Biblical Criticism and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Sources, Fragments, and Additions: Biblical Criticism and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Reinhard G. Kratz

The Hebrew Bible (like the New Testament or the Qurʾan) has come to us as an almost hermetically sealed corpus of writings. According to the religious claims of this corpus its authority is indisputable. As a result, biblical scholarship, which is usually bound to a religious (Jewish or Christian) community, is sometimes struggling to apply the usual methods of historical criticism to the collection of its “holy scriptures.” For this reason and also because confidence in its own abilities to obtain reliable results has fallen sharply—compared with previous generations of scholars in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries—, biblical scholarship today is desperately looking for empirical evidence. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls seventy years ago has given us such empirical evidence in abundance. For the first time we are permitted an authentic in- sight into the status of the manuscript tradition of biblical and many parabibli- cal writings in the period from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE. And therefore, for the first time, we have the opportunity to check the results of the 200-year history of biblical scholarship on the basis of ancient manuscripts. The fields and means of comparison are extremely diverse. The most prominent of these is textual criticism, for which, even before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there was external empirical evidence in the form of ancient versions (in particular the Septuagint). The standard work here is Emanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, a new edition of which appeared in 2012.1 In addition, the Dead Sea Scrolls invite us to review our hypotheses on form, tradition, religious, theological and historical criticism. Above all, they allow us to study the means, techniques and trends involved in ancient interpretations of biblical writings, which are documented in vari- ous forms (Rewritten Bible or Rewritten Scripture respectively, pesharim etc.).

This paper was presented at conferences in Jerusalem, Leipzig, and Munich, and I would like to thank the audiences for many helpful feedback and comments. The paper was finished in the Academic year 2014–2015, which I spent as an Overseas Visiting Scholar in St John’s College, Cambridge. I would like to express my gratitude to the College as well as to my host, Dr. Nathan McDonald, who invited me and provided to me a peaceful and most enjoyable environment to do research. 1 Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012).

Ultimately, the manuscripts represent a welcome opportunity of control for the methods of compositional criticism (Literar- and Redaktionskritik), which will be the focus in this paper. In the following pages I will deal first of all with the question of what biblical scholarship can learn from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then, I want to pose the question in reverse and ask what Qumran studies can learn from biblical criticism for its exploration of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Temple Scroll in particular will serve as a test case that allows us to approach the question from these two complementary perspectives.2

Biblical scholars rarely pose the question what biblical scholarship can learn from the Dead Sea Scrolls beyond textual criticism. The reason for this is obvi- ous: Old Testament scholarship is still focused primarily on the canon of the Hebrew Bible. The Septuagint, the Apocrypha, and the Pseudepigrapha have always led a shadowy existence and have been relegated to a specialist disci- pline for a few experts. For many scholars the texts from the Dead Sea are even more remote. Their use requires a great deal of basic research in palaeography and material reconstruction. The work has already taken up a lot of the time of the editors of the scrolls, and even now, after their publication in the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (DJD) and other editions, is not fully com- pleted. Measured against gain, the work is too arduous for most scholars, es- pecially when they believe that the texts are mostly post-biblical and therefore not relevant to their research.

2 Yigael Yadin, The Temple Scroll, 3 vols. and supplements, rev. ed. (Jerusalem: The Israel Exploration Society, 1983); Émile Puech, “4QRouleau du Temple,” in idem, Qumrân Grotte 4, XVIII: Textes Hébreux (4Q521–4Q528, 4Q576–4Q579), DJD 25 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 85– 114, plates vii–viii; Elisha Qimron, The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew Writings, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 2010), 137–207; James H. Charlesworth et al., Temple Scroll and Related Documents, PTSDSSP 7 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck; Louisville: Westminster James Knox, 2011); Johann Maier, Die Tempelrolle vom Toten Meer und das „Neue Jerusalem“, 3rd completely rev. and expanded ed. (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1997); Annette Steudel, Die Texte aus Qumran II: Hebräisch/Aramäisch und Deutsch (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001), 1–157. For an introduction see Sidnie White Crawford, The Temple Scroll and Related Texts, CQS 2 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); eadem, Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times, SDSSRL (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 84–104; for a more detailed treat- ment Lawrence H. Schiffman, The Courtyards of the House of the Lord: Studies on the Temple Scroll, STDJ 75 (Leiden: Brill, 2008).