Fri Feb 16 01:45:22 1996

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Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 01:42:42 -0500 (EST)
From: Andrew  Gross 
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Subject: Re: Qumran evidence for textual diversity
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On Fri, 16 Feb 1996, James R. Adair wrote:

> Emanuel Tov in _Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible_ estimates that 60% 
> of the Qumran material reflects a proto-Masoretic type of text, 5% are 
> pre-Samaritan, 5% are proto-LXX, 20% are written in the "Qumran scribal 
> practice" (i.e., plene orthography, lengthened pronouns and pronominal 
> suffixes, etc.), and 10% are non-aligned (114-116).  I have heard that 
> Tov has recently revised these figures so that the proto-MT group is 
> around 40% (?)--presumably the difference is made up by the non-aligned 
> group.  Does anyone have the bibliographic reference for his article that 
> updates these percentages?  Also, I have never thought that the "Qumran 
> practice" group belongs in the same discussion as the other mss.  This 
> group is characterized by a certain orthography and morphology, _not_ a 
> distinct text-type.  On the basis of their texts, do they belong in one 
> of the other groups, or should they be divided among the groups?  My 
> impression of 1QIsa-a is that, orthography and morphology aside, it 
> should be classified as non-aligned.  Of course, it would be hard to 
> determine a proto-LXX for Isaiah.  Does anyone have thoughts on any of 
> these points?


Tov's revised figures appear in the paper he contributed to the volume 
_Time to Prepare the Way in the Wilderness_ edited by Lawrence Schiffman 
and Devorah Dimant (Brill 1995).

I have not read Tov's later piece, but I have talked over this subject a
little with Dr. Schiffman.  In Schiffman's book, he argues from Tov's
initial figures that the MT-text family had started to become the dominant
one much earlier than had been previously thought.  What interests me
about this whole line of reasoning is that I believe it involves a big
methodological leap of faith.  Specifically, even if the figures for
distribution of text-types at Qumran support Schiffman's position, one 
still must assume that the distribution of text-types at Qumran can be 
extrapolated to all of Palestine at that time.  I still don't see how 
such an extrapolation is justified (I'm supposed to stop in during Dr. 
Schiffman's office hours to discuss this some day).

Tov tries to address this point in an article in the Journal of Jewish
Studies (Spring 1988, vol 34:1) -- see especially page 7.  The main
argument he seems to put forth is the fact that most of the Biblical
manuscripts seem to have been copied outside the community and brought to
Qumran.  For James Adair's question, this would at least explain why the
Qumran "practice" texts would not be counted among the groups of
text-types.  In other words, if we want to figure out the state of the
text as it was *throughout* Palestine during the Second Temple Period
based on the Qumran finds, the first thing we should do is set aside all
of the Qumran-type texts in order to control against any possible
idiosyncrasies the Qumran scribes may have brought to the text.

As for dividing up the Qumran texts amongst the other text-types, my 
impression of Tov's approach was that the whole text family picture was a 
lot blurrier than we once thought, and that we must be careful about 
trying to neatly place things within text families.  More specifically, 
he wants to get away from the whole Frank Cross "Local Texts" approach 
because he feels that we have a lot more textual families than previously 
thought.

I'm a little rusty on all this, but I really would love to get this thread
rolling because I find it all very interesting (obviously, since I'm on
this list ;-)).  

As a final note, I must say that I still find Tov's argument for
extrapolation unsatisfying, but I guess one must deal with evidence one 
has.  What does anyone else think?



andrew gross
Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies
New York University

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