Moving now to the relationship between the Masoretic Hebrew text and the ancient Greek translation, at 2 Samuel 8:7 the Septuagint displays a considerably expanded version compared to the Hebrew text. The latter reads:
And David took the shields of gold which were carried by the servants of Hadadezer and brought them to Jerusalem.
(MT)
Against this stands the Greek text which adds the name of the land over which Hadadezer ruled, together with further details lifted from 1 Kings 14:25–6. (The supplements are printed in italics.)
And David took the golden ornaments which were on the servants of Adraazar, king of Souba, and brought them to Jerusalem. And Sousakim, king of Egypt, took them when he went up to Jerusalem in the days of Roboam son of Solomon.
(LXX)
The Hebrew fragment from Cave 4 attests a similar long account of the events including the Sousakim=Shoshak episode.
[And] David [t]ook th[e shields of gold which were on the servants of Hadadezer and brought them to Jerusa]l[em. Afterwards Shoshak, king of Egypt took] them also [when] he went up to Jer [usalem] in the days of Rehoboam son of Solo[mon.]
(4Q51, 82–3)
We may conclude that this reading represents a Hebrew text current in Palestine which happened to be used by the Septuagint translator. Consequently, the divergence between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint must not be assigned to the action of the translator, but echoes a pre-existent Hebrew wording. It also suggests that in the Qumran age Hebrew texts corresponding to the Samaritan and the ancient Greek versions jointly circulated, thus buttressing the theory that the proto-Masoretic, Samaritan and Septuagint-type of Hebrew text forms happily coexisted before rabbinic censorship eliminated the last two around 100 CE.
The last sub-group, the non-aligned variety, exhibits features from diverse text forms, without wholly agreeing with any one of them. The Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32:43 supplies a good example. The traditional Hebrew is noteworthy for its brevity.
Rejoice, O nations, with his people;
for he avenges the blood of his servants,
and takes vengeance on his adversaries.
(MT)
The Septuagint has an extended version in which the expressions ‘sons of God’ and ‘angels of God’ alternate as synonyms.
Rejoice, O heavens, with him
and let all the angels of God worship him.
Rejoice, O nations with his people
and let all the sons of God declare him mighty.
For he shall avenge the blood of his sons,
and shall take revenge on, and pay justice to, his enemies
and shall reward them that hate him.
(LXX)
The medium-length Qumran version constitutes a kind of halfway station between the long Septuagint and the short Masoretic text and uses the phrase ‘gods’ (elohim) in lieu of ‘angels’ or ‘sons’ of God.
Rejoice, O heavens, with him
and all you ‘gods’, worship him.
For he shall avenge the blood of his sons
and shall take revenge on his enemies
and shall reward them that hate him.
(4Q44, fr. 5ii)
As has been observed, the traditional Masoretic text is usually the shortest whereas the Samaritan, the Septuagint and some of the Qumran versions are more verbose. However, it is impossible to decide whether the shorter text is an abridged version or the longer one an expansion. The axiom lectio brevior est potior (the shorter reading is stronger) is the brainchild of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German textual critics closeted in their studies far distant from the reality of the ancient world.
The distinctive mark of the biblical texts found in the Qumran library is their elasticity. Before the establishment of the authoritative wording of the Hebrew Scriptures, as a result of the Pharisaic-rabbinic reorganization of Judaism in the decades following the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, textual pluriformity reigned. The choice of the text and its interpretation were left in the hands of the local representatives of doctrinal authority. We even have evidence that a Qumran Bible commentator was aware of the existence of variants and was ready to employ them in his exposition of a biblical passage. In Habakkuk 2:16, ‘Drink and show your foreskin!’ (he‘arel from the root ‘RL), the traditional Hebrew uses the image of a drunkard, who like Noah, discards his clothes and allows his foreskin to be seen. The Septuagint, in turn, translates a slightly differently structured Hebrew verb, hera‘el (from the root R‘L, made up of the same consonants as the forgoing verb ‘RL but placed in different order) which means ‘to stagger’, and gives, ‘Drink and stagger!’ The author of the Qumran Habakkuk Commentary, applying the prophecy to the ‘Wicked Priest’, the priestly enemy of the Dead Sea Community, skilfully plays with both ideas: ‘For he did not circumcise the foreskin (‘RLH from ‘RL as the traditional Hebrew) of his heart and walked in the ways of drunkenness’, i.e. staggered as in the LXX (Commentary of Habakkuk 11:13–14). By contrast, the biblical manuscripts dating to the early second century, yielded by the caves of Murabba‘at, attest only the traditional (proto-Masoretic) form of the scriptural text.
The causes of the textual elasticity of the Qumran Bible are manifold. On a superficial level they may be seen as the result of efforts of modernization of spelling and grammar, the search for stylistic variation and harmonization, but above all, in Professor Shemaryahu Talmon’s words, they are due to ‘insufficiently controlled copying’. Put positively, the Qumran scribes arrogated to themselves the right to creative freedom and considered it their duty to improve the work they were propagating. Such relative liberty could go hand in hand with the conviction that all they were doing was to transmit faithfully the true meaning of Scripture. As is often the case, Flavius Josephus has the last word on the matter. In his Jewish Antiquities I:17, he maintains that he has reproduced the details of the biblical record without adding anything to it, or removing from it, when in fact he has been doing the exact opposite while intending to transmit what in his view Scripture actually meant. Allowing us to perceive the situation that preceded the enforced unification of the biblical text is one of the chief innovations of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is a major, indeed unique, contribution to an improved understanding of the history of the Bible.
(c) The Apocrypha
Of the fifteen books of the Bible of Hellenistic Jewry which are additional to the Palestinian Hebrew canon, only two are presumed to have been originally composed in Greek (Wisdom of Solomon and 2 Maccabees), while the rest are translations into Greek from Hebrew or Aramaic. None of these were known in their Semitic original until the discovery of the Hebrew Ecclesiasticus in the Cairo Genizah in 1896. Even there, as has been noted in chapter I (p. 14), scholarly opinion was divided between those who held that the Hebrew was that of the author, Jesus ben Sira, a priest from Jerusalem who flourished at the beginning of the second century BCE, and those who thought it was a medieval retranslation into Hebrew from the Greek of the Septuagint. How did Qumran affect the complex of the Apocrypha?
Compared to the Scrolls’ impact on the study of the Bible, their influence on the Apocrypha has been more limited. The only two titles belonging to this class, yielded by Qumran in a Semitic form, are Ecclesiasticus and Tobit. The first of these is the Hebrew Ben Sira, of which in addition to small insignificant fragments from Qumran Cave 2 (2Q18), belonging to Ecclesiasticus chapter 6, the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11 has preserved eleven verses of a poem in Hebrew, starting with Ecclesiasticus 51:13. This manuscript, dated to the first half of the first century CE, and the incomplete scroll found at Masada, necessarily in existence before the fall of the fortress in 73/74 CE, both substantially identical with the Hebrew Ecclesiasticus of the Cairo Genizah, prove that the Genizah text is definitely not a medieval retranslation into Hebrew of the Greek Jesus Sirach. Moreover, the Cave 11 passage is demonstrably closer to the original than the corresponding section in the Genizah manuscript. The Qumran version of Ecclesiasticus 51 prese
nts an alphabetical acrostic poem, that is one in which each line correctly begins with the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet, line 1 starting with alef or A, line 2 with bet or B, whereas in the Genizah manuscript the sequence of the opening letters has been jumbled.
The twenty-six leather fragments of the Masada Ecclesiasticus, dated by the editor, Yigael Yadin, to the early or mid-first century BCE, furnish badly damaged portions of chapters 1 to 7 and reasonably well-preserved columns corresponding to chapters 39 to 44 and thus allow a somewhat better grasp of the original work of Ben Sira than the medieval documents or even his grandson’s Greek translation, written half a century after the original composition, before the death of Ptolemy VII Euergetes in 116 BCE.
The Book of Tobit is the other apocryphal work for which Qumran has yielded important fresh information; but even at the level of the Greek translation Tobit’s text fluctuates. There is a long and a short version of which the long, attested in the fourth century CE Codex Sinaiticus and in the Old Latin translation (third century), is considered the more authentic. The Qumran evidence, copied in the first century BCE or at the turn of the era, and attested by five fragmentary scrolls, is equally fluctuating. Four manuscripts are in Aramaic and one in Hebrew. The Aramaic appears to be the original. All of them represent a Semitic text from which the reasonably free longer Greek version was made. For instance, in Tobit 1:22 the Aramaic text reads: ‘He was the son of my brother, of my father’s house and of my family’ as against the Greek: ‘He was the son of my brother and of my kindred’. In Tobit 2:11 the Aramaic has ‘On the festival of Weeks’ and the Greek, ‘On the feast of Pentecost which is the sacred festival of the seven weeks’. Finally, compare the Aramaic Tobit 14:2, ‘He was fifty-eight years old when he lost his sight and afterwards he lived fifty-four years’ to the Greek ‘He was sixty-two years old when he was maimed in his eyes’ (Sinaiticus) or ‘He was fifty-eight years old when he lost his sight and after eight years he regained it’ (Codex Vaticanus).
Bearing in mind that the Apocrypha are treated as Scripture in the most ancient branches of Christianity (Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches), perhaps the most significant feature disclosed by the Qumran Scrolls in their regard is the fact that neither the Semitic texts nor the Greek translations display the same level of unification as do the canonical books of the Hebrew Bible.
(d) The Pseudepigrapha
The Pseudepigrapha, a loosely defined collection of important Jewish religious writings, presumed to have been composed between the third century BCE and 100 CE, form the last literary class after the canonical and apocryphal Scriptures. In 1913, the rigorously selective R. H. Charles included only sixteen works in his collection, dating between 200 BCE–100 CE (plus the Damascus Document which now sails under the Qumran flag), whereas the more elastic James H. Charlesworth extended the chronological catchment area from the second century BCE to 900 CE and increased the selection to twenty-eight documents in the two volumes of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (1983–5). Originally composed in Hebrew or Aramaic, and some like 4 Maccabees and the Sibylline Oracles in Greek, they have been transmitted by Christians either in the original Greek or in Latin, Syriac and Ethiopic etc. translations. Some of them were highly influential and the Book of Enoch even reached canonical status in the Abyssinian Church. Two or possibly three of the Pseudepigrapha surfaced in their original Semitic language in the Qumran caves. Jubilees and Enoch are both well attested, but smaller remains of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Levi, Judah, Joseph and Naphtali) also survive. The Book of Jubilees, which was preserved among the Pseudepigrapha partly in a Greek and fully in an Ethiopic version, is attested in eighteen Hebrew manuscripts from Qumran Caves 1–4 and 11. The text was not yet unified and interesting variations can be detected. Eleven copies of the Book of Enoch were retrieved in Cave 4, to which should be added nine manuscripts, found in Caves 1, 2, 4 and 6, of a composition akin to Enoch, called the Book of the Giants. The language is Aramaic and the two works have survived in more than 130 fragments of various shapes and sizes. It should be recalled that the compilers of The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, M. Abegg, P. Flint and E. Ulrich, suggest that Jubilees and Enoch were part of Scripture at Qumran, but this is not generally agreed.
Of the five books of the Ethiopic Enoch, only four are reflected in the Aramaic fragments; missing is the second section, known as the Parables, which frequently uses the expression ‘Son of Man’, familiar also from the Gospels. In his pioneering work, The Aramaic Books of Enoch (1976), J. T. Milik advanced the theory that in the original composition of Enoch, the Book of Giants, mentioned earlier, occupied the place of the Book of the Parables. The latter should probably be dated to the final quarter of the first century AD. This was not the view of Milik, but he was almost certainly mistaken when he declared it a Christian work composed in Greek in 270 CE or later. In fact, none of the surviving Greek manuscripts or citations comprises this part, that is to say chapters 37–72 of the Ethiopic book. The Aramaic fragments of the Testament of Levi (4Q537, 540–41, as well as those extant in the Cairo Genizah), of the Testament of Judah (4Q538) and of the Testament of Joseph (4Q549) and the Hebrew relics of the Testament of Naphtali (4Q215) may either be the sources of the Greek Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs or works related to them.
In brief, without fundamentally affecting their significance, the Hebrew and Aramaic fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls afford for some of the Pseudepigrapha a fresh vantage point and a deeper and more nuanced understanding. With them a new chapter begins in the study of this important category of Jewish literature too.
3. The Hitherto Unknown Mainstream Jewish Literature
The eleven Qumran caves have yielded, in addition to the previously known Pseudepigrapha, a considerable number of further religious compositions produced by Jews in the latter part of the Old Testament era before the first war against Rome in 66–70 CE. A good many of these are definitely of sectarian character, that is, deriving from a community that had cut itself off from the body of Palestinian Jewry. They will be surveyed in chapter VII. But apart from these, we find in the Qumran collection a large number of works which show no particular sectarian features and are likely to have originated in mainstream Judaism. Of course, some of them may have been written within the community without displaying any of its particular ideas or customs, and others may have been adopted by the sect for its own use. Nevertheless, they should be kept separate from the sectarian literature proper and classified as supplements to the general Jewish Pseudepigrapha.
The best-preserved specimens in the latter category are the non-canonical Psalms, some of them interspersed among the biblical poems in the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11. One of these Hebrew compositions corresponds to Psalm 151, an additional poem preserved in the Greek Bible, and four others have been known since the eighteenth century in Syriac translation. Thanks to Qumran, they can now be read in their original Hebrew wording. Here is a sample of this previously unknown religious poetry, entitled a Hymn to the Creator (11Q5, 26), which is scarcely distinguishable from the poems included in the Psalter:
The Lord is great and holy,
The most holy for generation after generation.
Majesty goes before him,
And after him the abundance of many waters.
Loving kindness and truth are about his face;
Truth and judgement and righteousness are the pedestal of his throne.
He divides light from obscurity;
He establishes the dawn by the knowledge of his heart.
When all his angels saw it they sang,
For he showed them that which they had not known.
He crowns the mountains with fruit, with good fruit for all the living.
Blessed be the master of the earth with his power,
Who establishes the world with his wisdom.
By his understanding he stretched out the heaven,
And brought forth wind from his stores.
He made ligh
tnings for his rain,
And raised mist from the end of the earth.
Wisdom compositions are a further class of literature exhibiting no sectarian features. Among them figures a sapiential poem known as the ‘Beatitudes’, dated to the first century BCE, which is partly reminiscent of the Beatitudes of Jesus from Matthew 5:3–11, although it differs from the Gospel by adding to each virtue an antithetic parallel.
Blessed are those who hold to her (Wisdom’s) precepts
and do not hold to the ways of iniquity.
Blessed are those who rejoice in her,
and do not burst forth in ways of folly.
Blessed are those who seek her with pure hands,
and do not pursue her with a treacherous heart.
Blessed is the man who has attained Wisdom,
and walks in the Law of the Most High.
(4Q525, fr. 2)
A third quite substantial group of writings consists of biblically inspired apocryphal books, most of them badly preserved, but sufficiently clear for indicating the literary type. They are sometimes designated as ‘parabiblical’. The following extract from the Moses Apocryphon from Cave 4 will give a foretaste of the genre. The quoted passage describes how someone claiming to be a prophet is to be treated. If he exhorts the people to return to God, he is a genuine prophet and must be followed, but one who preaches defection from Judaism must be put to death as a false prophet. However, if his tribe comes to his defence and claims that he is a preacher of truth, the matter must be brought before the high priest for judgement.
[You will do all that] your God has commanded you from the mouth of the prophet. You will keep [all] these [pre]cepts and you will return to the Lord your God with all [your heart and al]l your soul. And your God will desist from the wrath of his great anger [to save you] from your misery. And the prophet who will arise and speak defection in your midst, turning you away from your God, shall be put to death. But if the tribe from which he originates stands up (for him) and says, ‘Let him not be put to death, for he is righteous; he is a [trus]tworthy prophet’, you, your elders and your judges will come with that tribe [t]o the place which your God will choose within one of your tribes (to appear) before [the] anointed priest on whose head the oil of anointing has been poured.
The Story of the Scrolls Page 10