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

DONALD W. PARRY 171
and write of an MT, Masoretic texts, or the Masoretic family of texts.
Regardless of what we name the Bible at any point in history, there never
existed a fixed, consonantal text that we could call a canonized text.
Beyond the “consonantal framework” of the Hebrew Bible, vowel
letters, 12 the system of diacritical marks for cantillation and accentuation,
13 Qere readings, 14 pausal marks, Masorah, critical apparatus, the
end of the book summary (Mwks), and other paratextual elements—these
have never been canonized by religious authorities. Many or most of
these elements did not exist when the canon of sacred books was fixed.
With reference to all the versions of the Bible, ancient and modern,
the arrangement or order of the individual books, 15 the combinations of
books (such as 1 and 2 Kings as a single book), and the creation of pericopes
or literary units, such as chapters, paragraphing, versification, the
books’ names, explanatory notes (footnotes, sidenotes, endnotes, intercolumnal
notes), chapter headings, marginal scriptural references, and
12. J. Solomon wrote: “Conflicts are legion; the Torah has become, not two Torot,
but numberless Torot owing to the great number of variations found in our local
books—old and new alike—throughout the entire Bible. There is not a passage which
is clear of confusion and errors in the vowel letters, in accents and vowel signs, in the
qre and ktib, in dages and rafe…so that if a man undertake to write a Torah scroll
according to law, he must necessarily err in respect of the vowel letters, and be like a
blind man groping in pitch darkness”; cited in Moshe Greenberg, “The Stabilization
of the Text of the Hebrew Bible, Reviewed in the Light of the Biblical Materials from the Judean
Desert,” JAOS 76 (1956): 158 (see also n3); reprinted in The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible
(ed. S. Z. [Shnayer] Leiman; New York: Ktav, 1974), 300. 319n3; also reprinted in the collection
of Greenberg’s essays, Studies in the Bible and Jewish Thought (Philadelphia: JPS, 1995), 192.
13. Greenberg writes: “The text of the Hebrew Bible is made up of three historically
distinct elements: in order of antiquity and stability they are the consonants, the
vowel letters, and the system of diacritical marks for vowels and cantillation. The
present system of diacritical marks was developed by the Masoretes—the preservers
of the text tradition—of the Palestinian school at Tiberias in the 9th century. It is the
product of two centuries of intensive text-critical work in the schools of Palestine and
Babylonia, whose object was the establishment of the correct pronunciation and
text”; ibid., 299.
14. On the development and history of Kethib and Qere readings, see Harry M.
Orlinsky, “The Origin of the Kethib-Qere System: A New Approach,” VTSup 7
(1959): 184–92.
15. On the variation of the ordering of the books in various Hebrew Bibles, see
William H. Brownlee, The Meaning of the Qumran Scrolls for the Bible (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1964), 27–28; Orlinsky, “Prolegomenon,” xviii–xix; and Israel
Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah (trans. E. J. Revell; Missoula, MT: Scholars
Press, 1980). The Non-Masoretic Psalms scroll from Cave 11 (11QPs a [11Q5]), as is well
known, presents a different sequence of its 48 compositions than does the Masoretic
Text. On this, see James A. Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon,”
McCQ 21 (1968): 284–98. For a look at the ordering and sequence of biblical books
by the early Eastern and Western Churches, see Albert C. Sundberg, Jr., The Old
Testament of the Early Church (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 58–59.