Discoveries of thousands of scroll fragments in remote caves along the western shore of the Dead Sea have provided new evidence with which to search for the origins of the text of the Hebrew Bible. In “New Directions in Dead Sea Scroll Research,” Frank Moore Cross relates his theory of textual families to explain the variant forms of biblical texts transfound at Qumran. Cross notes that by the first century A.D., the confusion of text types sub-sided, suggesting that some authority had decided on which texts would be accepted and which rejected. Cross identifies the great sage Hillel as […]