Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Undermining the Jewish Bible

With the help of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we can determine approximately when the text of the Hebrew Bible became at least relatively fixed.
When the Dead Sea Scrolls surfaced on the antiquities market, professional archaelogics and Arab tribesman began to explore caves in other wadis, including those south of Wadi Qumran. Thus nineteen biblical scrolls were found in two other wadis-
Nahal Hever and Wadi Murabba'at. These manuscripts too, are sometimes considered Dead Sea Scrolls through they date somewhat later than the Qumran materials and were apparently hidden in the caves during the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome, also known as the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-35 A.D.). All nineteen of these later biblical Scrolls are closely related to the Masoretic Text, whereas the biblical scrolls from Qumran vary widely; some are closely related to MT (Masoretic Text), others to the Septuagint, still others to the Samaritan Pentateuch, and some to none of the above.
Between 70 A.D., when the Romans destroyed Jeruselam, and 135 A.D., when they suppressed the Bar Kokhba revolt, the text of the Bible became almost completely standardized -a process that seems to have begun even before the Roman destruction of the Temple and was apparently largely completely by the time of the Second Jewish Revolt.
A Greek manuscript of the Twelve Minor Prophets discovered in Nahal Hever displays a systematic revision of the text toward the proto-MT (Masoretic Text). The Scribal corrections analysed in the Qumran scrolls, however, cannot be charactisered this way. Emanuel Tov, who has studied these "scribal interventions" (mostly corrections in an already existing text), tells us that "MT did not yet have such an authorative status that texts would be corrected to it..." To the best of my knowledge we do not know of any convincing example of a Hebrew text (from Qumran) which has been corrected towards MT." To the contrary, in several instances involving speling and language differences, the corrections have "removed that text even more frm MT." Nevertheless, the majority of biblical texts, from Qumran are already proto-Masoretic. The process of standardization appears already to have began, or at least the proto-MT was the preferred text, judging from the comparative number of the exemplars at Quamran.

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