Re-drawing the Map? the Islamic conquests, then our first question would have to be: whatwas
‘‘the Bible’’ as it then was, and do we have any access to it? One indirect,
but extremely important, channel of access has already been mentioned, the
great fourth- and fifth-century codices of the Septuagint, the Greek trans-
lation. Their date means that they are not mere later reflections or copies of
the ‘‘ancient’’ (Greek) Bible; on the contrary, theyarewhat that Bible ‘‘was’’
in late antiquity, as used by Christians; and the same goes for the substantial
number of papyrus fragments.
But what of the Hebrew Bible itself? It cannot be emphasised too strongly
that our conception of what the Hebrew Bible ‘‘was’’ in the Graeco-Roman
period has been completely transformed in the past half-century by the
manuscript discoveries from the Judaean Desert, at Qumran above all. Large
parts of the Bible can now be read in texts which are a thousand years or
more earlier than the manuscripts on which modern printed versions are
based, of which the most important belongs to the early eleventh century. If
we cannot yet read all those different parts together in a single volume, with
the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek reproduced as found in the texts from the
Judaean Desert, we can at least now see all these texts together in an English
version which is also an excellent guide to the sources from which what we
identify as ‘‘the Bible’’ is derived.^28 But it still remains to take the much big-
ger conceptual step of thinking of the Judaean Desert texts as the primary
evidence (as they are) and the medieval manuscripts as secondary.^29
The new material thus takes us directly to the Bible which Jews in the Hel-
lenistic and Roman period read, and to the concrete nature of the texts which
they used, as regards form and material (parchment or papyrus rolls), lay-out,
letter forms (with no pointing to indicate vowel sounds), spelling, and gram-
mar. But, if the story of the Bible has entered a quite new phase, which should
in principle involve a fundamental revision of all modern printed Hebrew
Bibles, that still leaves largely untouched the fundamental question of how
we should approach that earlier narrative history which is related in the vari-
ous books of the Bible, and which stretches from the Creation to the Persian
Empire of the fifth century. The book of Daniel indeed, though it may not
. M. Abegg, P. Flint, and E. Ulrich, eds.,The Qumran Bible: The Oldest Known Bible
Translated for the First Time into English().
. Even the excellent editors ofTheQumranBible, a truly priceless work of scholarship,
occasionally fall into the trap of speaking of readings from the documents from Qumran
asdeviations fromthe standard, ‘‘Masoretic,’’ text; for example p. , speaking of Leviticus:
‘‘Thirteen of the sixteen manuscripts exhibit some variation from the traditional Hebrew
text.’’ But that is the wrong framework. In so far as there are differences, it is the medieval
text which represents a deviation from the Qumran texts, of , years earlier, or more.