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The Modern History of the Qumran Psalms Scroll and Canonical Criticism

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The Modern History of the Qumran Psalms Scroll and Canonical Criticism THE MODERN HISTORY OF THE QUMRAN PSALMS SCROLL AND CANONICAL CRITICISM JAMES A. SANDERS At its 2001 annual meeting the international Society of Biblical Literature celebrated the completion of the publication of the Dead Sea Serolls. It was a gala occasion with a sense of the miraculous hovering over the some three hundred who attended. In the previ­ ous five decades eight volumes of the Discovenes in the Judaean Desert scries had been published, but during the last decade twenty-eight more have appeared. Emanuel Tov, Magnes Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Hebrew University, made the difference. In 1990 Tov became the fourth chief editor of the international team charged with thc pub1ications, following Roland de Vaux, Pierre Benoit, and John Strugnell. Tov increased the team from twenty scholars to over sixty. Five further volumes are in the pipeline at the present, which will complete publication of thirty-nine volumes of the scrolls in thc DJD series, over nine-hundred ancient texts all told. Reference vol­ umes will follow. Tov's address on the occasion was stunning. It was a tell-all, detailed history of publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls from his stand­ point, and as only he with his intimate knowledge of the last phases of the enterprise could tell it. I It was a kind of oral history of thc sort Sterling Van Wagner and Weston Fields, an editor of the present volume, and others have recently been collecting from the earlier generation of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars. One weeps over the lost, unpublished records that have languished in widows' and heirs' attics, when the source of the most intimatc kind of knowledge has been totally lost in the deaths of those who failed to complete their work, or who were too modest to publish their memories of what really happened. This is all the more poignant in the case of the Scrolls about which much unconscionable non sense has been published and said simply because there was laek of aecess to most of them for so long, not only to the Serolls but also to the real histories swept I See Hershel Shanks' interview of TOV in BAR 28/3 (May 2002) 32-35, 62. 394 SANDERS away by death and personal modesty. That situation has ehanged dramatieally in the past ten years sinee open aeeess has been the poliey rather than the exeeption to mueh of the world's informa­ tion, through the internet and through the fall of walls of separa­ tion and diserimination around the world. It seems appropriate to honor Tov's own openness, as weIl as labors of the past ten years, by offering a tell-all, modern history of the Dead Sea Psalms Seroll (11 QPsa = 11 Q5). Tov's AnDRESS In his address T ov mentioned that the tendeney early on to give names to the Serolls doeuments as they appeared meant that some might not finally be the most appropriate. He then gave examples, one of whieh was the Psalms Seroll from Qumran Cave Eleven. He explained that assigning numbers instead of titles obviated the prob­ lem, and that has been the praetiee reeently. Tov was, of course, right both that early titles usually endure, and that they ean be prob­ lematie. One thinks of "Manual of Diseipline," 'job Targum," "Wiles of a Wieked Woman," and "Temple Seroll." The situation is true in arehaeology generally. When a find on a dig comes to light, it needs to be diseussed by the team and is therefore given a name or tag of some sort to be referred to, sometimes that very evening when the day's work is assessed. Often a name hastily bequeathed beeomes the name that appears in eventual publieation. In the ease of the Psalms Seroll, a change was made from the siglum I gave it in the first two publieations. The preliminary report referred to the seroll as 11 QPss. 2 The editor of BASOR at the time, William F. Albright, made no eomment in eorrespondenee about the designation but, on the eontrary, ran the article as reeeived in the next available issue, whieh appeared the following spring while we were still in Jerusalern. The seeond article issuing from work on the seroll during the 1961-62 winter of recovery in J ersualem was titled, "Psalm 151 in 11 QPss. "3 It was not until the third article appeared that I used the more speeifie siglum, 11 QPsa.4 This eame partly out 2 "The Seroll of Psalms (I I QPss) from Cave 11: A Preliminary Report," BASOR 165 (February 1962): 11-15. 3 In the ZAW 75 (1963): 73-86. 4 "Two Non-Canonical Psalms in I I Ps,," ZAW 75 (1964): 57-75. .
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