Retrospective | My Journey with the Dead Sea Scrolls

I would like to thank the editors of Ancient Jew Review for this opportunity to reflect on my long engagement with the “biblical” manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, in particular the book of Deuteronomy. I often think that scholarly understanding of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls and I grew up together; over the years, and now decades, a paradigm shift has occurred in the field, and my own views have changed along with it.

I began my work on the Deuteronomy scrolls in 1986, when I was invited by Frank Moore Cross, one of the original members of the editorial team for the Cave 4Q materials, to edit and publish seven of the Deuteronomy manuscripts assigned to his lot. The beginning of the work involved a three-week long trip to Jerusalem (my first trip abroad!) to work with the actual scroll fragments, which were stored in the Rockefeller Museum (formerly the Palestine Archaeological Museum or PAM) in East Jerusalem. This trip was essentially a private tutorial in deciphering scroll fragments, conducted by John Strugnell, then editor-in-chief of the scrolls publication project and my teacher. The working conditions in the Rockefeller Museum were basic at best; the scroll fragments were stored in locked drawers in an unheated basement room that also functioned as a bomb shelter. We (the editorial team) used rulers to measure fragments and hand-held magnifying glasses to discern traces of writing. Our only photographs were the PAM series of infrared photographs taken in the 1950s. This is quite a contrast to the sophisticated digital equipment and on-line images used today!

Work on the Deuteronomy manuscripts was relatively straightforward. Each fragment had to be deciphered and located, both within the text of Deuteronomy and relative to other fragments of the manuscript. By this process the full extent of each manuscript was ascertained. A full physical description of each manuscript was undertaken. Finally, I did the text-critical work of painstakingly comparing the text of each particular manuscript with other extant versions. For my dissertation I used the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint (down to the granular level of individual witnesses), the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Peshitta, the Targums, and the Latin Versions. This text-critical work revealed the plethora of variants found in each manuscript, variants which sometimes agreed with one, sometimes another of the ancient versions, but sometimes were unique to that manuscript. At this point my perceptions of the textual history of the biblical books began to shift; as a student of Cross I had been taught that every manuscript could and should be placed in relation to one of the three major extant versions (the MT, the LXX, and the SP), which Cross considered to represent three separate textual “families” or streams of tradition.[1] This schema at times did work for the Deuteronomy manuscripts in my charge; for example, the manuscript 4QDeutᵍ never differed in its extant text from MT, in either text or orthography. But for other manuscripts the Cross schema simply did not work. It was becoming evident that the old, pre-Qumran, text-critical presuppositions had to be jettisoned.

Perhaps the most interesting manuscript of that first batch on which I worked in this regard was 4QDeutⁿ, or the All Souls Deuteronomy.[2] 4QDeutⁿ had unusual physical characteristics; it was of small dimensions and contained a different order of chapters than the received text (8:5-10 preceded 5:1ff. on the manuscript). Further, its short extant text was filled with variants, exhibiting no obvious pattern of agreement with any other version. In particular, its text of the Sabbath commandment in the Decalogue was harmonized in a unique fashion, adding the Exodus reason for Sabbath observance to the Deuteronomy commandment.[3] How was such a strange little manuscript to be understood? I proposed (and it has been generally accepted) that 4QDeutⁿ was a specially prepared Handschriften, a study manuscript that contained excerpts from Deuteronomy for personal or communal use. It never contained the whole book of Deuteronomy.[4] Further, I considered the harmonization in the fourth commandment to be the work of the copying scribe himself, thus beginning to draw attention to the role of the scribe in the creation of biblical texts.

After my work on the Deuteronomy scrolls, I was invited by John Strugnell to collaborate with Emanuel Tov on the edition of the manuscripts 4Q364-367. These manuscripts, then known as 4QPentateuchal Paraphrases, had, already in 1990, an interesting history. In the 1950s, when the Cave 4Q manuscripts were being sorted out by the original editorial team, 4Q364-367 were assigned to Frank Moore Cross. This assignment was made because the manuscripts all contained passages from the books of the Pentateuch; 4Q364 and 365, the largest manuscripts, contained a running text of the Pentateuch from Genesis to Deuteronomy. However, when Cross began to work through the manuscripts, he observed that each of them strayed in some way from the received witnesses to the Pentateuch, in particular containing text not found in any of the other witnesses. He therefore decided that they were not biblical manuscripts at all and transferred them to Strugnell, who was responsible for new Hebrew compositions. Strugnell, in private correspondence, referred to them as “wild” Pentateuch manuscripts.[5]

When Tov and I began to edit the manuscripts, which we renamed 4QReworked Pentateuch (4QRP), it was obvious to us that these were basically Pentateuch manuscripts, but that they contained what Tov referred to as “exegetical elements,” especially pluses.[6] Some of these pluses were identical to or resembled those found in the Samaritan Pentateuch, but some were unique to the manuscript.[7] The question for me became how to understand these manuscripts in relation to other witnesses to the Pentateuch, on the one hand, and new compositions based on the Pentateuch, such as Jubilees and the Temple Scroll, on the other. In my first public statement on the 4QRP manuscripts I can see myself wrestling with that question: “Clearly, the community held the Pentateuch in very high esteem, but had no taboos against a very free handling of the text” and “these manuscripts show by their very existence…that there was no concept of ‘a canonical text’ at Qumran, but that many exemplars of a book could exist side by side with no apparent difficulty.”[8] Cross and Strugnell, in their original classification of 4Q364-367, had concluded that these manuscripts violated the heuristic concept “Pentateuch” and needed to be placed on the other side of an invisible dividing line and labeled “not Pentateuch.” But, as my statements from as early as 1991 imply, what if our concept of “Pentateuch” was simply anachronistic for the late Second Temple period?

This question became more urgent as the 1990s went on and more and more manuscript evidence from the Qumran caves was published. It became clear that variants in manuscripts were the norm rather than the exception, and that the attempt to place all biblical manuscripts in textual families was doomed to failure.[9] Further, the question of the classification of the 4QRP manuscripts continued to be problematic.

In my 2008 book, Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times,[10] I wrote extensively on these questions. By that time, I had completely abandoned the idea of a dividing line between “Pentateuch” and “not Pentateuch,” preferring instead to speak of a spectrum of texts that were “the product of scribal interpretation,”[11] thus emphasizing the important role that scribes played in the production of texts throughout the Second Temple period. In the case of the books of the Pentateuch, the manuscript evidence demonstrated that there were texts that were short and unexpanded (of which the MT is a descendant), other texts that had a variety of short, unsystematic expansions (of which the LXX is an exemplar), and another particular family of texts that contained a systematic series of harmonizations between passages in Exodus and Numbers and their parallel passages in Deuteronomy 1-3, as well as content editing in key passages like the Plague Narratives (the Samaritan Pentateuch is a descendant of this textual family). Finally, some texts went beyond the pre-SP family in their expansions, e.g., 4Q364 and 365.[12] All of this textual multiplicity of variants, I argued, was the work of scribes, who were learned professionals tasked with transmitting and interpreting the classical literature of ancient Israel for later generations.

As a result of my developing focus on the activity of scribes in the 2000s, my monograph Scribes and Scrolls at Qumran (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019) emphasized the scribal profession from the time of ancient Israel and Judah through the first century CE, as well as the material evidence for that profession provided by the Qumran scrolls and the archaeology of Qumran and its caves. This volume brought together the two major foci of my career, the transmission of the “biblical” texts in the Second Temple period and the history of Qumran and its scroll collection.[13] In this volume, I concluded that the primary activity of the Jewish community that resided at Qumran, which I identify with the wider Essene movement in late Second Temple Judaism, was the collection, storage, and copying of Jewish religious literature, both ancient texts and contemporary compositions, from its foundation in the early to mid-first century BCE until its destruction in 68 CE.

I have always acknowledged that the Dead Sea Scrolls have been very good to me. I was very fortunate, as a young graduate student, to have the opportunity to work on the Scrolls at the moment when scrolls scholarship was breaking open. I was also fortunate to work with a close circle of fine colleagues, who freely shared ideas and supported each other’s work.[14] The Dead Sea Scrolls captured my intellectual interest very early in my development as a scholar, and they have held it ever since.

Sidnie White Crawford is Willa Cather Professor Emerita of Classics & Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Visiting Professor of Bible at Princeton Theological Seminary

[1] Frank Moore Cross, “The History of the Biblical Text in the Light of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert,” in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, ed. F. M. Cross and S. Talmon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1975), 177-95.

[2] All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City had provided the funding for the manuscript’s purchase from Kando and the Bedouin, hence its appellation. See Sidnie White Crawford, “4QDeutⁿ,” in Qumran Cave 4, IX: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Kings, ed. E. Ulrich, F. M. Cross et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 117-28.

[3] See Sidnie White Crawford, “The All Souls Deuteronomy (4QDeutⁿ) and the Decalogue,” in eadem, The Text of the Pentateuch: Textual Criticism and the Dead Sea Scrolls (BZAW 493; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 13-28.

[4] This was in contrast to a manuscript like 4QDeutᶜ, which, in its extant fragments, covers chapters of Deuteronomy from chapter 3 to chapter 32, and therefore was a complete scroll of Deuteronomy. See Crawford, “4QDeutn—Biblical Manuscript or Excerpted Text?” in The Text of the Pentateuch, 29-36.

[5] In a letter to Ben-Zion Wacholder discussing Yadin’s edition of the Temple Scroll, Strugnell states “the work to which these fragments [those found on plate 43.366] belong is not a copy of the ‘Temple Scroll,’ but a Pentateuch with frequent non-biblical additions; whether they are quotations from the Temple Scroll incorporated by that Pentateuch, or vice versa (i.e. bits of an earlier ‘wild’ Pentateuch text used as a source by 11QT) remains to be seen.” Ben-Zion Wacholder, The Dawn of Qumran: The Sectarian Torah and the Teacher of Righteousness (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1983), 206.

[6] Emanuel Tov, “The Textual Status of 4Q364-367 (4QPP),” in The Madrid Qumran Congress: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Madrid 18-21 March 1991, ed. J. Trebolle Barrera and L. Vegas Montaner (vol. 1; Leiden/Madrid: Brill and Editorial Complutense, 1992), 49.

[7] Sidnie A. White, “4Q364 & 365: A Preliminary Report,” in The Madrid Qumran Congress, 1:218.

[8] White, “4Q364 & 365,” 219f.6 and 228.

[9] There were in some cases manuscripts that were clearly related to one of the complete exemplars, such as the example of 4QDeutᵍ above. For example, 4QExod-Levᶠ, 4QpaleoExodᵐ, and 4QNumᵇ stand close to the received text of the Samaritan Pentateuch. However, other manuscripts do not stand close to any of the received texts. Tov labeled these manuscripts “non-aligned.” Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (3rd rev. ed.; Minneapolis, Fortress, 2012), 109.

[10] Sidnie White Crawford, Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008).

[11] Rewriting Scripture, 39.

[12] See especially my essay “Interpreting the Pentateuch through Scribal Processes: the Evidence from the Qumran Manuscripts,” in Insights into Editing in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East: What does documented evidence tell us about the transmission of authoritative texts?, ed. Reinhard Müller and Juha Pakkala (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), 59-80.

[13] I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge my debt to the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, at which I had several fellowships in the 1990s, for kindling my interest in archaeology and convincing me that the study of texts and material realia go hand-in-hand.

[14] My own work has been particularly influenced by the work of George Brooke, Emanuel Tov, Eugene Ulrich, and Molly Zahn.