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

BRENT A. STRAWN 131
also not unrelated to the genre issues discussed above: How ought one to
view these manuscripts within the larger discussion of the history and formation
of the biblical text, and what, if anything, do they have to contribute
to that debate? Definitive answers to these questions lie outside
the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, both must be addressed before a
final important question can be explored: what were the purpose(s) and
function(s) of these texts and what do they reveal about the socio-religious
and scribal practices of the Qumran Community (see §4 below)?
a. The Text-Critical Contribution of Excerpted Manuscripts
The specific contributions of the readings contained in the excerpted
manuscripts are detailed elsewhere: in addition to the editions of these
texts found in DJD, the articles of White Crawford, Duncan, Eshel, and
Tov contain extensive collation of the data. The sheer amount of information
indicates that it cannot be repeated here. Moreover, some of
the most important conclusions about these texts, especially the
Deuteronomy manuscripts, have already been summarized above. This
includes, especially, Duncan’s work, which has shown that these manuscripts
tend toward a slightly expansionistic version of the text in question
and that, in the case of the Deuteronomy manuscripts, this may be the
result, not of textual affinity with SamP or the phylacteries and mezuzot,
but the influence of closely parallel passages and copying from memory.
Most text-critical discussions to date and the data contained therein
have been focused on the most minute details in the excerpted manuscripts:
line-by-line, even word-by-word analyses treating specific words
and clauses, orthography and morphology, and so forth—in other words,
the contents and constituent parts of these scrolls. What has received less
attention is the text-critical issue of the overall form, order, and shape of these
manuscripts. Typically, once scholars have identified a manuscript in
question as excerpted, that fact is ignored and the text-critical data of the
constituent excerpts are then investigated. But the textual form ought to
give one pause: precisely how useful are these documents for the text-critical
enterprise given their form and order, which are, at times, drastically
different from what is preserved in other versions of the text?
An important and quite pertinent issue at this point is the determination
of the function(s) of these manuscripts. This is investigated in §4. It
suffices to say here that the function of the manuscript in question (e.g., personal
or devotional use) no less than the manner of its composition (e.g., from