Recently Ada Yardeni, the foremost paleographer working in Israel today, made a startling claim: More than 50 Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts were copied by the same scribe.1 The 54 manuscripts came from six different caves: Qumran Caves 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 11. Even more surprising, Yardeni identified the same scribal hand in a manuscript of the Joshua Apocryphon found 30 miles south of Qumran at the famous desert fortress of Masada, the last holdout in the Jewish revolt against Rome.
Yardeni is not the first scholar to identify more than one Qumran text copied by the same scribe. After all, scribes in ancient Judea were trained professionals; it is not surprising that each scribe would have written several of the more than 900 documents that comprise the Dead Sea Scrolls. Careful study of scribal hands has shown that a number of other manuscripts were copied by a single scribe. For example, the 040 scribe who penned one of the intact scrolls (the Community Rule—1QS) from the famous Cave 1, where Bedouin made the initial discovery of the scrolls, also copied an important text of the Biblical Book of Samuel (4QSamc) and made corrections in what is probably the most famous of the scrolls, the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaiaha).
John Strugnell, one of the members of the original team assigned to publish the scrolls, attributed several other manuscripts to the same scribe; however, these manuscripts are small and fragmentary, and not all scholars agree on the identifications.2 Other leading scholars, including Józef T. Milik and J.P.M. van der Ploeg, have made similar suggestions, but tentatively.
More recently, Eugene Ulrich identified the hand of a scribe who wrote three manuscripts found in different caves (4QIsac, 1QPsb and 11QM). He described this scribe as having “an elegant, careful, 041 distinctive hand” that is immediately recognizable.3 Ulrich’s identification is thoroughly documented and is likely to withstand scholarly scrutiny better than some of the earlier identifications. But Yardeni is the only paleographer to attribute so many manuscripts to one scribe.
What are we to make of all this? First and foremost, these identifications reflect subtle achievements in the art and science of paleography by which scripts are identified and dated based on the way individual letters are formed. Letter forms change or evolve slowly over time; observing the characteristics of the letters enables paleographers to date a script within a certain range of dates. In the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the manuscripts can be dated within about a 50-year range. When the paleographical dating of the scrolls was confirmed by radiocarbon (carbon-14) tests,4 Harvard professor Frank Cross remarked that “the [carbon-14] results were remarkably in agreement with dates arrived at earlier on paleographic grounds … paleographical analysis is more precise, and often can narrow the range of dates to a half century.”5 In a more jocular vein, Cross said that the tests “vindicated the confidence I have always had in the accuracy of … carbon-14 dating.”6
The scribe identified by Yardeni who copied more than 50 texts worked in the first half of the Herodian period (late first century B.C.E. to the start of the first century C.E.), the floruit of the Qumran community. Yardeni describes the general appearance of the scribe’s handwriting as “orderly, spacious and elegant, indicating a skilled, professional and trained hand, easily recognizable thanks to its peculiar lamed, with the ‘pressed’ and curved lower part.”7
The fact that one scribe penned manuscripts found in more than one cave (and, in the case of the scribe identified by Yardeni, in six caves) provides a powerful counter to an argument sometimes made about the Dead Sea Scrolls: that the Qumran collection was simply a “general Jewish” library, rather than that of a particular Jewish sect. According to this argument, the scrolls are not a special or sectarian collection but simply a general Jewish library that was hidden at Qumran during the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–73 C.E.). However, if Yardeni (and Ulrich) is correct that the same scribe copied scriptural and sectarian manuscripts, it makes sense to conclude that the scribe was a member of that sect who also copied Jewish scriptural scrolls, countering the idea that the Qumran collection was a non-sectarian “general Jewish” library.
Another argument rebutted by the same scribe’s hand appearing in different caves is that each cave reflects a separate collection belonging to a different Jewish group. If the same scribe copied manuscripts found in separate caves, then those scrolls must have originated in the same place, with the same scribe, and therefore the group to which that scribe belonged must have placed the scrolls in the different Qumran caves. To put it another way, the fact that manuscripts penned by the same scribe turned up in different caves makes it difficult to argue that the manuscripts in different caves are not connected to each other.
Another question that sometimes arises in relation to Qumran is whether or not manuscript copying actually took place there at all. The 042 presence of six inkwells serves as physical evidence that writing did take place at Qumran.a Moreover, hundreds of scroll fasteners were found in Cave 8, one of the marl terrace caves near the building at Qumran, serving as evidence for the manufacture of scrolls at the site (see sidebar).b
The first generation of scroll scholars assumed that all the scrolls were copied at Qumran. It is now clear that they weren’t. About 10 percent of the scrolls—dated paleographically—were written before 100 B.C.E., when the settlement was established. It is not logically possible that scrolls that predate the site itself were copied there. But surely some of them were.
Some scrolls were copied at Qumran during its period of occupation from c. 100 B.C.E. to 68 C.E., at which time the Romans attacked the site. This is supported by evidence of a single scribal hand in multiple documents from several different caves, as in the cases of the scribes identified by Ulrich and Yardeni. Yardeni’s scribe worked in the late first century B.C.E., the period from which the highest percentage of the manuscripts date and when the settlement was at its largest.8
Finally, what about the manuscript from Masada that Yardeni says was penned by the same scribe who copied more than 50 texts found at Qumran? Shemaryahu Talmon identifies the two Masada fragments by this scribe as the “remainder of an apocryphon woven on the Book of Joshua. More 043 precisely, it reflects vestiges of the report of the last episodes in Joshua’s life: the summary of the conquest (Joshua 21:43–45) and Joshua’s final address to the people (Joshua 23) at the meeting in Shechem (Joshua 24), in which he surveys major events in the history of Israel.” Talmon notes similarities to the Psalms of Joshua (4Q378, 4Q379) from Qumran Cave 4, though the dissimilar scripts prove that they are not fragments of the same manuscripts. Before Yardeni confirmed that many Qumran texts and the Joshua Apocryphon were written by a single scribe, Talmon had already suggested that the Masada text was carried to the site by Qumranite refugees.9
A connection between Qumran and Masada has long been known. Nine copies of the liturgical cycle Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice were discovered at Qumran—eight in Cave 4 and one in Cave 11—suggesting its importance to the Qumran community. Another was also found at Masada, in the same locus as the Joshua Apocryphon fragments!10 Moreover, this is a sectarian composition, not a composition of mainstream Judaism.
Masada was occupied by Zealot refugees from Jerusalem during the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–73 C.E.). They constructed a synagogue in the fortress, where their manuscripts were found.
It’s anyone’s guess how the Songs manuscript—and the Joshua Apocryphon written by Yardeni’s scribe—got to Masada. It seems likely that some manuscripts from Qumran were carried south by refugees fleeing the Roman destruction of Qumran in 68 C.E. But that’s only a best guess.
Recently Ada Yardeni, the foremost paleographer working in Israel today, made a startling claim: More than 50 Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts were copied by the same scribe.1 The 54 manuscripts came from six different caves: Qumran Caves 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 11. Even more surprising, Yardeni identified the same scribal hand in a manuscript of the Joshua Apocryphon found 30 miles south of Qumran at the famous desert fortress of Masada, the last holdout in the Jewish revolt against Rome. Yardeni is not the first scholar to identify more than one Qumran text copied by the same […]
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Ada Yardeni, “A Note on a Qumran Scribe,” in M. Lubetski, ed., New Seals and Inscriptions: Hebrew Idumean, and Cuneiform (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007), pp. 287–298.
2.
John Strugnell, “Notes en marge du volume V des ‘Discoveries in the Judean Desert of Jordan,’ ” Review de Qumran 7 (1970), pp. 163–276. See Emanuel Tov, Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2004), pp. 23–24, who also includes a full bibliography. See also Eibert Tigchelaar, “In Search of the Scribe of 1QS,” in Shalom Paul et al., eds., Emanuel: Studies in Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, and Dead Sea Scrolls in Honor of Emanuel Tov (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 439–452.
3.
Eugene Ulrich, “Identification of a Scribe Active at Qumran: 1QPsb-4QIsac-11QM,” in M. Bar-Asher and E. Tov, eds., Meghillot: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls V-VI. A Festschrift for Devorah Dimant (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute and Haifa University Press, 2007) pp. 201–210. Ulrich has informed me (private communication) that this same scribe also penned 4QDanb.
4.
G. Bonani, I. Carmi, S. Ivy, J. Strugnell and W. Wölfli, “Radiocarbon Dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Atiqot 20 (1991), pp. 27–32. A.J.T. Jull, D.J. Donahue, M. Broshi and E. Tov, “Radiocarbon Dating of Scrolls and Linen Fragments from the Judean Desert,” Atiqot 28 (1996), pp. 1–7.
5.
Frank Moore Cross, “Paleography,” in L.H. Schiffman and J.C. VanderKam, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford, 2000), p. 631.
6.
B.A. Levine, P.J. King, J. Naveh and E. Stern, eds., Eretz Israel 26: Frank Moore Cross Volume (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1999), p. xi.
7.
Yardeni, “A Note on a Qumran Scribe,” p. 288. For a discussion on chronology at Qumran, see Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).
8.
Brian Webster, “Chronological Index of the Texts from the Judean Desert,” in Emanuel Tov, Texts from the Judaean Desert, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Series 04XIX (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 375.
9.
Shemaryahu Talmon, “Qumran Corner: Fragments of a Joshua Apocryphon—Masada 1039–211,” Journal of Jewish Studies 47 (1996), pp. 128–139.
10.
Carol Newsom, “Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice,” in L.H. Schiffman and J.C. VanderKam, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 887–889.
