1 Editing the Dead Sea Scrolls

Editing the Dead Sea Scrolls: What Should We Edit and How Should We Do It? Eibert Tigchelaar (KU Leuven) Lecture Copenhagen Conference on Dead Sea Scrolls and Material Philology, April 5, 2014 (cleaned up with minor revisions in 2018 and 2019) I. In the 1990s the American classicist Glenn Most organized a series of conferences in Heidelberg in which the participants reflected upon key elements of classical history of philology in the light of new tendencies in the humanities and philology. The conference resulted in 6 volumes in the series Aporemata: Kritische Studien zur Philologiegeschichte. In a sense, the sequence of the conferences reflects the different stages in classical philology, as seen by Most: collecting fragments, editing texts, commentaries, historicizing, and disciplining classics. Each of these volumes was concluded by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, literary theorist at Stanford University. The important thing is that Most initiated in the field of classicists a reflection on their own history of philology. And that too, reflection on the kinds of philology that inform and determine our editing and scholarly research, has been a major contribution of this conference. I have heard great papers, from many different perspectives, that all commented on different perspectives on the project of editing or interpreting manuscript, in conversation with what has been called new, material, or artefactual philology. Especially on the first day, there were no less than four papers (by George Brooke, Michael Langlois, Trine Hasselbalch, and Kipp Davis) that touched upon issues that I had wanted to discuss in my paper. George discussed the principles that have governed previous editions, something I had thought to do myself, Michael presented in a very sophisticated way the different steps of a what one might call a philology of fragments, Trine covered several questions I had wanted to discuss, for example on the reason why scrolls scholars did not use Karl Lachmann, and Kipp appropriated and superbly illustrated my own thesis that manuscripts are scholarly 1 constructs, and en passant reviewed Elisha Qimron’s editions. These four scholars taken together covered a large part of my own envisaged contribution, sometimes even in details. Fortunately, the other papers of Thursday and Friday, most of them more specific, covered other grounds, all interesting, leaving some possibilities for reflections of a general nature. II. One of the problems we continuously run into is the terminology we use, and how we define it. This goes, for example, for the term “philology,” which some of us clearly use in a different way than others. Here, however, I am concerned with our use of terms like fragment, manuscript, scroll, text, work, composition, and even cluster or constellation. In classical philology, “fragment” may refer to a unit of text, often preserved through a later compiler, from an older, but now lost work. See, e.g., the large project of Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Alternatively, it may refer to a physical fragment, remnant of a once larger physical unit, often characterized by damaged edges, words that are broken off, etc. Though scrolls scholars are largely used to the last meaning, Hindy Najman used it in the first meaning, implicitly raising the question how on a more basic level scholars interpret fragments. With manuscripts, things are even more problematic. One might call every discrete piece with writing a manuscript, in which case every written fragment is also a manuscript. More usually, however, the word manuscript is used to refer to the larger whole from which these fragments survive. The manuscript is lost, with the exception of one or more fragments. Thirdly, the word manuscript is often used to refer to the total of all the fragments that are believed to originate from that lost whole. Finally, it refers to the tentative scholarly reconstruction of that original whole on the basis of the available evidence. Whereas its first meaning (literally something written) is discrete, the other three meanings are in different degrees scholarly constructions. Throughout all our work it is important to recognize this, also when it comes to material philology. We all know that the assignment of many fragments to specific manuscripts is uncertain in various degrees. This means that if a scientist states something about a manuscript, e.g., with regard to the Zurich or Tucson C14 datings, we really 2 need to know which fragment has been tested. For example, was the texted 4Q201 fragment it one of the 4QEnocha fragments which Michael believes do not really come from 4Q201? Or, to give a very common example: if we make literary arguments about a manuscript consisting of different fragments, whether that really is correct. Or, another one, were there really nine different 4QSa Cryptic A manuscripts, as claimed by Stephen Pfann, and often simply accepted by other scholars (till years later, after the presentation of this lecture this claim was finally rebutted by Jonathan Ben Dov, Asaf Gayer, and Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra). From a theoretical and practical perspective, the concept of a work or composition (often simply called text by many colleagues) or even book, is equally problematic. There often are no clear textual boundaries, where texts are rewritten, expanded or excerpted, or arranged in different orders or collections. The clearest example given in this conference by Kipp are the 4QM manuscripts, but in other degrees the same holds true for most other works, often with what one might call variant literary editions. Because of the different textual forms and combinations of such texts, one might refer perhaps to clusters, as David Hamidovic has suggested, though he has not spelled out what he would include in such a cluster and why. For example, to what extent should one include not only the various S manuscripts, but also 4Q275 and 4Q279, already included in DJD 26 as various texts, or also 5Q13, or 1Q29a, as well as other so-called manuscripts. III. A differentiation between fragment, manuscript, and work, is important for the discussion what we want to edit, and how. But how does that relate to what has been called “old” or “Lachmannian” philology, versus “new,” “material” or “artefactual” philology? For an assessment, it is important not only to refer to a method, and the result of the application of the method, but also to the suppositions, theoretical views and the aims that gave rise to those methods. In Lachmann’s case, but also in the case of most classical philologists, the supposition is that works are the product of authors, the text of which gradually deteriorated through scribal errors in the course of transmission. Lachmann’s aim was to reconstruct on 3 the basis of the manuscript evidence a stage of the text of the composition that preceded all the preserved witnesses. His method was one of recension and stemmata. Lachmann introduced his scientific method in order to replace earlier textual editing where editors on the basis of their aesthetic feeling of the text corrected and emended texts. As Trine has indicated, Lachmann’s method has never been used in Dead Sea Scrolls for a variety of reasons, not the least because there simply was not enough material to apply this method. It seems, however, that in medieval studies and in Scrolls studies not primarily the method, but rather the suppositions and aims are criticized. First, the supposition that in these fields texts are unique works of genius authors, which afterwards only deteriorate through the hands of scribes. In contrast, medievalists and many scrolls scholars see these scribes who change texts as continuing the author-role. Therefore, the aim that one should retrieve the original work has become irrelevant. One might argue that in some respects scrolls scholars were material or even artefactual philologists avant la lettre. Because of the fragmentary nature of the manuscripts and texts, the first aim was to join fragments, and edit manuscripts. Because of the paucity of the material, the establishment of a critical text was not only difficult, but also unnecessary. At the same time, at an early stage editors already realized that attention for artefactual details would facilitate the construction of manuscripts. This already started with Józef Milik and John Strugnell, was further developed by Hartmut Stegemann, and, in the description of scribal practices culminated in the work of Emanuel Tov. Interestingly, however, in many cases concern for the artefact was a means, not an aim. This is clear from the treatment of biblical manuscripts, where most editions simply arranged the remaining fragments in the order of the biblical text, and were more interested in variant readings and the like, than in the physical characteristics of the manuscript. It also appears from the fact that the Stegemann method has hardly been applied to (one might also say tested on) biblical manuscripts. It took more than fifteen years before a Göttingen PhD student (Eva Jain) worked on the biblical scrolls. In contrast, the last decade has shown how a material philology sheds new light on such so-called biblical manuscripts. Ironically, such a 4 material philology is only possible because we can compare the text of the fragments to that of the Masoretic text. If we hadn’t known the MT we could not have known that some texts were excerpts, or only covered half of a book, etcetera. It therefore comes as no surprise that most of the detailed discussions of this conference concern biblical scrolls, or texts connected to the few otherwise largely known texts, like S and H. (The only exception is Kipp’s presentation on the Apocryphon of Jeremiah C.) IV. Things are much more difficult in the case of fragmentary manuscripts of hitherto unknown texts, such as the Apocryphon of Jeremiah C, 4QInstruction, or many other texts of which we have even less fragments.

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