls is considered significant by many scholars and probably rightly so. Among the 215 biblical manuscripts found in the Qumran caves, the books best attested are the Psalms (37 copies), followed by Deuteronomy (30) and Isaiah (21). It is worth noting that these are the works that are the most often cited in the New Testament too: the Psalms 68 times, Isaiah 63 times and Deuteronomy 39 times. This can hardly be due to pure coincidence.
(b) The biblical text
One may recall from chapter I that the chief characteristic of the traditional or Masoretic Bible (Masorah = tradition) was textual uniformity. The strictly controlled medieval manuscripts produced by careful scribes displayed practically no meaningful variants. The only discrepancies, apart from very occasional scribal errors, related to systems of spelling. The Dead Sea scriptural manuscripts, on the other hand, present a more heterogeneous picture. According to the classification of Emanuel Tov, one of the greatest experts of the text of the Hebrew Bible and the editor-in-chief of the Scrolls, the scriptural manuscripts from Qumran fall into five categories. Of these, the largest, representing 60 per cent of the total, is designated as proto-Masoretic, being very similar to the text handed down by later Jewish tradition. Another 20 per cent attest the technical idiosyncrasies, peculiar orthography and grammar of the Qumran scribes (for instance the use of archaic Hebrew letters for the writing of divine names and the copious occurrence of certain consonants to indicate vowels, for example Y (yod) and W (wav) to suggest the vowels i and o or u. There is a smaller group, amounting to 5 per cent of the total, reminiscent of significant variants found in the Samaritan Bible and in the old Greek or Septuagint version of the Hebrew Scriptures. Finally, a not-insubstantial number of manuscripts (15 per cent) are classified as non-aligned because they sometimes agree with the Masoretic text, sometimes with the Samaritan or the Septuagint, and on other occasions depart from all of them. Tov’s arguments, set out in two major books, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (1992) and Scribal Practices and Approaches reflected in the Texts found in the Judean Desert (2004), though questioned by some, are solidly argued and largely persuasive.
Non-specialist readers may find these remarks somewhat baffling, but a few illustrative examples will help to understand the nature and importance of the Qumran contribution to the textual study of the Bible. Before the Dead Sea discoveries
, some of the discrepancies in the Samaritan Torah were identified as changes due to doctrinal differences (e.g. the replacement of Jerusalem and Mount Zion by Samaria and Mount Gerizim, the site of the Samaritan Temple). Also, variant readings in the Greek Bible were often attributed to the Greek translator’s deliberate or unintentional interference with the original Hebrew text. As has been noted in chapter I (p. 11), before 1947, Bible experts still believed in the recoverability of the Urtext (the original author’s original text), the reconstruction of which – with the help of the surviving copies and ancient translations – constituted the textual critic’s ultimate aim and dream.
Now let us look at the Qumran evidence, first with a view to the Samaritan Law of Moses. In Exodus 10:5, both the traditional Hebrew Masoretic text (MT) and the Greek Septuagint (LXX) offer a succinct statement regarding the plague of locusts:
And they (the locusts) shall eat every tree of yours which grows in the field.
(MT, LXX)
By contrast, the Samaritan version has a longer account which we find also in a Hebrew fragment of Exodus from Qumran Cave 4. (The details supplementary to the traditional Hebrew are printed in italics.)
[And they (the locusts) shall eat ev]ery grass of the land and every [fruit of the tree of yours which grows in the field.]
(4Q12, Sam)
Clearly the expansion has no doctrinal import. Hence the Cave 4 variant may, and probably should, be interpreted as an alternative reading of Exodus current among Jews before the parting of the ways with the Samaritans in the sixth century BCE. This reading was then adopted by the Samaritans but it continued to be copied, as the Qumran fragment indicates, by Palestinian Jews as well.