Biblical Texts and Interpretations in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Biblical Texts

The introduction to this entry places the Dead Sea Scrolls in their historical and chronological context and discusses the popularity and provenance of the texts found in the Judean Desert. The main focus is the content of the Judean Desert Scripture texts (including tefillin) compared with the Masoretic Text (MT). The comparison with MT is especially significant, since the human mind works from the known to the unknown by connecting new evidence to data that are already known. Until the middle of the 20th century, the Hebrew Bible was known only from medieval Jewish codices that gave one-sided information on the content of the Bible, because at that time the only text that was current was the MT. In the early 21st century a multitude of texts from the Judean Desert are known: more than two hundred fragmentary texts from Qumran alone and twenty texts from other sites in the Judean Desert. Outside Qumran are found solely texts that reflect the Masoretic Text, while at Qumran one witnesses many different texts, namely those resembling MT, the LXX, SP (pre-Samaritan scrolls), and various types of liturgical scrolls (of the Torah, psalms, and tefillin), as well as a large cluster of texts that are not related closely to any of the mentioned texts and are often named independent or non-aligned. Each of these units forms a closely related text group or cluster (an artificial unit) that developed after the formulation of the early text(s) of the Scripture books. In addition, one witnesses scribal interests in groups of texts that reflect types of scribal activity. Among these scribal groups are found a group of texts written in the Paleo-Hebrew script and a group characterized by idiosyncratic features in orthography, morphology, and scribal features. The earliest specimens of this group were probably written before the settlement at Qumran, while most of them were written at Qumran. Probably one-third of the Qumran texts were copied locally, while the larger part was brought there by the Qumran settlers. Consequently, the name “Dead Sea Scrolls” is misleading, as it implies a limited milieu for the scrolls. These scrolls represent a broad spectrum of biblical and nonbiblical writings created and copied in ancient Israel, and they should therefore be considered “the scrolls of ancient Israel.” Likewise, the biblical scrolls found at the other sites in the Judean Desert were not copied locally, neither at Masada nor in the hiding caves from the time of the Second Jewish (Bar Kochba) revolt (132–135 ce). The readings of all these texts differing from MT contribute to the understanding of the transmission of the Scripture text in the last three centuries bce and the first two centuries ce. When calculating the frequency of each of the groups of texts, one notes that in the Torah this is the combined cluster of the texts representing the SP group and LXX visible in texts and tefillin together with quotations from these texts in the contemporary literature as opposed to quotations from MT. In the post-Pentateuchal books, most texts reflect the non-aligned cluster.