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

82 SCROLLS AND HEBREW SCRIPTURAL TEXTS
SP
“…my anger may ignite against them and I may consume them;
but I will make you a great nation.”
But against Aaron the Lord was very angry, enough to destroy him;
so Moses prayed on behalf of Aaron.
11 Then Moses entreated the Lord.…
This ancient scroll from ca. 50 B.C.E. repeatedly shows, where preserved,
all the major expansions exhibited by the SP. Even where fragments
are not extant to decide regarding the major text differences, the
scroll in general is so extensively preserved that we can confidently make
judgments about the inclusion or lack of large portions of text. With one
significant exception, it agrees with the SP against the MT in the major
interpolations. That exception is the extra commandment, lacking in the
MT and LXX but added after the traditional commandments in the SP
at Exod 20:17b, to build an altar at Mount Gerizim. Moreover, insofar as
the evidence is available, it appears that the scroll also agrees with the
MT and the LXX against the SP in the small but important formulaically
repeated variant that envisions Israel’s central shrine in Jerusalem in the
future (“which the Lord will choose,” relative to Moses’ time) as opposed
to Shechem by a past decision (“which the Lord has chosen”). This
means that there were (at least) two variant editions of the text of Exodus
circulating in Second Temple Judaism. 7 The earlier and more widely used
edition continued in use by the rabbinic and the Hellenistic Jews and thus
was eventually incorporated into the MT and LXX collections. The secondary,
expanded edition was taken up by the Samaritans, probably
without knowledge of the specific text-type, and intentionally altered in
two ways: they added a commandment in which God commands that
Israel’s central altar be built on Mount Gerizim, and they emphasized
that this central shrine had been chosen by God. 8 But the secondary edition
(evidently without the two specifically Samaritan alterations) continued
to be used by Jews and was still being copied around the middle of
the first century B.C.E.
7. At least for Exodus 35–39 there was a third edition, yet earlier than that in the
MT. The LXX is systematically different from the MT in those chapters, and Anneli
Aejmelaeus, the Director of the Septuaginta-Unternehmen in Göttingen, has demonstrated
that the LXX edition is earlier than the MT edition; see her “Septuagintal
Translation Techniques: A Solution to the Problem of the Tabernacle Account,” in On
the Trail of Septuagint Translators: Collected Essays (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1993), 116–30.
8. A third intentional, but not necessarily specifically Samaritan, change illumined
by 4QJosh a (4Q47) is suggested below.