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

BRENT A. STRAWN 147
scholars in the field may be seen by noting the poverty of conception that
usually characterizes their comparative endeavours, frequently due, as has
already been suggested, to apologetic reasons. It is as if the only choices the
comparativist has are to assert either identity or uniqueness, and that the
only possibilities for utilizing comparisons are to make assertions regarding
dependence. 153
Although made with reference to the comparative analysis of religion and
religious systems, Smith’s comments may be instructively applied to the
textual criticism of the Qumran biblical scrolls. In the light of Smith’s
comments, Tov’s analysis can be seen (especially through an Ulrichian
lens!) to be in need of more acceptance of difference. The manuscripts
need not be categorized as a matter of similarity and/or identity with later
traditions in a search for origins, dependence, or trajectory. At the same
time, Smith’s comments indicate, contra Ulrich, that identity’s opposite,
uniqueness, is also not the only option available to the textual comparativist.
Smith continues by warning that comparison, whether constructed
as genealogy or homology, often “disguises and obscures the scholar’s
interests and activities allowing the illusion of passive observation.” 154
Instead, according to Smith, comparison is “a disciplined exaggeration
in the service of knowledge.…Comparison provides the means by which
we ‘re-vision’ phenomena as our data in order to solve our theoretical
problems.” 155 Smith’s ultimate point is that comparative work—in the
present analogy: textual criticism—is not the be-all and end-all of (religious
studies) inquiry. Comparison, whether of religious systems or textual
witnesses, is only part of the job of interpretation. And even when it
is done and done well, as it has been by Tov and Ulrich and many others,
more will still need to be done. 156 Here, too, Ulrich and Tov have
led the way by going beyond the text-critical data to larger analyses.
Even so, more work still lies ahead of us since those larger analyses are,
by definition, interpretive.
153. Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the
Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 47.
154. Ibid., 51.
155. Ibid., 52; emphasis his. On several levels, Ulrich’s “Our Sharper Focus” essay
is a nice example of Smith’s comments. In light of the citation of Geertz (see note 121
above), note Smith, Drudgery Divine, 53: “Comparison…is an active, at times even a
playful, enterprise of deconstruction and reconstitution.”
156. Cf. Smith’s conclusion: “Lacking a clear articulation of purpose, one may
derive arresting anecdotal juxtapositions or self-serving differentiations, but the disciplined
constructive work of the academy will not have been advanced, nor will the
study of religion have come of age” (ibid., 53).