The Qumran Scrolls of the Book of Judges: Literary Formation, Textual Criticism, and Historical Linguistics
What it is about
The paper tests the usual practice of dating Biblical Hebrew from the Masoretic Text alone. It compares MT Judges with three Qumran fragments (1QJudg, 4QJudga, 4QJudgb), above all the passage Judg 6:7–10, which MT has and 4QJudga lacks. After a long literary and text-critical argument that the MT passage is a late addition, the author examines ten linguistic features in the MT pluses and in the MT–Qumran variants (verb syntax, construct forms, suffixes, the article, and others). The late MT additions are written in standard "classical" Hebrew, with "early" and "late" features mixed at random. Manuscripts differ word by word in such details (an article here and not there, wayyiqtol in one, weqatal in another), so language was fluid in transmission and the direction of change is largely patternless. His conclusion: historical linguistics of Hebrew must work together with textual and literary criticism; a linguistic profile of the MT does not date its author.
Ideas
- I1. When the manual states a "late" or "early" feature, add the caveat that MT samples can carry late additions in classical language; frequencies per book describe the MT as transmitted, not the date of composition.
- I2. If the Samaritan Pentateuch (or a Qumran Torah text) becomes available aligned to our trees, count the linguistic variants by type (article, conjunction, verb form, plene spelling, suffix form) between MT and SP for the five books. This is the Torah analogue of the paper's test and measures how "fluid" the text of the corpus Mova reads is.
- I3. Keep a list of verses where the wayyiqtol/weqatal choice varies between witnesses, as a known source of noise for any rule that depends on the verb form.
For Mova
I1 is a paragraph for 12. Biblical, Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew compared (the dating debate). I2 and I3 need an aligned second witness of the Torah; until then they are entries for the gaps list in 13-mova-tools.md, and a caution for verb-form rules in tools/macula/src/prag.rs.
Cite
@article{rezetko2013qumran,
title = {{The Qumran Scrolls of the Book of Judges: Literary Formation, Textual Criticism, and Historical Linguistics}},
author = {Rezetko, Robert},
journal = {Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 13},
year = {2013},
doi = {10.5508/jhs.2013.v13.a2},
url = {https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs.2013.v13.a2}
}This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2013-rezetko-qumran-scrolls-book-judges-literary/