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

EUGENE C. ULRICH 81
text-critical judgment) to preserve for many, but not all, of the individual
books the edition of a book that was prevalent within general Judaism.
For those books they simply inherited the majority text. But for other
books, again without any clear pattern discernible, they preserved textual
forms that were less widely influential or were clearly textually inferior
(e.g., Samuel, Ezekiel, Hosea). At any rate, it remains true that the Textus
Receptus of the various books in the MT was quite accurately copied
over the centuries from one form of the text tradition for each book as it
existed in the Second Temple Period.
4QpaleoExod m (4Q22) and 4QNum b (4Q27)
If the MT was vindicated as a collection of texts carefully preserved from
one form of each book from antiquity, so too was the SP. Thus,
4QpaleoExod m dramatically showed in reading after reading the
expanded text-type so well known from the SP. 6 As a specific example,
the expanded text in Exod 32:10, illustrated earlier with the insertion
from Deut 9:20, is among those preserved by 4QpaleoExod m :
MT
“…my anger may ignite against them and I may consume them;
but I will make you a great nation.”
11 Then Moses entreated the Lord…
4QpaleoExod m
[“…my anger may ignite against them and I may consume them;
but I will make] you a great nation.”
[But against Aaron the Lo]rd [was] very [angry], enough to destroy him;
so Moses prayed on behalf of A[aron.]
11 Then Moses [entreat]ed the [Lord…]
6. As early as 1955 Patrick W. Skehan published fragments alerting the scholarly
community to the significance of this scroll: “Exodus in the Samaritan Recension
from Qumran,” JBL 74 (1955): 435–40. The full publication is by Patrick W.
Skehan, Eugene Ulrich, and Judith E. Sanderson, “4QpaleoExodus m,” in Qumran
Cave 4.IV: Palaeo-Hebrew and Greek Biblical Manuscripts (ed. P. W. Skehan, E. Ulrich,
and J. E. Sanderson; DJD 9; Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 53–130. In 1986 Sanderson
published a highly detailed and useful analysis of this text: Judith E. Sanderson, An
Exodus Scroll from Qumran: 4QpaleoExodm and the Samaritan Tradition (HSS 30; Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1986).