the-bible-and-the-dead-sea-scrolls

EUGENE C. ULRICH 99
copied outside Qumran from those possibly copied at Qumran.
Moreover, the variety in the text of the Scriptures quoted during the latefirst
century by the New Testament authors and by the Jewish historian
Josephus reflects the same character as that found in the Scriptures from
Qumran.
B. The text of the Scriptures was pluriform throughout the period up to at
least the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–74 C.E.) and possibly as
late as the Second Jewish Revolt (132–135). Virtually all the MSS exhibit
a range of orthographic variety, and all of them present an unpredictable
quantity of textual variants for individual words; Qumran has valuably
illuminated an array of variant literary editions of virtually all the books
of Scripture.
C. For the past two centuries literary criticism had demonstrated that virtually
all the biblical books are the products of a long series of creative
efforts by many hands over many generations. Qumran has enabled us to
see that this process of dynamic composition of the biblical books continued
up to the late first or even the second century, until the irresistible
power of Rome and the growing threat of Christianity abruptly halted
that dynamic process, and eventually a single form of the text for each
book alone survived within the rabbinic community. It was not so much
a “stabilization” of the biblical texts as a loss of the pluriformity of the
texts and the transition from a dynamically growing tradition to a uniform
collection of “Scripture.”
D. Finally, just as the texts of the Scriptures were not fixed prior to the First
Revolt, or possibly until the Second Revolt, so too the list of books that
eventually formed the contents of the Hebrew Scriptures was not yet
fixed. Though the process toward the eventual canon had ancient roots,
the canon of Scripture is a later, postbiblical set of decisions.