Qumran-rullene og kanon
Mai/juni-utgaven av Biblical Archaeology Review er en himmelreise. Dette nummeret markerer 60-årsjubileet for funnet av Dødehavsrullene.
I tillegg til et morsomt intervju med Frank Moore Cross, er det artikler av Emanuel Tov, Sidnie White Crawford og Martin Abegg (identisk med min førsteopponent).
Crawford mimrer om sine første møter med Cross og John Strugnell, og sine første møter med tekstfragmentene på 80-tallet i Rockefeller museets dunkle kjeller. Nærmest en passant skriver hun også så kort, gripende og presist om Dødehavsrullenes betydning for forståelsen av Den hebraiske bibels kanon at det rett og slett bør blogges:
"For me, the greatest change as a result of my work on the scrolls concerns the textual history of the Hebrew Bible and the formation of the Jewish canon. Before the discovery of the scrolls, it was understood that the text of the Hebrew Bible was not completely fixed until the 10th century of our era. Until then, variants in the text existed (mostly the result of scribal error). The task of the text critic was to weigh and choose between the variants. The goal was to determine the "original" text. The Dead Sea Scrolls have changed all that. Now we realize that the textual tradition of what became the Biblical books was far more fluid than we ever imagined. We can isolate different textual families (for example, the pre-Masoretic family of texts, the Septuagint family of texts and the pre-Samaritan family of texts of the Pentateuch). For some books, such as Jeremiah, we now recognize two editions of the same text.
The remarkable thing is that all these variant manuscripts were stored together in the caves at Qumran, indicating that in the late Scond Temple period, devout Jews were not concerned at having a fixed, unchanging text of Scipture. ...
We have also realized that the very terms "Bible" and "Biblical" are anachronisms in the Second Temple period. In this period, there was no Bible as such--no list of canonical (authoritative) books. A core group of authoritative books was accepted by all Jews as Scripture: the Torah (Pentateuch), the Prophets and the Psalms (although the text of the Psalter was not fixed). Beyond this core, however, the edges begin to blur. At Qumran the books of Enoch and Jubilees had scriptural authority, but they did not make the final cut of the Hebrew Bible. On the other hand, at Qumran the books of Chronicles probably had not attained scriptural authority. The Book of Esther, which was not found at Qumran, certainly did not have scriptural authority, since the Qumranites did not celebrate the festival of Purim, the Jewish festival that is still celebrated today by reading the Book of Esther in the synagogue. Thanks to the scrolls, we now realize that our familiar Jewish canon of 24 books did not exist until at least the late first century C.E." (Sidnie White Crawford: "Present at the Breakdown; Learning from the Greats," BAR 33 no. 3 [2007], 47, 49-50, p. 50).
