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

476 THE APOCRYPHA AND PSEUDEPIGRAPHA
as in the Greek at this point. 32 It could also have accommodated v. 25 in
line 6, nothing of which has survived on the fragment. At v. 26 the fragment
contains only the last letter (h) which would fit as the final letter of
the verse (hykrd = ta_j o(dou_j au)th=j). The final letters and words in
each of the next five lines, the only other ones on the fragment, fit perfectly,
apart from one orthographic variant (gn([tl in 2Q18, gwn(tl in
ms A), with the ends of lines in ms A. 33 As a result, there is a likelihood
that frag. 2 does indeed come from a copy of at least this part of Sirach.
11Q5 (= 11QPs a ) 21.11–17, 22.1 = Sir 51:13–20b (?); 51:30b
The second Qumran witness to part of the ancient Hebrew text of the
book comes from a manuscript that is not even a copy of Sirach, but what
appears to be a different version of the Psalter. The text was edited and
published by James A. Sanders in 1965 in DJD 4 34 ; he dated the hand in
which the text is copied as coming from the first half of the first century
C.E. 35 In other words the copy is somewhat later than 2Q18.
The poem in Sirach 51 is an acrostic, but the text is not set out in
poetic form in the Cave 11 manuscript. It is written in lines that stretch
across the column, although the first words of the poem start a new line
after a blank space following the end of the previous poem (Psalm 138).
The end of 51:30, which appears at the top of the next column, marks
the conclusion of the poem, and a short blank space is left after it before
the next composition (Apostrophe to Zion) begins. It is interesting that
the poem has 23 alphabetic lines, with the first 22 giving the letters of the
Hebrew alphabet in order and the twenty-third beginning with the letter
pê. “In some acrostics, the reason for the twenty-third (or last) line, the pê
line (as in Psalms 25 and 34), is this: the )alep line is the beginning of the
poem, the lamed line is the exact middle, and the pê line is the end, these
three letters thus forming the word )a¯lep, which is the name of the first
32. Ibid., 77.
33. For a convenient presentation of the textual material from the various versions,
see Francesco Vattioni, Ecclesiastico (Naples: Istituto Orientale di Napoli, 1968), 32–33.
See also Pancratius C. Beentjes, The Book of Ben Sira in Hebrew (VTSup 68; Leiden:
Brill, 1997), 28–29 for the relevant part of ms A. A few verses from this part of ch. 6
are contained in ms C (ibid., 96); Beentjes gives a transcription of 2Q18 on p. 123,
and he places the relevant parts of all three texts in parallel columns on p. 134.
34. James A. Sanders, The Psalms Scroll of Qumrân Cave 11 (11QPs a ) (DJD 4; Oxford:
Clarendon, 1965), 79–85, with pls. 13–14. For the full textual evidence, see Vattioni,
Ecclesiastico, 278–83; Beentjes, Ben Sira in Hebrew, 177–78. Manuscript B is the only
medieval Hebrew copy that offers the parallel text.
35. Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 6–9.