Donald W. Parry on the Absence of Isaiah 2:9b-10 in the Great Isaiah Scroll

  

Notwithstanding several carefully articulated arguments, vv. 9b–10 exist in three Hebrew witnesses (MT 4QIsa^a 4QIsa^b) plus LXX Syr Vulg; 1QIsa^a remains the sole witness that omits vss. 9b–10; the other witnesses, including two from Qumran (4QIsa^a 4QIsa^b, although note that the texts of these copies of Isaiah are fragmented), include vv. 9b–10. And furthermore, the Greek text features a significant plus at the end of v. 10 (ὅταν ἀναστῇ θραῦσαι τὴν γῆν, “when he rises to crush the earth”), a plus that was evidently assimilated from v. 19. After carefully weighing the evidence, some critics maintain that 1QIsa^a did indeed accidently drop this long passage while copying the text. Although the mechanism for dropping it is not immediately apparent, it is my considered view that the scribe or one dictating the text inadvertently omitted a full (horizontal) line of text from the Vorlage. Forty-five characters are missing from 1QIsa^a, just slightly above the average of 43–44 characters per line for this column. (Donald W. Parry, Exploring the Isaiah Scrolls and Their Textual Variants [Supplements to the Textual History of the Bible 3; Leiden, Brill: 2020], 49-50)