Early Judaism- A Comprehensive Overview

their earliest, shadowy beginnings the texts solidified and developed by

faithful repetition but also by occasional creative, updated editions to form

the books as we begin to see them when manuscript evidence becomes

available. Source-critical examples, such as the retheologizing of the older

monarchic traditions in light of the destruction and exile (traditional P),

and more specifically the insertion of the P flood story into the older J story

in Genesis 6–9, help illustrate the phenomenon. Those new editions were

achieved not through displacement of the old but through combination of

the new with the old. A more sustained and documented example is the

four or five successive editions of the book of Exodus. Exodus 35–40 is pre-

served in two successive editions; the OG is presumably the earlier edition

(editionn+1) and the MT the later (editionn+2), developed from the He-

brew parent text used by the OG. Then 4QpaleoExodmdisplayed an ex-

panded edition (editionn+3) based on but expanding the edition as in the

MT, while the SP exhibited the same general edition as 4QpaleoExodmbut

with such significant theological changes (albeit not significant quantita-

tive changes) that it could be regarded as a fourth edition (editionn+4).

There is now even a fifth, if 4QRP is considered 4QPentateuch (edition

n+5). A similar pair of successive editions for Numbers was seen in

4QNumb, while for Genesis the MT, SP, and LXX all clearly show intention-

ally revised editions of the two extended passages in chaps. 5 and 11.

The Nature of the Biblical Text

Before the discovery of the scrolls in 1947, scholars generally viewed the

MT, the SP, and the LXX as three main, but not equal, text types. The MT,

in a purified form, was seen as the “original” Bible; Gesenius had shown

that the SP was derivative from the MT and thus farther from the “origi-

nal,” and the LXX was usually denigrated as an inaccurate translation

where it disagreed with the MT. The SP and the LXX were occasionally

helpful, to be sure, but the prevailing mentality was that the MT repre-

sented the closest extant form of theUrtext.TheUrtexttheory was cham-

pioned by Paul de Lagarde in the late nineteenth century. It envisioned a

single original Hebrew text that was no longer extant in its pure form but

that could largely be recovered through the MT with comparative analysis

of the SP, the LXX, and the versions. Paul Kahle in the middle of the twen-

tieth century unsuccessfully challenged it with hisVulgärtextetheory, see-

ing a plethora of variant texts overshadowed by the MT, the SP, and the

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eugene ulrich

EERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:03:58 PM