Hebrew Bible Textual Criticism and the Dead Sea Scrolls: What Not to Expect of the Pesher Habakkuk (1Qphab)

Chapter 2 Hebrew Bible Textual Criticism and the Dead Sea Scrolls: What Not to Expect of the Pesher Habakkuk (1QpHab)

Gert T. M. Prinsloo

1 Introduction

Peter Flint—the esteemed Dead Sea Scrolls scholar to whom this volume is dedicated—and James VanderKam published an extensive volume on the meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their significance for understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity.1 They indicated that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls just more than seventy years ago made an immense contribution towards our understanding of the Second Temple period in several fields of study.2 The scrolls illuminated the history of the text of the Hebrew Bible and of developing textual traditions in the Second Temple period. Especially the biblical scrolls and the so-called continuous pesharim became important sources for Hebrew Bible textual criticism.3 The scrolls il- lustrated processes involved in the formation of individual books and collec- tions of books in the Hebrew Bible and the eventual emergence of a biblical canon.4 They illuminated the methods of and processes involved in Jewish biblical interpretation and application during the period,5 and provided new

1 James C. VanderKam and Peter W. Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity (London: T&T Clark, 2002). 2 Matthias Henze, “Introduction,” in Biblical Interpretation at Qumran, ed. Matthias Henze (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 1–9. 3 VanderKam and Flint, Meaning, 103–53; Arie van der Kooij, “The Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible Before and After the Qumran Discoveries,” in The Bible as Book: The Hebrew Bible and the Judean Desert Discoveries, ed. Edward D. Herbert and Emanuel Tov (London: British Library, 2002), 167–77. 4 VanderKam and Flint, Meaning, 154–81. Shemaryahu Talmon, “The Crystallization of the ‘Canon of Hebrew Scriptures’ in the Light of Biblical Scrolls from Qumran,” in Herbert and Tov, Bible as Book, 5–20. 5 VanderKam and Flint, Meaning, 293–308; Moshe J. Bernstein, “The Contribution of the Qumran Discoveries to the History of Early Biblical Interpretation,” in Reading and Re-Reading Scripture at Qumran Volume 2: Law, Pesher and the History of Interpretation, STDJ 107 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 363–86.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004410732_004 26 Prinsloo insights in the history and development of emerging and often conflicting and contradicting Judaism(s) during the Second Temple period.6 The present study focuses on the first of these fields of study—a field where Peter Flint made a considerable contribution—namely the impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls on our understanding of emerging, and sometimes diverging, Hebrew Bible textual traditions circulating in various centres of Jewish schol- arship during the Second Temple period.7 Approximately 222 biblical scrolls were discovered in eleven caves on the western shore of the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956.8 These finds have “altered the ‘face’ of Old Testament textual criticism in a fundamental way.”9 The discovery shattered the myth of a single textual tradition underlying all the versions of the Hebrew Bible. It exposed the express aim of Hebrew Bible textual criticism at the time to reconstruct the original, single Hebrew Vorlage of all the ancient textual witnesses as a futile exercise.10 It is now common to classify the text type of these scrolls “according to their textual character, i.e., based on the degree of proximity to the versions, the Proto-Masoretic Text, the Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuch in particular,”11 and even that classification is recognised as an over-simplification of the variety of text types co-existing during the late Second Temple period.12 The study re-evaluates the significance of the Pesher Habakkuk (1QpHab) for Hebrew Bible textual criticism in general and for the text of the book of

6 Lester L. Grabbe, An Introduction to Second Temple Judaism: History and Religion of the Jews in the Time of Nehemiah, the Maccabees, Hillel and Jesus (London: T&T Clark, 2010). 7 Cf. Peter W. Flint, The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms (Leiden: Brill, 1997) to name an example. Chapter 3 (“Psalms Variants Listed by Manuscript,” pp. 50–85) and Chapter 4 (“Variants Listed by Psalm and Verse,” pp. 86–116) illustrate Flint’s painstaking work in the field of Hebrew Bible textual criticism. Johann Cook, “The Text-critical and Exegetical Value of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 72(4) (2016): a3280, http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/hts.v72i4.3280 argues that comparative studies of the text of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls with other Second Temple period textual traditions illustrate their text-critical and exegetical value. 8 VanderKam and Flint, Meaning, 103. For an overview of the texts from the Judean desert and their textual character, cf. Emanuel Tov, “The Biblical Texts from the Judean Desert— An Overview and Analysis of the Published Texts,” in Herbert and Tov, Bible as Book, 139–66. 9 Ferdinand Deist, Witnesses to the Old Testament: Introducing Old Testament Textual Criticism, Literature of the Old Testament 5 (Pretoria: Boekhandel, 1988), 88. 10 Van der Kooij, “Textual Criticism,” 169. 11 Henze, “Introduction,” 3. 12 Emanuel Tov, “The Textual Base of the Biblical Quotations in Second Temple Compositions,” in Hāʾîsh Mōshe: Studies in Scriptural Interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature in Honor of Moshe J. Bernstein, ed. Binyamin Y. Goldstein, Michael Segal, and George J. Brooke, STDJ 122 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 280–302.