נוסח ספר דניאל במגילות מדבר יהודה

The book of Daniel, the latest of the biblical books, is preserved in at least eight manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls (with a fragment from a ninth manuscript presented in this study). This article analyzes the textual status of Daniel at Qumran in light of the complex textual history of Daniel as attested in other versions of the book. Outside of the scrolls, one can identify three distinct literary editions of Daniel: (1) the Masoretic text; (2) the Old Greek translation, which contains three additional significant passages (the ‘Additions’ to Daniel), and markedly different versions of chapters 4–6; and (3) the translation attributed to Theodotion, which covers the same material as the Old Greek version, but has been corrected towards a Hebrew text similar to MT. The first section of the article demonstrates that the Qumran copies of
Daniel reflect the MT edition of the composition, in those scrolls where positive evidence is available (due to the fragmentary nature of the evidence, we cannot make this claim for all of the scrolls). The evidence includes the absence of the long Addition in the middle of chapter 3; the presence of Dan 4:5–6 (which are absent in the Old Greek) and the formulation of 4:15 according to the MT version; the presence of Dan 5:17–22 (which are absent in the Old Greek); and perhaps the use of various divine epithets in Daniel 2. Despite agreements in minor details between the Qumran Daniel scrolls and the Old Greek or Theodotion translations, the overall textual affiliation of these scrolls is decidedly with the MT edition of this composition. The second half of the article suggests that, in contrast to the exclusive affiliation of the DSS Daniel manuscripts with the MT literary edition, two nonbiblical compositions discovered at Qumran may show evidence of alternate literary editions of Daniel. First, it is suggested that the Genesis Apocryphon, column 13, formulates its description of Noah’s dream of a felled tree based upon the OG version of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Daniel 4 (in addition to other biblical passages). Second, the sectarian scroll 4Q174 contains an explicit quotation from the book of Daniel that does not match any of our extant versions. The exegetical background of this otherwise unknown passage is examined in light of the internal development of the book of Daniel itself, leading to the cautious consideration of the potential implications of this citation for understanding the development of the text of Daniel. The combination of the evidence from the biblical and nonbiblical manuscripts demonstrates the complexity of the ancient textual evidence for Daniel in particular, and biblical books in general, and the necessity of investigating both in order to arrive at a complete picture of the book’s textual history.