Reviews

064

Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, Volume XXXVI, Qumran Cave 4—XXVI

“Cryptic Texts” by Stephen J. Pfann and “Miscellanea,” Part 1 by 32 authors and consultants.

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) 739 pages, 49 b&w plates, $165 (hardback)

DJD volumes, as they are called in the trade (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, the official series of publications of the Dead Sea Scrolls), are rolling off the Clarendon Press at Oxford University faster than you can say Jack Robinson. They’re not easy reading. But they do contain nuggets. Take Volume 36, a hefty tome that contains 739 pages and 49 plates and sells for a cool $165.

For example, Plate 34 (or XXXIV, as it is officially designated) depicts a nondescript piece of pottery 5 inches wide and almost as high that was found in Roland de Vaux’s 1953 excavation at Qumran; it is crudely inscribed with successive letters of the Semitic alphabet, with some repetitions, corrections, variations and errors. It is here published by Esther Eshel of Hebrew University. Known in scholarly parlance as an abecedary, it is an exercise tablet for a scribe-in-training. It is important because it helps establish that scrolls were actually written at Qumran even though not a scrap of a manuscript has been found at the site. How? Because someone at the site was obviously learning to be a scribe.^a To this may be added the four, five or six inkwells found there.^b And so the evidence of scribal activity at Qumran accumulates.

Another ostracon (an inscribed piece of pottery) officially published in this volume was found only in 1996 in a small Qumran excavation directed by James F. Strange of the University of South Florida. This ostracon made quite a stir in BAR because it was read by Harvard’s Frank Cross and Esther Eshel as recording a deed of gift to the Yahad, the Community, the term by which the Qumran religious community designates itself in the scrolls. In Cross and Eshel’s reading of the ostracon, the donor was making this gift in fulfillment of his oath as part of his initiation into the Yahad, as required by the rules specified in the scrolls. In short, by this word Yahad the scrolls were tied to the site.^c In the very next issue of BAR, however, one of Israel’s leading paleographers, Ada Yardeni, took issue with this reading. She agrees that the ostracon records a gift, but not to the Yahad. The line that Cross and Eshel read as “when he fulfills (his oath) to the Yahad,” Yardeni reads as “and every othe[r?] tree,” simply adding to the estate given by this deed.^d Cross never replied to Yardeni’s argument in BAR. But he has in DJD 36. Although he finds Yardeni’s reading “plausible,” he nevertheless finds his (and Eshel’s) reading the “preferred” one, supporting this reading with a detailed letter-by-letter analysis that will be understandable only to the most sophisticated paleographer. But even the novice can appreciate why it is so difficult to decipher such a crudely inscribed, badly worn, 2,000-year-old text.

Those who want to plumb the exotic mysteries of the scrolls will find plenty here. For we are presented with the first of three so-called Cryptic Texts. Actually “Cryptic Scripts” would be more accurate: These scroll manuscripts include fragments written in three hitherto unknown scripts, designated Cryptic Texts A, B and C. Cryptic Texts A are published here by 065Stephen J. Pfann, of the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem. The script of these texts is not a “descendant” of any known alphabet, although it is clearly an alphabetic script. A few of the letters appear to have been derived from the corresponding letters of early first-millennium Semitic alphabets. Other letters may be variations of earlier letter forms. Most of the letters, however, give no clear indication of their source. As far as we know they are arbitrary. The result is a kind of code of the Hebrew alphabet. The texts themselves are in the Hebrew language.

The daunting task of making any sense of these 260 fragments is plain from looking at plates 35–49: Few fragments contain more than a dozen letters, and most are smaller than a fingernail. When they originally came into scholarly hands and were assigned for publication to Josef T. Milik, they were divided into two documents, one with 240 fragments (4Q249) and the other with 20 fragments (4Q250). When the fragments were re-assigned to Pfann, however, he developed a computer-based program to identify quotations in the fragments from the Hebrew Bible and from other Dead Sea Scroll texts. On this basis he was able to identify eight or nine copies of a single Qumran manuscript known as the Rule of the Congregation. So obviously there were more than two manuscripts among the 260 fragments. This led to a careful examination of each of these small fragments, based on an enormously impressive list of considerations, including the handwriting of the script, the type of pen, the characteristics of the papyrus (color, fiber width, fiber separation, pattern, thickness and the angle formed by the intersection of recto and verso fibers), the qualities of the ink, patterns of deterioration, etc.

Pfann was able to identify 36 manuscripts, with an average of but two fragments each—a total of about 75 fragments. The remaining 185 or so fragments cannot as yet be separated into manuscripts, but if the same ratio of two fragments per manuscript holds, then there are nearly another 100 documents represented by these fragments.

With the help of both paleography and carbon 14 tests, Pfann was able to date the manuscripts to the earliest days of the Qumran community, in the second century B.C.E. The eight or nine copies of the Rule of the Congregation (1QSa) that he identified are to be distinguished from the manuscripts with which it is often associated, the Rule of the Community (1QS) and the Blessings (1QSb), all found in a single scroll from cave 1. That 066these latter two documents have not been found among the Cryptic Texts, while numerous early copies of the Rule of the Congregation have been found, suggests that the latter was the earliest and most central document of the three.

Because the fragments are so small, there is not much to be read, but Pfann has nevertheless squeezed an amazing amount of significance from them. As he puts it, “The fragmentary nature of the … corpus necessarily sets limits on a thorough analysis of the original structure and content of these manuscripts. However, the surviving fragments provide a tantalizing, if not significant, sampling of the topics and issues considered germane to the Sons of Light during this formative period[—]legal clarifications … liturgy … and community rules and self-definition.”