Chapter 3 4QLXXNum and a Text-Critical Examination of a Debated Hebrew Term in Numbers 4

Gideon R. Kotzé

1 Introduction

The manuscript finds from Qumran and other sites in the Judean Desert have opened up new horizons in research on early and the text-critical study of the compositions included in the and cor- pora.1 The textual criticism of these early Jewish writings is primarily occupied with collecting and collating their various textual representatives, explaining variants and debated readings in them, gaining insight into the craft of the scribes who copied and translated the texts in antiquity, and tracing the writ- ings’ textual history, that is, how the wordings and subject matter of the compo- sitions were shaped and developed by the ancient scribes during the processes of transmission. The provide invaluable data relevant to these interrelated analytical endeavours of text-critics. The thousands of fragments that preserve, in teasingly incomplete forms, manuscripts of early Jewish writings in their languages of composition and in translations, provide text-critics and other scholars with much older cop- ies of these compositions than the majority of textual representatives that were available before the Dead Sea discoveries. These copies, especially those from Qumran, which were made over the span of time from approximately the middle of the third century BCE to the first century CE,2 witness to a pleth- ora of textual variation when compared to one another and to other textual

1 Cf., e.g., Russell Fuller, “Some Thoughts on How the Dead Sea Scrolls Have Changed Our Understanding of the Text of the Hebrew Bible and Its History and the Practice of Textual Criticism,” in The Hebrew Bible in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Nóra Dávid, Armin Lange, Kristin de Troyer and Shani Tzoref, FRLANT 239 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 23–28; James A. Sanders, “The Impact of the Judean Desert Scrolls on Issues of Text and Canon of the Hebrew Bible,” in The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Volume One: Scripture and the Scrolls, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006), 25–36. 2 Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 98–99.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004410732_005 a Debated Hebrew Term in Numbers 4 57 representatives.3 In view of their dating, the Qumran manuscripts imply that the marked textual diversity that can be observed in them was not created by scribes of one locality in a short stretch of time. Rather the kaleidoscope of wordings in these manuscripts reflect the work of many scribal hands over a long time period.

The diversity of textual traditions preserved in the Covenanters’ library may in part have resulted from the variegated sources of provenance of at least some of the manuscripts. These probably were brought to Qumran by members of the Community who hailed from diverse localities in Palestine, and from various social strata. From the very outset, one there- fore should expect to find in that library, as indeed one does, a conflux of text-traditions which had developed over a considerable span of time in different areas of Palestine, and also outside Palestine, as in Babylonia, and in different social circles.4

The textual diversity at Qumran therefore gives a fair indication of the state of texts, as well as prevalent scribal conventions and practices, in the period

3 Armin Lange, “Ancient Hebrew-Aramaic Texts,” in Textual History of the Bible: The Hebrew Bible, vol. 1A, ed. Armin Lange and Emanuel Tov (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 132–48; Peter W. Flint, The Dead Sea Scrolls (Nashville: Abington, 2013), 52–72, 86, 88–90; James C. VanderKam and Peter W. Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2002), 103–40, 184–87. In a number of publications, Flint discusses the textual data in the Qumran manuscripts of Leviticus, Isaiah, Psalms, Song of Songs, and Daniel in greater detail: Peter W. Flint, The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms, STDJ 17 (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Peter W. Flint, “The Daniel Tradition at Qumran,” in Eschatology, Messianism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Craig A. Evans and Peter W. Flint, SDSSRL 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 41–60; Peter W. Flint, “The Daniel Tradition at Qumran,” in The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, vol. 2, ed. John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint, VTSup 83, 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 329–67; Peter W. Flint, “The Book of Isaiah in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Bible as Book: The Hebrew Bible and the Judaean Desert Discoveries, ed. Edward D. Herbert and Emanuel Tov (London: British Library; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2002), 229–51; Peter W. Flint, “The in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Book of Leviticus: Composition and Reception, ed. Rolf Rendtorff and Robert A. Kugler, VTSup 93 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 323–41; Peter W. Flint, “The Book of Canticles (Song of Songs) in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Perspectives on the Song of Songs / Perspektiven der Hoheliedauslegung, ed. Anselm C. Hagedorn, BZAW 346 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 96–104; Peter W. Flint, “Psalms and Psalters in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Volume One: Scripture and the Scroll, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006), 233–72. 4 Shemaryahu Talmon, “The Textual Study of the Bible—A New Outlook,” in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, ed. Frank Moore Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 325–26.