The complicated process whereby the biblical books took shape and were copied and transmitted in biblical times can only be partly reconstructed based on biblical evidence, with the help of ancient Near Eastern parallels. Clearly, the biblical era constitutes the first stage in the history of the Jewish book, or more correctly, the Jewish book par excellence. However, for the period immediately following, the Second Temple period, the level of documentation for creating, editing/redacting, and copying and disseminating Jewish books is now enormous due to the discovery, publication, and analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls.Footnote ¹ While this information relates directly to the period in which the Scrolls were copied, from the last part of the third century bce through the early first century ce, it also allows us a model with which to supplement our understanding of the biblical period, and much of it is directly relevant to the rabbinic period in which most of the same scribal conventions were in use.

There is one fundamental difference, however, in this regard between the Scrolls and the rabbinic evidence. The sect that gathered the Scrolls and the authors of the nonbiblical materials, both apocryphal-pseudepigraphal (i.e., Bible-related) or sectarian (peculiar to the Qumran sect), stem from a writing-oriented culture, in which the ongoing development of the Jewish tradition was a literary activity. The history of rabbinic literature begins with the Pharisees who revered the books we call biblical, but whose extrabiblical traditions were developed and transmitted orally. While some scholars argue that oral traditions played a role in the development of biblical literature,Footnote ² Second Temple Jews all dealt with biblical books as finished products, albeit not yet completely stabilized as to text or authoritative status.Footnote ³ The Pharisees pursued a written-oral culture in which orality characterized their own traditions. Later rabbinic convention initially continued this orality, and developed the full-blown Oral Law concept. Eventually the oral became written and orality became primarily an identifier of the theoretical origins of the “oral” Torah in God's revelation at Sinai.Footnote ⁴ None of this was of concern to the Dead Sea sectarians who did not accept the Pharisaic “traditions of the Fathers.”Footnote ⁵ For the Qumran sect, all Jewish law and tradition was derived from the interpretation of the written text of the Bible conducted by the sectarians,Footnote ⁶ and no unwritten traditions were acceptable, except in matters of the organization of the sectarian community.Footnote ⁷

We will deal below with the following steps in text production as can be gleaned from the Scrolls: composition, editing/redacting, copying, circulation, and gathering and storage.

Composition

The Scrolls give us information about the composition of only one type of literature, collections of laws called serakhim.Footnote ⁸ These laws were derived from Scripture by halakhic midrash and then organized into serakhim, lists of laws on a topic, and were often provided with titles such as “Regarding Forbidden Consanguineous Marriages.”Footnote ⁹ Such topical collections are in some ways forerunners of the later orally redacted mishnaic tractates or their earlier oral proto-tractates. We know that the collectors of larger halakhic compositions found at Qumran had such serakhim available. Similarly composed “mini-rules,” stemming from the sectarian assembly (moshav ha-rabbim),Footnote ¹⁰ seem to underlie the collections of sectarian rules included in the various rule scrolls.

Redaction

Quite a number of Dead Sea Scrolls texts show evidence of redaction that enable us to learn about this process. Specifically, since all the major sectarian compositions survive in more than one recension, in which different components are variously assembled, it becomes clear that the larger texts were assembled from sources that originally circulated as independent units. This is certainly true about the Damascus Document (Zadokite Fragments),Footnote ¹¹ Rule of the Community,Footnote ¹² War Scroll,Footnote ¹³ the Berakhot texts,Footnote ¹⁴ and HodayotFootnote ¹⁵—among the most significant sectarian scrolls. It is also the case with the Temple Scroll, the sources of which are easily recognized.Footnote ¹⁶ But comparison with the expanded Pentateuch scrolls shows that some raw material got into both redactions.Footnote ¹⁷ Perhaps the best example is the penal code that appears in various versions in three different texts.Footnote ¹⁸

In the area of biblical text, several texts are clearly preserved in more than one literary edition.Footnote ¹⁹ The Scrolls preserve both proto-Masoretic and proto-Septuagintal editions of Samuel, but Chronicles is based on another edition, different from the canonical Samuel. The Scrolls preserve in Hebrew both proto-Masoretic Jeremiah and proto-Septuagintal. In the case of Psalms, we can see that the order was not yet standard in different editions. In the view of some scholars, an expanded version circulated as well, with texts not part of our canonical Psalms. Here we are not discussing the issues of lower biblical criticism occasioned by the existence of various text types and minor textual variations.

Copying

The amount of data about the scribal practices, preparing hides, ruling, writing, ink and writing materials, attaching pieces, and rolling of scrolls is enormous.Footnote ²⁰ We can only survey a small portion of this data here. However, it seems that much of it is relevant to the way scrolls were written in biblical times, and it is certainly the case that the procedures required in tannaitic halakhah are in accord with many practices followed by the Qumran sectarians.Footnote ²¹ Interestingly, the biblical scrolls from Qumran that are closest to the proto-Masoretic text type tend to accord most closely with later rabbinic scribal rules. However, as codices developed and Torah scrolls became symbols with a ritual role to play, more and more specifications reflecting holiness and guaranteeing aesthetic concerns became associated with them in the rabbinic corpus.

Qumran scrolls are written mostly on skins of bovines, sheep, or goats, and a small number on papyrus, a material not permitted by later rabbinic law for biblical scrolls. The ink is a carbon-based vegetable product, with no metallic content. It is normally black, with just a few words written in red, a practice not permitted by the rabbis for biblical scrolls. The script is generally the square script, known also as Assyrian or Jewish script, although a small number of texts are written in the paleo-Hebrew script or have divine names in that script, practices again forbidden by later tannaitic authorities. As required by tannaitic sources, the writing surface is ruled by incising vertical lines to provide intercolumnar margins and also with horizontal lines for suspending the letters. The various methods of correcting manuscripts used in the scrolls are mostly permitted in rabbinic sources, but some are not.Footnote ²²

There has been much discussion about methods employed for copying scrolls in terms of whether they are copied from other manuscripts or orally through listening. For Torah scrolls, rabbinic law requires direct, visual copying. Actually, the Scrolls bear witness to errors of both graphic and phonetic form,Footnote ²³ but it appears that copies were generally made from other written copies.Footnote ²⁴

Circulation

It is clear that some texts were widely circulated. This is the only sensible way to understand how some apocryphal-pseudepigraphal books are found in various translations, while Hebrew and Aramaic originals are found at Qumran. Further, the Qumran collection contains multiple copies of various books, both biblical and nonbiblical, written often in different writing systems and clearly of disparate origin. Biblical manuscripts have been found at Qumran, Masada, and in the Bar Kokhba Caves dating over a few centuries. These chance examples of preservation probably indicate that biblical manuscripts were widely spread in the Land of Israel. Further, the presence of some of these same apocryphal and pseudepigraphal works at Qumran and Masada also indicates that these works were part of the literature of the wider Jewish community and constitute exactly the types of works prohibited by the tannaim as Sefarim ḥiẓẓoniyim, “external books,” that is, books outside the list of authoritative books.Footnote ²⁵

Gathering and Storage

It became clear with the study of the entire collection that the scrolls found at Qumran in the eleven caves were of disparate origin geographically and in their literary traditions.Footnote ²⁶ Only the sectarian Scrolls (about one-third of the total) even related to the particular views of the Dead Sea sect.Footnote ²⁷ Further, even if the contents are mostly uniform, the collection of Greek texts in Cave 7Footnote ²⁸ indicates that even within the sect there were differences in holdings in the various caves.Footnote ²⁹ Overall, the practice of gathering biblical and other books into a collection can be seen here.

We are accustomed to referring to the Qumran collection as a library. Some have tried to argue with this concept.Footnote ³⁰ However, since the origins are disparate, as testified to also by the fact that only a few scribes appear more than once, the library theory is most likely. Further, we have evidence of the wearing out and repair of books, correction over a period of years, and the use of multiple copies that confirm the notion that this collection was made by the group that occupied the buildings at Qumran. This is especially true of the collection of Scrolls found in Cave 4 that in antiquity had shelves on which the manuscripts were stored, probably sideways. Further, the common conception that the Scrolls were stored in jars needs to be corrected. Most Qumran Scrolls were not stored in jars. Some, however, were wrapped in linen cloths. In general, Scrolls were tied closed with leather thongs that attached to the back of the scroll at its start with little squares of leather. Others were tied with strings.Footnote ³¹ While numerous jars were found with the Scrolls, no Scroll was ever found in a jar by an archaeologist. However, some written material was attached to a jar brought for sale by the Bedouin. From the excessive height of the “Scroll jars,” it is obvious that they were manufactured for food storage and only used secondarily, if at all, for Scrolls.Footnote ³²

Thus far, we have been talking about a library of real books, but we need to remember that in some Second Temple texts, there also exists a “library” of pseudo-books or imaginary works. Here we refer to books that are totally imagined, functioning to convey ancient, often antediluvian traditions to the forefathers of Israel. Often this motif is employed to argue for the authenticity of pseudepigraphal works that claim to divulge the teachings of patriarchs and other biblical figures who are said to have received knowledge from these ancient books.Footnote ³³ From the point of view of this study, the imagining of such books shows the extent to which written texts are assumed to be the authoritative conveyance of Jewish teachings.

Standardization of the Text

Finally, the Scrolls give us much information related to the difficult questions of the standardization and canonization of the Jewish Book, the Bible. Several issues are involved here—including the stabilization of the text and the determination of the contents of the canon. However, it is precisely in these issues that there is great disagreement among scholars.

Regarding the formation of the canon, there are two positions. One holds that there was no concept yet of a specific authoritative list—what we call a canon.Footnote ³⁴ The other view, which I hold, argues that Qumran texts show evidence of a concept of the tripartite canon—Torah, Prophets, and Writings—but that the Writings were not yet a closed and totally defined corpus. In my view, the canon of all Jews in the Land of Israel followed this same development.Footnote ³⁵

In the Scrolls we can also follow the fixing of the text of the individual books. The Scrolls bear witness to the existence of a variety of text types in Second Temple times, and a complex process by which eventually the Masoretic consonantal text, give or take some textual variants, became the norm. When we move from the variety of text types found at Qumran to the more or less Masoretic collection at Masada, to the revision of Greek Bibles, toward the Masoretic Text (MT) in the Bar Kokhba Caves, we can see how the MT emerged dominant in the first two centuries of our era.Footnote ³⁶ At the same time, the final decisions about the canon were made, and the Pharisaic-rabbinic supporters of proto-MT became the dominant influence on the future development of Judaism.