Early Texts of the Torah: Revisiting the Greek Scholarly Context

The paper seeks a new way to understand the early activity within versions of the Torah. It builds on two recent developments. First, a refined understanding of the so-called “harmonizations” in the pre-Samaritan Pentateuch and the circulation of this version in early Hellenistic Palestine.
|Second, new insights with regard to the extent of Homeric scholarship in contemporary Alexandria, and of the type of contact between this activity and Jewish literati. The result is a new view of the pre-Samaritan text as an academic – rather than popular – text, which corresponds
|with academic textual practices elsewhere. It seeks to smooth out narratological problems in the text, basing itself on the image of Moses as a faultless author. This view explains the continuum between the various attestations of the pre-SP in Qumran and elsewhere. We show that previous explanations of the pre-Samaritan text duplications as a sequel to phenomenon in cuneiform literature are unwarranted. Finally, it is suggested to project from the explicit discussions about the legitimacy of academic Torah texts in Jewish-Hellenistic writings on their less explicit contemporaries in Judea. This reasoning paves the way for a renewed evaluation of the early stages of the conservative version, known as proto-MT, being part of the same dynamics.