Whose Speech Is It Anyway? On the Interpretation of 4Q378 Frg. 3 ii

The highly fragmentary Qumran manuscript 4Q378, also known as 4QApocryphon of Joshuaa, features a rewritten version of the Joshua tradition as found in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua. On frg. 3, to which the small frg. 4 may be joined, an account of the succession of Moses by Joshua is preserved. Part of this account, col. ii features a speech by a first-person plural subject which apparently is based on Josh 1:16-18, the Transjordanian tribes’ response to Joshua. While there is broad agreement as to the identification of the biblical base text, substantial problems in the interpretation of the rewritten version have yet to be discussed, including the question of who is speaking. While Devorah Dimant and Ariel Feldman have argued that the response of the Transjordanian tribes is reworked by the scribe into an address by all Israel, the present paper makes the case for the Transjordanian tribes as the subject also in the rewritten version.