Prof. Lawrence H. Schiffman

Finally, the Scrolls give us much information regarding the difficult questions of the standardization and canonization of the Jewish Book, the Bible. Several issues are involved here—the stabilization of the text and the determination of the contents of the canon. However, it is precisely in these issues that there is great disagreement among scholars.

Regarding this there are two positions. One holds that there was no concept yet of a specific authoritative list—what we call a canon.^[1] The other view, which I hold, argues that Qumran texts show evidence of a concept of the tripartite canon—Torah, Prophets, and Writings—but that the Writings was not yet a closed and totally defined corpus. In my view, the canon of all Jews in the Land of Israel followed this same development.^[2]

In the Scrolls we can also follow the fixing of the text of the individual books. The Scrolls bear witness to the existence of a variety of text types in Second Temple times, and a complex process by which eventually the Masoretic consonantal text, give or take some textual variants, became the norm. When we move from the variety of text types found at Qumran, to the more or less… Continue reading →

Circulation

It is clear that some texts were widely circulated. This is the only sensible way to understand how some apocryphal-pseudipigraphical books are found in various translations, while Hebrew and Aramaic originals are found at Qumran. Further, the Qumran collection has multiple copies of various books, both biblical and non-biblical, written often in different writing systems and clearly of disparate origin. Biblical manuscripts have been found at Qumran, Masada, and in the Bar Kokhba Caves dating over a few centuries. These chance examples of preservation probably indicate that biblical manuscripts were widely spread in the Land of Israel. Further, the presence of some of these same apocryphal and pseudpigraphic works at Qumran and Masada also indicates that these works were part of the literature of the wider Jewish community and constitute exactly the types of works prohibited by the tannaim as Sefarim ḥișoniyim, “external books,” that is, books outside the list of authoritative books.^[1]

Gathering and Storage

One of the things that became clear with the study of the entire collection is that the scrolls found at Qumran in the eleven caves were of disparate origin geographically and in their literary traditions.^[2] Only the sectarian Scrolls (about… Continue reading →