pentateuchal books, three with Aramaic translations(targumim),and
thirty-three phylacteries andmezuzot.In addition, many of the “nonbibli-
cal” manuscripts are in various ways intertextually related to the “biblical”
books. While the “biblical” manuscripts give direct witness to the forms of
the biblical books and their text in the period just before the final stage of
the formation of the Hebrew Bible, the corpus as a whole gives indirect
witness to those compositions and their text, but also sheds light on the
authoritativeness of scriptures for the group(s) behind the corpus.
The “biblical” Dead Sea Scrolls reflect a wide diversity of textual vari-
ants and recensions. Whereas many manuscripts present a text that stands
fairly close to the Masoretic Text (MT), there are also scrolls that preserve
variants and even recensions that correspond to those of the Old Greek
(e.g., 4QJerb), or to the Samaritan Pentateuch (4QpaleoExodm, 4QNumb,
and 4QDeutn). But many other “biblical” manuscripts do not closely cor-
respond to any of those three texts, since they either have multiple unique
variant readings, or have readings that cannot be aligned with only one of
the traditional texts. Therefore, with regard to textual readings, we do not
have a limited number of text types but multiple texts. With regard to
recensions, the manuscripts generally correspond with the types of
recensions found in the MT or the LXX (where book by book the one or
the other may be older), or with the harmonizing kind of recensions that
are also found in the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP). Famous is the case of
4QJerb, which displays the recensional differences in which the LXX differs
from MT. But here again, some scrolls preserve recensions that are inde-
pendent from other known texts (e.g., 4QJudga). None of the variants or
recensions has a clearly “sectarian” concern, though some of the 1QIsaa
variants have been interpreted as expressing the self-understanding of the
Dead Sea Scrolls community.
For the assessment of the LXX and the SP, the scrolls are invaluable be-
cause they demonstrate that divergent readings and recensions of the Old
Greek (OG) often go back to a HebrewVorlageand are not tendentious in-
novations of the translator, and that the harmonizations in the SP were al-
ready present in the text the Samaritans chose. The variety of the “biblical”
manuscripts from Qumran may be contrasted with the homogeneity of
the post-70-c.e.“biblical” manuscripts found at Wadi Murabba{at, Wadi
Sdeir, and NaFalμever/WadiÒeiyâl, which preserve a text that is virtually
identical to the MT. This contrast has been explained chronologically and
sociologically: the Qumran “biblical” manuscripts, the majority of which
stem from the first centuryb.c.e.and the early first centuryc.e., reflect209The Dead Sea ScrollsEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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