Sources and Redaction in the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Growth of Ancient Texts

One of the most fascinating insights provided by the scrolls is the way they allow us a first hand glance at the way in which ancient texts grew. By looking at the original manuscripts, sometimes corrected by another scribe, sometimes available in radically different witnesses to the same composition, we are almost watching ancient texts grow and evolve in front of our eyes. The question of how ancient texts developed over time has been and continues to be of great interest to scholars of the Hebrew Bible; the important difference for Qumran studies is that we have actual ancient manuscripts to check the theory in crucial places. What I hope to do in this chapter is to look at ways in which readers and interpreters of the Scrolls can feed off biblical criticism and ways in which the disciplines are unique. I will use the methodological observations of John Barton on source- and redaction criticism of the Hebrew Bible as my conversation partner.
In this contribution I offer some reflections on ways in which methodological bridges may be built between the source- and redaction critical study of the Hebrew Bible and the source- and redaction critical study of the scrolls and areas where the physicality of the ancient manuscripts adds data far beyond of what is available to biblical scholars. In line with the editor's vision methodology is very much foregrounded in this chapter which also includes many 'hands on' examples.