The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible.

Davies, Philip R.

By EUGENE ULRICH. Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature, vol. 1. Grand Rapids, Mich.: WM. B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING CO., 1999. Pp. xviii + 309. $25 (paper).

Eugene Ulrich is arguably the leading textual critic of his generation, thanks to his long and deep involvement with the Qumran scrolls, a resource now central to this sub-discipline. These fourteen essays span the years 1980-98 and are arranged topically. Part one begins with two general discussions of the growth of the scriptural books and of canon formation, followed by four more focused studies, arranged in chronological order, and then two more specialized chapters: one on the Qumran palaeo-Hebrew manuscripts and one an orthographic and textual comparison of Quintan Cave 4 Daniel manuscripts with the traditional Masoretic Hebrew/Aramaic text. Part two comprises essays on various aspects of the Greek translations (Josephus, the Hexapla) and of the Old Latin, the last two being chronologically the earliest of the collection.

Such a volume, as the preface readily confesses, displays both repetition and evidence of change of opinion over the years. The pluriformity of biblical texts at the end of the Second Temple period, for example, is remarked on frequently, as is Ulrich's view that the canon was still closed by the end of the first century of our era.

As for changes of mind, Ulrich has clearly developed disagreements with both Tov and Cross, erstwhile mentors: in his later work he disagrees explicitly over Tov's "Qumran orthography" and Cross's "text-types" and implicit[y departs from both scholars in his understanding of the goals of textual criticism. In this volume one can see how the text-critical task of reconstructing the "original text" is endorsed on p. 279 (1985) and then rejected, with a full and lucid explanation of its impossibility, on p. 14 (1997). Without consulting the details of the original essays (pp. 290-91) the reader might become a little confused by this contradiction! I also wonder whether the present, quite "minimalistic" Ulrich would accept the earlier Ulrich's arguments (pp. 271-80) for an original first column of Origen's Hexapla containing the Hebrew text, since the better of the arguments that he lays out seem to indicate the opposite.

Most of what is stated in this volume should elicit scholarly assent. On the origins of the Jewish scriptures and of the canon (chapters 1 and 2) Ulrich is correct, without doubt, to insist that the term "Bible" is quite anachronistic and to remind the reader (who often does need reminding!) that the Hebrew scriptures were a collection of scrolls and not a book. Similarly, he later observes that the received Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible is not a consistent or coherent entity, but simply one choice made for each individual book/scroll, "a collection of disparate texts" (p. 32); the MT as a whole thus has no specific textual characteristics. On just a few issues, however, Ulrich seems to me to go either too far or not far enough. He suggests, for example, that the evidence from Qumran belies any notion of an agreed canon within Judaism as late as the first century of our era (e.g., pp. 20-21, 56). But both Josephus and 4 Ezra (written at the end of that century) pronounce a fixed number of scriptural books (even if they disagree on the arithmetic), showing that the notion of a closed canon was certainly accepted by some Jews before 100 A.D. What is nevertheless likely is that such a closure was not accepted among the authors and keepers of the Qumran scrolls. Why, indeed, should they accept the verdict of a religious and political authority they despised? Ulrich is right, nevertheless, to state that such a fixed canon did not immediately lead to a standardizing of the text of these chosen books, and that in the first century of our era hardly any two scrolls of most biblical books will have been textually identical.

Elsewhere, Ulrich perhaps does not go quite far enough when he speaks of the "community of Israel" as the context for the production of the scriptures and their texts. Such a single, coherent "community" is historically problematic. It is true that on the whole we do not have examples of "sectarian" biblical texts (though a detailed case for IQI[sa.sup.a] having sectarian readings has recently been made), but there were ideological aspects to the canons that various Jewish groups, each regarding itself as the true israel, adopted. The books of Enoch, for example, were surely deliberately excluded from the canon that the rabbis and even most Greek-speaking Jews inherited--after the time of Ben Sira, fulsome in his praise of this figure. But the inclusion of books of Enoch within a group's canon defines a quite different sort of Judaism, as Sacchi and Boccaccini have argued. From the Qumran community's point of view, then, ought not the Enochic manuscripts historically speaking to be regarded as "biblical texts"?

There is just one other point where Ulrich's careful and reflective mind does not go far enough, either: in reviewing the textual witness of the various scriptural books, he speaks of the text of Genesis as having become "basically stable by the late Second Temple period" (p, 25), since the Qumran manuscripts display relatively little deviation. But he spends much of the book explaining to us that stabilization was not a natural process! Leviticus exhibits a similar degree of relative conformity, but, as Ulrich says (p. 25), this may be "because it was a work containing specific cultic regulations" What makes a text "stabilize" rather than follow what Ulrich describes as the usual process, increasing differentiation? It is logical, rather, on Ulrich's analysis of textual transmission that Genesis is a relatively late text, whose transmission history is too short to have generated as much deviation as most others.

Ulrich is particularly persuasive, on the other hand, in explaining the difficulty faced by text-critics, but also by many religious communities, in defining what the most authentic Bible is. While he accepts that a religious denomination may simply choose its text on the basis of doctrine or tradition, the text-critic must grapple with the question of historical priority. Here the Scrolls have actually hindered rather than helped this task. If we try to recover a single "original" text from the plurality of text forms that the manuscripts present, we can often go back in most cases only as far as differing, contemporary "original" texts, simultaneously forms of an "original" that may be either inaccessible or in fact non-existent, since most texts did not simply grow from an original draft. Indeed, as he puts it (p. 52) "our exploration will erase even more the line between 'higher criticism' and 'lower criticism'"; thus, the phenomena investigated by the source-critic, the redaction-critic, and the text-critic are all aspects of a single process, the scribal activity of producing and re-producing texts by copying, editing, combining, interpreting. For "text," then, read "process," one frozen by a fixation of text and canon, but then resuming in a different way in the process of exegesis.

This is a book to recommend especially to anyone hooked on "canonical criticism" or, indeed, on the historical superiority of the received text of the Hebrew Bible. Alongside rather technical studies are highly readable reflections on the theological and philosophical aspects of what is often taken as an obscure and forbidding craft. A number of fascinating problems yet remain to be considered: given the book of Ezekiel's huge influence on the Damascus Document in particular, is it merely accidental that only one scroll of that book was recovered from Qumran? Or are such statistics misleading? Again, if, as Ulrich suggests, the Samaritans adopted an already existing Judean text of the Pentateuch and made very few alterations to it, when and why did this happen, and what does it tell us about the date of the schism between Samaritans and Judeans? (And why is the Pentateuch, perhaps together with Joshua, the only part of the Hebrew Bible that has no specifically Judean features?)

With the labors of DJD behind him, Ulrich might now consider writing a systematic comprehensive book on the text criticism of the Hebrew Bible and especially on what its methods and results mean to biblical scholarship.

PHILIP R. DAVIES

UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD