The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Volume 1, Scripture and the Scrolls

1: THE IMPACT OF THE JUDEAN DESERT SCROLLS ON ISSUES OF TEXT AND CANON OF THE HEBREW BIBLE

CHAPTER ONE THE IMPACT OF THE JUDEAN DESERT SCROLLS ON ISSUES OF TEXT AND CANON OF THE HEBREW BIBLE James A. Sanders There are five areas of biblical study on which, in my view, fifty years worth of collective study of the scrolls have had considerable impact. Others would focus on other areas, I am sure.1 Those five are as follows: A. The history of early Judaism B. The first-century origins of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism C. The intertextual nature of Scripture and of early Jewish and Christian literature generally D. The concept of Scripture as canon E. Textual criticism of the First Testament Elsewhere I have elaborated on others of the five areas.2 I want to focus here on what study of the scrolls has done for understanding concept and method in the study of Jewish and Christian canons of Scripture. Miqra in Judaism and the First or Old Testament in Protestant Christianity, though the same in contents, are structurally quite different; they are in fact different canons. The received canon of Miqra (Miqra denotes the Hebrew Bible) is tripartite in structure, while the received canon of the First Christian Testament is quadripartite in structure. The structure of each sets the hermeneutic by which people expect to read them in the respective believing communities. This is especially poignant in the Protestant canon of the Old Testament as over against the Tanak because they both have the same Hebrew text base. And they have the same text because of convictions held first by Jerome in the fourth century, and then by Luther in the sixteenth. Prior to Jerome, Christian communities had basically the so-called Septuagint, later its Old Latin translation, as the text of what came to be called the Christian Old Testament. 25 1. Joseph A. Fitzmyer in his review of Geza Vermes’s The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (New York: Penguin, 1997) in the New York Times Book Review Section of Sept. 21, 1997 (26–27) lists four areas: the text of the Hebrew Bible, the history of Palestinian Judaism from 150 B.C.E. to 70 C.E., the Hebrew and Aramaic languages, and the Palestinian matrix of Christianity. Three of the four are in the above list. 2. See note 17 (below). 26 IMPACT OF SCROLLS ON TEXT AND CANON The churches’ insistence on keeping the Old Testament in the Christian canon, and indeed, on insisting on a double-testament Bible, in reaction to Marcion and others, was largely to advance the growing Christian conviction in the second and third centuries that Christianity had superseded Judaism as God’s true Israel.3 Keeping the old or first part of the double-testament Bible was anything but pro-Jewish in terms of the ongoing debates between Christians and Jews over exegesis of the First Testament—or in terms of the ongoing debates within Christianity between Jewish Christianity and Gentile Christianity. The latter, of course, had completely won out by the time of Constantine. Jerome’s conviction that the churches should have a translation directly from the Hebrew was much the same as Origen’s intention had earlier been in providing the Hebrew text of the Old Testament alongside the various Greek translations in the Hexapla: to counter Jewish arguments outside the church as well as pro-Jewish or Judaizing arguments within it.4 Despite their having the same text base and the same contents, the Protestant First Testament and the Tanak convey quite different messages precisely because of their different structures. And the Protestant structure is basically the same as all other Christian canons, Roman Catholic and the various Orthodox canons, except that the latter have more books in them than the Protestant. The two major differences between the Jewish canon and the Christian First Testament are the position of the Latter Prophets in each, and the tendency in the Christian canon to lengthen the story line, or history, that begins in Genesis, to include Ruth, Esther, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Judith, Tobit, and the Maccabees. And each of these major differences in structure makes a clear statement of its own, even before consideration of content. In the Jewish canon, the story line that begins in Genesis ends at the close of 2 Kings, with the defeat of the united-then-divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The fifteen books of the Latter Prophets then come immediately next, to explain...