CHAPTER 9 – THE TORAH SCROLLS FROM THE DEAD SEA AREA
Approaching the Evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls
The question of how to treat the evidence of the Dead Sea scrolls deserves special con-
sideration. While it seems obvious that all of the scrolls should be subjected to the same
process of analysis, questions of how to approach the evidence from different localities
are complicated by problems with the interpretation of archaeological data, and by issues
associated with dating the finds through palaeographical and radiocarbon analyses. Ulti-
mately we must proceed only after addressing some critical questions that relate to our
understanding of the textual evidence. Should the scrolls from Qumran be treated as a
separate data set to those from other sites in the Judaean Desert? Is it reasonable to treat
the scrolls from Masada, ostensibly written in the first century C.E., with those written in
the second century C.E. from Murabba‘at, Naḥal Ḥever, and Wadi Sdeir? Or, accepting
that the scrolls from all of these sites can only be examined in their overall context,
should we treat them all together in the same analysis without trying to delineate between
scrolls form the B.C.E. and C.E. periods?
A number of options are presented for tackling this methodological problem. One ap-
proach is that taken by Young, who breaks the corpus of Dead Sea scrolls into two
parts.^706 The first part, representing scrolls from the last three centuries B.C.E., contains
the biblical scrolls uncovered in the caves near Qumran. The second part of the corpus is
represented by the scrolls from the mid-first century C.E. to the mid-second century C.E.,
706
See primarily I. Young, "The Stabilization of the Biblical Text," 387, and I. Young, "The Biblical
Scrolls from Qumran," 122-23.