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

JAMES A. SANDERS 33
right about whether there was a pristine early text that became fluid
(Delagarde), or that fluidity preceded stability (Kahle), was misguided. 26
The history of the text’s transmission for both the HUBP and the
HOTTP begins (a) with the pre-masoretic period of limited textual fluidity
in the earliest biblical manuscripts, moves to (b) the proto-masoretic
period after the “great divide” marked by the destruction of Jerusalem
and its temple by Rome, and then, finally, (c) the masoretic period,
beginning with the great classical Tiberian manuscripts of the late ninth
and following centuries. 27
The most important single thing the scrolls have taught us is that early
Judaism was pluralistic: the Judaism that existed before the end of the
first century C.E., when surviving Pharisaism evolved into what we call
rabbinic Judaism, existed in a variety of modes. 28 This is so much the
case that Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton speak of the Judaisms of the
period, and specifically speak of the early Christian movement as a
Judaism. 29 Before the scrolls were found, the thesis of George Foot
Moore had held sway, that there was a normative Judaism that found
expression in Pharisaism, and over against it was heterodox Judaism,
which produced what are called the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. 30
An equally important lesson learned from study of the scrolls has been
the fact that significant numbers of Jewish groups disagreed with the
Pharisaic/rabbinic position that prophecy or revelation had ceased in the
26. If one insists on starting with that debate, then according to Shemaryahu
Talmon, Paul Kahle was right (oral presentation at the World Congress celebrating
fifty years of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in Jerusalem, July 21, 1997). Contrast the position
of the Albright-Cross School as seen in P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., Old Testament Text
Criticism (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989); and reflected in Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism
of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992).
27. A facsimile edition of Aleppensis edited by Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein
appeared from Jerusalem’s Magnes Press in 1977. The text of The Hebrew University
Bible is that of Aleppensis where extant. The text of the Biblia Hebraica Quinta, which
the publisher began releasing as fascicles in 2004, is based on new photographs taken
of Leningradensis (1009 C.E.) in Leningrad in 1990 by the Ancient Biblical
Manuscript Center and West Semitic Research. See James A. Sanders and Astrid B.
Beck, “The Leningrad Codex: Rediscovering the Oldest Complete Hebrew Bible,”
BR 13, no. 4 (1997): 32–41, 46. Also see David N. Freedman, Astrid B. Beck, and
James A. Sanders, eds.; Bruce Zuckerman et al., photographers, The Leningrad Codex:
A Facsimile Edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
28. See Michael E. Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ,” Scientific American 288
(January 1973): 80–87; followed by idem, Scriptures, Sects, and Visions: A Profile of
Judaism from Ezra to the Jewish Revolt (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980).
29. See Bruce D. Chilton and Jacob Neusner, Judaism in the New Testament (London:
Routledge, 1995), xviii.
30. George F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era (3 vols.;
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927–1930).