Manuscripts and Authors of the Psalms

It is well known that pre-modern manuscripts have individual scribal peculiarities. Two examples discussed here are the distinctive treatments of the sibilants samekh and śin in the Qumran manuscript 4QPs-f, and the unusual second person feminine singular suffix כִי – in the traditional Masoretic Text (MT) of Psalm 103, the unusual forms not being attested in the 4QPs-b copy of the text. It is noted that while it is acknowledged that manuscripts such as the Qumran scrolls have individual peculiarities, in general the peculiarities of the MT have been treated as if they stem from the “original author” of the composition. Given the decentralization of the MT in recent scholarship on the text of the Hebrew Bible, it is better to treat these forms also as most likely simply representing scribal peculiarities. This fluidity of linguistic features is part of a broader phenomenon where each manuscript of a biblical book in antiquity was a performance of a community tradition where the exact wording was not as important as the effective conveying of what was understood to be the meaning of the tradition.