ילקוט המזמורים האלוהיסטי וכתיבת שמות האל בקומראן

The Elohistic Psalter (EP) constitutes a unique phenomenon in the transmission of biblical literature. The present article addresses and advances the growing corpus of recent EP scholarship by linking the textual character of EP with a similar phenomenon, albeit significantly late, attested in a group of scrolls from Qumran. In contrast to some recent scholarly opinions, I maintain that the psalms contained in EP were originally composed using the divine name YHWH and only subsequently modified. The modification resulted not only in the replacement of YHWH with Elohim but also in a surprising plethora of compound divine names and epithets. Since the psalms contained in EP do not appear in non-elohistic form in any textual witness, we must assume that the elohistic modifications took place at a very early date. Despite the large time gap between EP and the scrolls from Qumran, the only large-scale parallel to the modifications made in the EP is attested in these scrolls. More precisely, the special treatment of divine names at Qumran appears only in a limited corpus: several biblical scrolls (notably 1QIsaa) attest to the practice of augmenting the divinename; and a group of sectarian nonbiblical manuscripts attests to the avoidance of the Tetragrammaton altogether or its replacement. In contrast, the great majority of biblical scrolls from Qumran do not attest to any modification of the Tetragram. This points to a canonical awareness among the scribes who copied the biblical scrolls. Other trajectories of the analogy between EP and the Qumran scrolls, as well as the basic motivation for modifying the divine name, are furtherpursued in detail.