Frank Moore Cross on the Support for the Septuagint from the Dead Sea Scrolls

  

Those who have defended the originality of the traditional text by arguing that the Greek translator abbreviated the Hebrew text before him are proved wrong. The Septuagint faithfully reflects a conservative Hebrew textual family. On the contrary, the Proto-Massoretic and Massoretic family is marked by editorial reworking and conflation the secondary filling out of names and epithets, expansion from parallel passages, and even glosses from biblical passages outside Jeremiah.

 

The text of Samuel found in three manuscripts from Cave IV is non-Massoretic. 4Qsam^a, an extensively-preserved manuscript of ca. 50-25 B.C., contains a text-type closely related to the Vorlage of the Septuagint. Its precise textual relationships can be defined even more narrowly. It is allied with the text of Samuel used by the Chronicler about 400 B.C. It is even more closely allied to the Greek text of Samuel used by Josephus, and surviving in a substratum of the Lucianic recension of the Septuagint. In short, its textual family is Palestinian, and corresponds to the Greek recension usually called Proto-Lucianic. 4Qan^c, written by the same scribe who copied the Sérek Hay-yáḥad (1QS), preserves the same Palestinian text-type. The archaic manuscript of Samuel from Cave IV (4QSam^b), dating from the third century B.C., belongs to an early stage of this Palestinian tradition.

 

Divergent textual families are represented also on the Pentateuch. A palaeo-Hebrew manuscript of Exodus (4QpalaeoEx^m), and a Herodian scroll of Numbers (4QNum^b) present a textual tradition closely allied to the Samaritan, a Palestinian text-form characterized by wide-spread glosses, expansions from parallel passages, and like editorial activity. We note that these textual Proto-Massoretic (and Massoretic) text of such books as Jeremiah described above, and Isaiah . . . In contrast to these expansionistic texts, however, the Massoretic text of the Pentateuch was remarkably short and conservative. One other manuscript may be cited to illustrate these deviant textual families found at Qumrân: 4QEx^a. This Herodian exemplar stands very close to the Hebrew text in Egypt by the Greek translator of the Septuagint. (F. M. Cross, Jr., “The Contribution of the Qumrân Discoveries to the Study of the Biblical Text,” in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, ed. Frank Moore Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1975], 279-81)