Care must
be taken therefore not to exaggerate the contribution of these texts to the
text-critical endeavor. Since most of the two hundred-plus biblical texts are
in fragmentary form, some of them indeed consisting of a few words or verses,
it can be misleading to imply that the Qumran scrolls witness to fresh and full
antique forms for the entire Bible. Very few of the scrolls in fact contain a
full book, the 1QIsaa scroll being the best example of an almost
complete entity. To say that “all the books” of the Bible, apart from Esther
are represented in Qumran likewise needs to be qualified, particularly since
the evidence for some of the other biblical entities such as Judges, Kings, Ruth,
Song of Songs, Qoheleth, Lamentations, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles amounts to
hardly more than a few verses in each case. Moreover, in this respect, it needs
to be remembered that these biblical texts appear to have been copied and used
for different purposes: some are careful study texts, some were perhaps used
for liturgy, and others are excerpted texts, such as the tefillin and 4QDeutn.
This variation in purpose, leading to disparities in the quality and care taken
in the copying of the manuscripts, has direct implications for the text-critical
relevance of variations in the text.
The principal
contribution of the Judaean desert discoveries to the task of textual criticism
therefore does not just consist in the number of readings that diverse from [the]
M[asoretic text]. They also challenge scholars to be careful not to place M
always exclusively at the center of their textual thinking. The Qumran biblical
manuscripts represent one example of pre-canonical fluidity already present in
the Judaism of that era and show that, alongside popular texts marked by
assorted corruptions, there also existed some carefully executed texts. These
were restrained and conservative in orthography, and their scribes scrupulously
preserved difficult readings that other manuscript traditions appear to have
altered or eliminated or smoothed over. It is understandable therefore that
most textual critics insist on the importance of contextualizing the various
Qumran readings and of attending to the details of each fragment or scroll in
its own right when evaluating its text-critical worth. (Carmel McCarthy, “Textual Criticism and
Biblical Translation,” in The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Companion, ed.
John Barton [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016], 536-7, comment in square brackets added for clarification)