Christian Palestinian Aramaic Fragment of Joshua

In this Fragment of the Month, Christa Müller-Kessler discusses a Christian Palestinian Aramaic fragment of the book of Joshua on a palimpsest from the Cairo Genizah. The Christian Palestinian Aramaic is a very interesting version, but not well attested or widely known, so any fragment that has survived is important.

Competition for Deciphering Herculaneum Rolls

Brent Seales and his team have announced a new competition to see who can read rolled up and carbonized Herculaneum scrolls. Unlike the En Gedi Leviticus scroll that had metallic ink, up to now it has proven very difficult to read these Herculaneum scrolls that used a carbon-based ink. So this would truly be an important development in the field.

Saqqara Book of the Dead

Owen Jarus republishes images of the new 16 meter-long Book of the Dead recently discovered intact in Saqqara.

Mirotadze on Greek Esther

Natia Mirotadze has published a brief and helpful discussion of the various Greek versions of Esther and the Old Georgian evidence. At risk of a shameless plug, for those who are interested in further details on the tradition of Esther and the Old Georgian texts, see several articles in the volume From Scribal Error to Rewriting that we co-edited together with Anneli Aejmelaeus.

Brent Nongbri's List of Radiocarbon Dated Manuscripts

Brent Nongbri has compiled a useful list of papyrus and parchment manuscripts that have been radiocarbon dated.

Authoritative NT Citations of the OT?

In Christian circles, the question often comes up whether NT authors' citations of OT passages are authoritative for textual decisions regarding to the OT passages. To this, the answer must simply be "No!" Such authoritative pronouncements were far from the minds of the original authors, and so we should by no means appropriate them in this way. Furthermore, the NT authors frequently cite different forms of the OT, so they cannot be said to give a unified voice in favor of a single original. They rather used a variety of texts that were available to them at that time generally without making text-critical judgments of the sort we are used to making today.

In my reading today, I came across a good example of this in the parallel texts Ps 6:9, Matt 7:23, and Luke 13:27. Both gospels disagree with each other and what seems to be the OG of the Psalm. Both gospel writers seem to have a mix of OG and revision towards the MT, but in different places. Matthew omits "all" against MT, LXX, and Luke, and he uses a different Greek word for "depart" that could perhaps be a revision towards the Hebrew (?--I'd have to look into this more). Luke keeps the OG except the final phrase, where he reflects a revision towards a more literal rendering of the Hebrew. So here we have just one example where it makes no sense to look to NT usage for authoritative textual judgments in favor of a single inspired original. The authors had access to an array of texts, translations, and revisions, and they used them creatively for their own purposes. But they have no claim to making authoritative pronouncements about the precise original text of the Hebrew or Greek Bibles.

Ps 6:9

 ס֣וּרוּ מִ֭מֶּנִּי כָּל־פֹּ֣עֲלֵי אָ֑וֶן

ἀπόστητε ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ, πάντες οἱ ἐργαζόμενοι τὴν ἀνομίαν,

Matt 7:23

ἀποχωρεῖτε ἀπ᾿ ἐμοῦ οἱ ἐργαζόμενοι τὴν ἀνομίαν.

Luke 13:27

ἀπόστητε ἀπ᾿ ἐμοῦ πάντες ἐργάται ἀδικίας.

Tov on Torah Scrolls

Emanuel Tov has published a nice piece on the early history of the Torah scroll that describes his take on the origins of the scribal traditions. My main critique is that he follows Haran in supposing that early scrolls only had one book of the Torah, while the complete Torah scroll was a late development of the common era. He understands this as a technological limitation in the earlier periods, but it's difficult for me to see how this could be, since all you really have to do is stitch more sheets on. Indeed, even in the rabbinic periods of complete Torah scrolls, scribes also continued to produce copies of individual books of the Torah. I think you see the same both/and practice in the DSS, so synchronic functional differences seem more compelling to me than diachronic and technological developments.

While I admit that we have no preserved, complete Torah scrolls from the Hellenistic and Roman periods to conclusively demonstrate that complete Torah scrolls were produced at the time, I think the evidence strongly suggests this. Some scrolls indeed only had one book, but many had more. In my study of the Exodus scrolls, fully half of them had concrete evidence for containing more than one book, including the 4QExod-Lev-f from as early as the 3rd century BCE. The large formats of these scrolls were clearly designed to hold very large quantities of text, and even if they contained the entire Torah they would still have been significantly smaller than modern Torah scrolls, so we can hardly discount the possibility of such scrolls. Tov says that maybe these scrolls contained only two books, but other than the much later Rabbinic prohibition of this practice, we have no evidence that this was ever done in the earlier periods. So why discount half of the DSS evidence based on an unattested alternative possibility, rather than simply prefer the more likely explanation that the DSS (just like rabbinic literature) evidence both scrolls of individual books and Torah scrolls?

In a forthcoming article, I do suggest a possible technological development that could have prompted the creation of the Torah scroll, but at a much earlier period. I have observed in a COMSt Bulletin article that the Hebrew/Aramaic script decreased in size significantly in the Hellenistic period (3rd century BCE), making it possible to fit much more text onto scrolls. I think this is the most likely technological impetus for the creation of the Torah scroll, and it is no coincidence that we see evidence for this already in the earliest of the DSS. So it seems to me that the Torah scroll has even deeper roots than Tov is willing to concede.