Difference between massoretic pentateuch and the one from qumran?


There are at least parts of 86 copies of different scrolls of individual books in the Torah (plus 4 that are too fragmentary to identify for sure) at Qumran. They don’t all agree with each in every particular. In general, they mostly agree with what became the Masoretic text, but sometimes they agree with what what we now call the Septuagint, sometimes with the Samaritan Pentateuch, and some variants are non-aligned. Apologists will occasionally cite percentages to indicate that the MT and the DSS are almost the same, but this totally misrepresents the situation. VanderKam, “The Dead Sea Scrolls Today,” 2nd ed., (2010), examines “The Scrolls and the Old Testament” in pp.157-196 (and this is an introductory book). He probably wouldn’t do that if a three or four item percentage list could adequately summarize what is going on with the biblical scrolls as Qumran. Eugene Ulrich, “The Jewish Scriptures: Texts, Versions, and Canons,” in Collins and Harlow, eds., “Early Judaism” (2012), makes 3 main points: “First, the scrolls did confirm that the medieval codices of the MT had for over a millennium been very accurately hand-copied…But they also confirmed that the SP…and the LXX preserved equally important witnesses to alternate ancient forms of the Hebrew biblical text, otherwise lost. “Second, scholars realized that the MT is not ‘the original text’ or the ‘Urtext’ of the Hebrew Bible, but that it is not a text at all. Like the LXX, it is a varied collection of texts…each being simply a copy of one of the editions of that book that was circulating in late Second Temple Jewish circles. “Third, there was a revival of theories making major advances in charting the history of the biblical text…Prior to the Jewish revolts against Rome, however, there was no ‘standard text’–whether MT, SP, or LXX–with which texts should be ‘aligned’ or should be judged ‘non-aligned’, and thus those four categories appeared anachronistic for classifying the scrolls….Each book had its own history and developed along its own trajectory. The main lines of development resulted from the creative, revised and expanded editions of each book. Each copy of whatever edition displayed its own particular individual textual variants.” (pp.141-142) Abegg, Flint, and Ulrich, “The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible” (1999), gathers together the parts of the Bible that are readable among the Dead Sea Scrolls into one book, italicizing and footnoting variants, and occasionally giving editorial commentary. Crawford, “Scribes and Scrolls at Qumran” (2019), gives a good analysis of the scrolls, as well as an orientation to ancient scribal cultures. The mental picture many of us have of the medieval scribe dutifully copying from a giant text, in order to reproduce it exactly, is not what was going on in the ancient Near East. Scribes were active scholars, editors, writers who contributed to the works they transmitted.


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