Читать книгу Judaism II - Группа авторов - Страница 17

Before the discovery of ancient scrolls in the Judean Desert (the Dead Sea Scrolls), scholars were not aware that MT existed in the same consonantal form as early as the last centuries BCE.⁵ But detailed comparisons of the various forms of the Judean Desert texts with the consonantal text of MT–putting aside the vocalization, accentuation, and other elements of MT dating to the medieval period–reveals that an ancient group of manuscripts from the Second Temple Period is virtually identical to MT.

We find a striking difference between the Judean Desert scrolls from places other than Qumran and the Qumran scrolls, where most of the scrolls were found. The Qumran scrolls display textual diversity, while the twenty-five texts that were found in the Judean Desert at sites other than Qumran display almost complete identity (roughly 98% agreement) in consonants with the medieval Masoretic text (as reflected in the earliest complete version of MT, called the Leningrad Codex; see discussion below).

The non-Qumran Judean Desert scrolls were found at both the earlier site of Masada (written between 50 BCE and 30 CE)⁶ and the later sites of Wadi Murabbaʿat, Wadi Sdeir, Naḥal Ḥever, Naḥal ʿArugot, and Naḥal Seʾelim, dating to the period of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132–135 CE. The latter were copied between 20 and 115 CE.

4QGen^b, officially labeled as a Qumran text probably deriving from one of the Judean Desert sites needs to be added to this group, as well as the recently opened En-Gedi scroll which agrees with codex L in all of its details. It is fair to say that we have access to only a very small percentage of proto-MT manuscripts.

The virtual identity between the early scrolls and the medieval texts can be seen best in an examination of the well-preserved texts such as:⁷

• The Masada Psalms scroll copy a (MasPs^a) dating to the end of the 1^st century BCE, and containing one complete and two fragmentary columns.

• The Masada Leviticus scroll copy b (MasLev^b) dating to 30 BCE–30 CE, and containing five fragmentary columns.

• The Psalms scroll from cave 5/6 in Naḥal Ḥever (5/6ḤevPs) dating to 50–68 CE, and containing twelve fragmentary columns.

• The Murabbaʿat scroll of the Minor Prophets (MurXII) dating to ca. 115 CE and containing major parts of these books in 21 columns.

• The En-Gedi scroll of Leviticus chapters 1–2, ascribed to the 1^st–2^nd century CE as shown by Segal et al.⁸

This last text was deciphered and published only in 2016, and although its evidence is fragmentary, it was the first time an ancient text agreed entirely with the consonantal medieval text.

The other Judean texts of the same type differ in a few details, but never more than the medieval texts differ among each other. The categories of differences pertain to details of spelling, small linguistic differences, and minute content differences. Thus, the relationship between MT and the ancient Judean Desert texts is one of almost complete identity showing that the consonantal framework of MT changed very little over the course of one thousand years—the period between the scrolls and the earliest medieval codices.