The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

CHAPTER THREE
THE BIBLICAL SCROLLS FROM QUMRAN
AND THE CANONICAL TEXT
Frank Moore Cross
The finds in the Judean Desert have taught us a good deal about how
and when the stabilized text and canon of the Hebrew Bible came into
existence. They extend the labors and insights revealed by the intense
searches and collations of medieval manuscripts carried out in the last
decades of the eighteenth century.
Analysis of the collections, especially those of Benjamin Kennicott and
Giovanni Bernardo de Rossi, led to the conclusion that all medieval texts—
all that were extant at that time—could be traced back to a single, narrow
recension, the Rabbinic Recension of roughly the turn of the Common
Era. Paul de Lagarde claimed that all went back to a single manuscript or
archetype, pressing fragile arguments too far, and Ernst Friedrich Rosenmueller’s
one-recension theory has gained scholarly consensus.
The biblical scrolls from Masada (dating from before 73 C.E.) and
from the Bar Kokhba Caves, especially the great Minor Prophets Scroll from
Murabba(at, dating to ca 50–70 C.E., 1 reveal a fully fixed text and clearly
postdate the Rabbinic Recension. To date, none of the biblical texts from
Masada and the southern caves show any sign of the pluriform character
of the biblical texts from Qumran. Indeed, even the so-called protorabbinic
texts from Qumran show a range of variation which differs toto
caelo from that of Masada and the southern caves.
I think it is reasonable to think that labors of fixing a text and canon—
tasks that complement each other—fall in the early, not the late, first century.
Josephus, writing in the last decade of the first century C.E., presumes the
fixation of the text and the stabilization of the canon, a text and canon we
may designate Pharisaic.
1. The script of the manuscript is coeval with 4QPs c (4Q85) and 4QDeut j (4Q37),
and considerably earlier than Mur 24 (dated to 133 C.E.). See Frank M. Cross, “The
Development of the Jewish Scripts,” in The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays in
Honor of William Foxwell Albright (ed. G. E. Wright; Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1961), 133–202, esp. figure 2, lines 7–10.
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