329. “Exegesis of the Bible Enriched by the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Scribal Practice, Text and Canon in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Essays in Memory of Peter W. Flint, ed. John J. Collins and Ananda Geyser-Fouché, STDJ 130 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 225–46.lastPROOFS (original) (raw)
1 Different Types of Exegesis in the Scrolls The first Scripture scrolls were discovered in Cave 1 seventy years ago and since then they have not ceased to enrich Bible research. Merely some of the aspects of that research were affected by the discovery of the scrolls, viz., the study of the text and language, and its exegesis, while most literary-critical problems remain untouched by the Judean Desert scrolls. Thus, the scrolls have no bearing on the issue of the distinction between Isaiah and Deutero-Isaiah, as they are simply too late to be relevant to the history of the books before the third or second century BCE. We do not have the answers to many of the questions regarding the identity and origin of the scrolls, but these questions are irrelevant for most issues relating to matters of text, language, and the exegesis of small details. In my estimation , some fifteen percent of the Scripture texts were copied at Qumran,1 while the remainder were taken there by the Qumran settlers. The complete corpus reflects a multitude of approaches to the text. In addition to the Scripture texts, the members of the community also imported a large group of Bible commentaries and rewritten Bible compositions; in addition, they penned several pe-sharim at Qumran. We are talking about a Qumran corpus that included 242 different Scripture texts according to the latest count. This calculation includes tefillin and me-zuzot that previously had been excluded from the counting. However, these liturgical texts need to be included because they are as much biblical texts as the fragmentary biblical scrolls that are included. We count fragments of 210-212 biblical scrolls from Qumran together with twenty-five tefillin and seven mezuzot.2 As far as we can tell, no attention was paid to the quality or character 1 This evaluation is based on my view that fifteen percent of the Scripture texts were copied in the style of the Qumran Scribal Practice; see Emanuel Tov, Textual
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