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

CHAPTER SEVEN
QUMRAN AND A NEW EDITION OF THE HEBREW BIBLE
Ronald S. Hendel
INTRODUCTION
In 1616, the Italian traveler Pietro della Valle acquired in Damascus a
copy of the Samaritan Pentateuch, which was brought to Paris seven
years later. 1 This discovery caused a sensation among biblical scholars,
because in the Samaritan Pentateuch they now had a biblical text in
Hebrew that differed in many instances from the traditional Hebrew
Bible, the Masoretic Text. Moreover, many of the Hebrew variants in the
Samaritan Pentateuch agreed with readings in the Old Greek translation,
the Septuagint. Up to this time, the Septuagint had been generally
regarded as an unreliable translation of the Masoretic Text, but now there
was evidence that it may have been based, at least in part, on Hebrew
texts that differed from the Masoretic Text. To biblical scholars, the
intricate pattern of agreements and disagreements among these three
texts—MT (Masoretic Text), SP (Samaritan Pentateuch), and LXX
(Septuagint)—posed a challenge to the notion that MT was the hebraica
veritas, the unchanging “Hebrew truth.” Scholars began to consider the
possibility that some of the variant readings in SP or LXX may preserve
a better or more original biblical text than the corresponding reading in
MT. Thus, the modern scholarly discipline of the textual criticism of the
Hebrew Bible was born. Its first major landmark was the Critica sacra by
the French scholar Louis Cappel, published in 1650. 2 Though Cappel’s
1. Pietro della Valle gave the manuscript as a gift to Signore de Sancy, the French ambassador
in Constantinople; see his account in The Pilgrim: The Travels of Pietro Della Valle (trans.
and ed. G. Bull; London: Hutchinson, 1990), 88–89. The editio princeps, by Jean Morin,
appeared in the Paris Polyglot of 1645; it is MS B in the critical edition of August F. von
Gall, Der Hebräische Pentateuch der Samaritaner (5 vols.; Giessen: Töpelmann, 1914–18).
2. Louis Cappel had completed the work in 1634 but until 1650 was unable to find
a publisher willing to print it. On the history and the impact of this work, see François
Laplanche, L’écriture, le sacré et l’histoire: Érudits et politiques protestants devant la Bible en
France au XVIIe siècle (Amsterdam: Holland University Press, 1986), 224–44, 299–327.
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