A Contextualized Approach to the Hebrew Dead Sea Scrolls Containing Exodus

This thesis suggests a new approach to studying the Hebrew-language Dead Sea Scrolls
(DSS) containing Exodus. After surveying the history of research, Longacre suggests applying a contextualized approach to the study of these scrolls, which seeks to understand them first as individual material artifacts and then in comparison to other manuscripts which are most closely contextually connected to them. Each manuscript is only subsequently compared with increasingly contextually distant manuscripts according to a hierarchy of contextual proximity.

A network of close contextual connections between the Hebrew DSS containing Exodus warrant the isolation of this corpus as a test case for application of a contextualized approach. Based on new transcriptions and reconstructions of each of the included manuscripts
(1Q2 2Q2 2Q3 2Q4 4Q1 4Q11 4Q13 4Q14 4Q17 4Q18 4Q19 4Q20 4Q21 4Q22 4Q158 4Q364
4Q365 4Q366 Mur1), Longacre then analyzes patterns that emerge from a comparison of the characteristics of each of these manuscripts. Finally, from a close examination of textual overlaps from a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative perspectives, Longacre suggests several specific groups and clusters of texts and synthesizes them to provide clearer insight into the documented Hebrew-language textual history of the book of Exodus.