Clearer Insight into the Development of the Bible -- A Gift of the Scrolls

The past decade has seen a paradigm shift in our understanding of the development of the texts that eventually became the Bible. Almost sixty years ago, the first biblical scroll discovered – the Great Isaiah Scroll – was judged “vulgar” or “worthless.” During the latter half of the twentieth century, the many “biblical” scrolls were all judged according to the “standards” of the Masoretic, Samaritan, and Septuagintal texts, and the canons represented by those texts.
With the full publication of the Scrolls, the past decade has seen a Copernican shift: a decentralization of the three texts mentioned above, and an appreciation that they were but three fortunately preserved stars in a vast, otherwise lost, galaxy of ancient texts. This paper will attempt to review recent advances. The later categories of “biblical,” “parabiblical,” and “canonical” need to be refocused. There is nothing “sectarian” about the corpus. The development of the successive editions that form the received biblical books can be traced with greater accuracy. There never was an “unreworked Pentateuch,” and so 4Q364-367 will probably eventually be recognized as “4QPentateuch.”