1998

In the formation of the Old Testament, it is not so clear that we are dealing with ancient traditions as that we are dealing with – from the very first compositions that we know – traditions that have been presented and understood as ancient. The long-standing separation of scholarship in our field between those who are engaged in the relatively hard science of lower criticism and those in the very soft, theologically driven speculation of higher criticism has helped us to avoid some of the implications of this observation, and has allowed many higher critics a security and self-confidence that is not properly ours. Transmission, as we all know, whether oral or written, transposes. Biblical traditions, as we first know them in the Dead Sea Scrolls, are specifically – from the historical perspective of the Hellenistic period and from our perspective of the texts as artifacts – not so much ancient as textual manifestations of Hellenistic and Greco-Roman literature, which relates, at best, to what is only known as a narrated or transmitted past. The referents of these texts do not in fact carry us into a tradition earlier than that implied by the conglomerate of the extant texts themselves.

The richness and variety found among the Qumran texts, I believe, not only open up many alternative explanatory possibilities for biblical composition, they also present us with concrete examples of those processes that are involved in the creation and transmission of books and other texts in this part of the ancient world.