Third, there was a revival of theories making major advances in chart-
ing the history of the biblical text. The discoveries at first supported the
position of the three main text types, since various scrolls agreed with the
MT, the LXX, and the SP. Large fragments of 4QSama,b(agreeing with the
LXX) and 4QpaleoExodm(agreeing with the SP) were published early, and
thus W. F. Albright and, more substantially, Frank Moore Cross posited
three localities as producing the three local text types, seeing a textual de-
velopment of “one-into-three” — the presumed original into the MT, the
LXX, and the SP. But numerous differences in the scrolls from these three
types led to further theories. Shemaryahu Talmon, noting the pluriform-
ity, saw rather a “many-into-three” situation, noting that out of the many
textual traditions only three survived. Socio-religiously only three com-
munities survived the Roman destruction: the rabbis, the Samaritans, and
the Christians, each preserving their own set of texts. But the numerous
disagreements in the scrolls also dethroned the LXX and the SP from their
positions as the other two “main text types.” Seeing the numerous dis-
agreements as well as the agreements, Emanuel Tov expanded the view,
classifying a number of scrolls as “nonaligned” with either the MT, the SP,
or the LXX.
Prior to the Jewish revolts against Rome, however, there was no “stan-
dard text” — whether MT, SP, or LXX — with which texts should be
“aligned” or should be judged “non-aligned,” and thus those four catego-
ries appeared anachronistic for classifying the scrolls. Thus, the present au-
thor proposed a series of successive revised and expanded editions of each
of the biblical books, noting that the pluriformity and great variation in
the texts were not chaotic, but patterned in the four principal categories of
variation discussed above. Each book had its own history and developed
along its own trajectory. The main lines of development resulted from the
creative revised and expanded editions of each book. Each copy of which-
ever edition displayed its own particular individual textual variants, and
further copies would either reproduce the orthographic profile of the
source text or show modernizing tendencies in spelling practices. Occa-
sionally, scribes would put into the text isolated interpretive insertions that
had become either customary oral supplements or marginal glosses, and
these would become an accepted part of the transmitted text. Each of the
four kinds of variation took place independently of the other three. The
MT, the LXX, and the SP should not be regarded as “the three main text
types” but are merely manuscript copies for each book in their collection,
each copied more or less accurately from one or other of the available edi-142eugene ulrichEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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