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

BRENT A. STRAWN 157
of crucial importance; his opinion on these matters is most weighty. Even
so, if the excerpted manuscripts can be appropriately termed a kind of
“‘nonbiblical’ ‘biblical’ scroll,” then it is possible that a correlate exists: a
“‘biblical’ ‘nonbiblical’ scroll.” The psalms scrolls that are excerpted
(4QPs g,h ; 5QPs) belong to the former and perhaps also to the latter. Their
existence and the possibility, in the light of their existence, that other
psalms scrolls are also excerpted constitutes evidence that the same might
be true for still other manuscripts, even large ones such as 11QPs a . If so,
these documents’ primary concern is not preserving a copy of the biblical
text (hence, “nonbiblical”); instead, the textual form and order of
these documents has been dictated or impacted by their (liturgical) functions.
But those selfsame functions indicate that the compositions in question
are, despite that fact if not because of it, authoritative and
canonical—functioning as rule of faith and life (that is, as “Scripture”) for
the community (hence, “biblical”).
In sum: as was the case with textual criticism and the Dead Sea
Scrolls, the excerpted manuscripts prove useful to the larger debates
regarding authoritative literature at Qumran and offer a via media
between opposing perspectives by focusing our attention on the specific
(again, “hyper-local”) contexts and uses of the manuscripts in question.
5. CONCLUSIONS
In conclusion, the comment of Tov, used in part as the epigraph of this
study, has proven quite correct:
These texts are of interest at all levels for the biblical scholar, as they relate
to…exegesis, literary criticism, liturgy, the development of the canon, and
textual criticism, although in the latter case their evidence should be used carefully. 198
The full significance of the excerpted manuscripts is still yet to be fully
appreciated, explored, and utilized by scholars. The present article has
attempted to further the discussion on several different fronts, but certainly
more can be said, and the debates engaged here are far from settled.
This is true due, in part, to the intriguing questions raised by the
existence of excerpted manuscripts. Considered together, they offer characteristic
traits by which other documents can, with greater or lesser
degrees of certainty, also be identified as belonging to this genre (see §2).
198. Tov, “Excerpted and Abbreviated,” 582; emphasis mine.