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

90 SCROLLS AND HEBREW SCRIPTURAL TEXTS
“text-types” or even called “recensions,” intentionally and deliberately
reworked text-types. 24
But consideration of other dynamics that have become clearer
through time allows us to adopt the contributions made by Cross and
move the discussion forward. For example:
a. It was eventually recognized that the same process by which the biblical
books were produced from their shadowy origins to recognizable biblical
form was an organic process still in progress in the textual forms discovered
at Qumran. 25 This helped eradicate the line of demarcation between
the literary and the textual development of the text, and thus between literary
criticism and textual criticism.
b. That same realization—that the composition stage was still in process in
the late Second Temple Period—further helps us realize that the concept of
Urtext is not equal to the task of explaining the complexity involved. Each
biblical book has its own complex history of literary development, and in
some instances this history of development traverses many centuries and
entails major revisions. Thus, the goal of seeking “the original text” may
sound like a clear idea with a clear object, but as I have argued elsewhere,
it can have at least eight different levels of meaning. 26 Moreover, one can
argue that we should reconsider the entire presumption that a “more original”
form of the text is to be preferred to a “more developed” form of
the text. 27 The various types of literary creativity seen in the variegated
examples found at Qumran are representative of the types of literary creativity
that have characterized the biblical text from its very beginnings
and throughout its development. That is, one can now chart and describe
the literary creativity that produced the expanded “proto-Samaritan” texts
of Exodus and Numbers, the expanded versions of the MT both for the
David-Goliath narrative of Samuel and for the book of Jeremiah, the
“Additions” to the LXX of Daniel, and the expanded form of the Psalter
seen in 11QPs a . Those types of literary creativity are analogous to the literary
creativity that kept contributing to the biblical books as they developed
through the monarchic and postexilic periods. There are numerous
examples: (i) the book of Genesis grew from mythic themes and
24. Although Albright had spoken in terms of “recensions,” Cross in “The
Contribution,” 85n21 (= Qumran and the History, 282), correctly softened the language,
noting that the “textual families” were the product “not of conscious or controlled textual
recension” but “of natural growth or development in the process of scribal transmission.”
25. See Eugene Ulrich, “The Canonical Process” (see n13 above), and “The
Community of Israel and the Composition of the Scriptures,” in The Quest for Context
and Meaning: Studies in Intertextuality in Honor of James A. Sanders (ed. C. A. Evans and
S. Talmon; BibIntS 28; Leiden: Brill, 1997), 327–42.
26. Ulrich, “The Community of Israel,” 337–38.
27. Ibid., 338–41.