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

110 EXCERPTED MANUSCRIPTS AT QUMRAN
2. TOWARD A TAXONOMY OF EXCERPTED MANUSCRIPTS
Recognition that excerpted texts might form a distinct genre or subset of
documents at Qumran is relatively recent. As indicated above, early on
Skehan suspected 4QDeut q was an excerpted text, and Stegemann subsequently
furthered the discussion by positing that 4QDeut n was another
example. Stegemann’s opinion on 4QDeut n was accepted and further
augmented by White Crawford, the official editor of this text. Building on
White Crawford’s works—particularly, the material and textual characteristics
of 4QDeut n —Duncan determined that 4QDeut j and 4QDeut k1 were
two more excerpted manuscripts, bringing the total number of excerpted
Deuteronomy manuscripts to four. Looking beyond Deuteronomy,
Duncan posited that other Pentateuchal manuscripts might be excerpted.
Tov concurred, adding manuscripts of both Psalms and Canticles to the
growing list of (possibly) excerpted texts (cf. Table 1).
The excerpted nature of several of these manuscripts is debatable
given, above all, their fragmentary states of preservation. Larger theoretical
issues are also important in assessing the nature of several of these
manuscripts (see §3 below). Even so, while criteria for the identification
of excerpted manuscripts, their common elements and characteristics,
and so forth are still being refined, the existence of at least four excerpted
Deuteronomy manuscripts permits discussion of these texts. A preliminary
taxonomy of the excerpted manuscripts is thus possible and is presented
below, focusing on the five characteristics that most, if not all, of
these documents share. These characteristics, which can be seen as criteria
for the identification and classification of scrolls like these, are
arranged in order of decreasing significance. Given the excellent surveys of
Tov and Duncan, examples are kept to a minimum; moreover, the specific
manuscripts that are discussed tend to be those that are most certainly
excerpted rather than those that are only debatably so.
a. Form: Excerpted, Abbreviated, Rearranged
As is obvious from the nomenclature, excerpted manuscripts selectively
excerpt material(s) from one or more “base-text” compositions, often
omitting, abbreviating, and/or rearranging the source text in the process.
A comparison of this phenomenon to similar practices in “exegetical”
documents from Qumran is helpful and in order.