The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible.

• Author: Davies, Philip R.
• Position: Book Review

By EUGENE ULRICH. Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature, vol. 1. Grand Rapids, Mich.: WM. B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING CO., 1999. Pp. xviii + 309. $25 (paper).

Eugene Ulrich is arguably the leading textual critic of his generation, thanks to his long and deep involvement with the Qumran scrolls, a resource now central to this sub-discipline. These fourteen essays span the years 1980-98 and are arranged topically. Part one begins with two general discussions of the growth of the scriptural books and of canon formation, followed by four more focused studies, arranged in chronological order, and then two more specialized chapters: one on the Qumran palaeo-Hebrew manuscripts and one an orthographic and textual comparison of Quintan Cave 4 Daniel manuscripts with the traditional Masoretic Hebrew/Aramaic text. Part two comprises essays on various aspects of the Greek translations (Josephus, the Hexapla) and of the Old Latin, the last two being chronologically the earliest of the collection.

Such a volume, as the preface readily confesses, displays both repetition and evidence of change of opinion over the years. The pluriformity of biblical texts at the end of the Second Temple period, for example, is remarked on frequently, as is Ulrich's view that the canon was still closed by the end of the first century of our era.

As for changes of mind, Ulrich has clearly developed disagreements with both Tov and Cross, erstwhile mentors: in his later work he disagrees explicitly over Tov's "Qumran orthography" and Cross's "text-types" and implicit[y departs from both scholars in his understanding of the goals of textual criticism. In this volume one can see how the text-critical task of reconstructing the "original text" is endorsed on p. 279 (1985) and then rejected, with a full and lucid explanation of its impossibility, on p. 14 (1997). Without consulting the details of the original essays (pp. 290-91) the reader might become a little confused by this contradiction! I also wonder whether the present, quite "minimalistic" Ulrich would accept the earlier Ulrich's arguments (pp. 271-80) for an original first column of Origen's Hexapla containing the Hebrew text, since the better of the arguments that he lays out seem to indicate the opposite.

Most of what is stated in this volume should elicit scholarly assent. On the origins of the Jewish scriptures and of the canon (chapters 1 and 2) Ulrich is correct, without doubt, to insist that the term...