show very close agreement with each other, and that even excerpts found in the school
texts from the Late Babylonian period are closer to the Kuyunjik sources for this ritual
than many of the geographically proximate sources for the other textual genres examined
above. The significance of this finding concerning ritual texts in relation to the transmis-
sion of the biblical scrolls will be discussed further below.
Concluding Remarks on The Dead Sea Torah Scrolls
The documents from Qumran show a wide range of variations relative to the MT. Even
so, it must be said that there are surprisingly few major stylistic variations. Only 12 out of
the 1,985 variations are hermeneutic in nature. A significant proportion of the major sty-
listic variants exist in 4QNumb and 4QExodm, both of which may be tentatively associ-
ated with the same tradition that eventually produced the SP. Another scroll that has a
significant number of major stylistic variations is 4QExodb, which has close associations
with the textual tradition underlying the LXX. In this way scrolls that show major stylis-
tic variations or hermeneutic variations relative to the MT are close, in terms of these ma-
jor stylistic and hermeneutic differences, to known textual editions, and do not a priori
constitute independent textual traditions in themselves.
It should be noted, though, that this observation does not extend to include the multitude
of minor variations that exist between the scrolls and the MT. Seeing as we lack any sig-
nificant overlap between the ancient manuscripts themselves, it is very difficult to know
what would result if we were to compare the manuscripts with each other, were they
more completely preserved. One may guess that the emergent picture would be substan-