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. 4Qsama,
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. 4Qanc, 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 (4QSamb), 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 (4QpalaeoExm), and a Herodian scroll of Numbers
(4QNumb) 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: 4QExa. 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)