Notes on M. H. Gottstein's analysis of Qumran Isaiah

koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

9 February 2010

Anyone who has read the work of Gottstein will know that he was a hard worker who devoted many hours to his research. His data is very useful towards a proper understanding of the condition of texts in the Second Temple Period. In 1954 M. H. Gottstein published an article in Biblica 35 on the comparison of the Isaiah scroll from cave one with the Peshitta and Targum. The surprising aspect of the research is that there are many correspondences with variants that the cave Isaiah have with the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition, but which are also shared by the Peshitta and the Targum. The first reaction scholars will have is that in Hellenistic times the Hebrew text was fluid and developing and thus many styles and forms were floating around of which the consonantal text of the Masoretic Tradition or Codex Alleppo, is just but one of several. The Peshitta and Targum would then represent another form which they share with the Isaiah Scroll from the Dead Sea.

Before we run away with any idea we need to secure our understanding with certain facts:

1. The Peshitta is late and the earliest manuscripts date no earlier than the fourth century CE if not later.

2. The Targumim are also based upon late manuscripts so that a Byzantine date for them is probably the closest that one can come to the Second Temple Period or Hellenistic period.

3. The archaeology of Qumran has turned up a strange third century CE lamp at caves 1, 4 and 11 so that one may rightfully ask, who came in 250 CE to the caves and left their lamp there? Did they bring anything extra in or replace it with what was there? We know that Origen claims to have visited caves near Jericho and that scrolls were found in them. With Father De Vaux one can concur that these lamps should be dated to the Late Roman IV period.

4. Not all scholars were impressed by the early dating of the scrolls and Solomon Zeitlin's criticism was brushed aside by many scholars in the fifties after the finding of the scrolls. He complained that many of these manuscripts were no earlier than the ninth century CE and he was a Middle Age manuscript expert. Those who have looked at the content of these caves will have to admit that some late Arabic manuscripts were also found in some of the caves. The scripts of these manuscripts are sometimes very surprising.

5. There is one iconographical picture on one manuscript where the shoe of the person is curling up. Very suspicious.

6. But, leaving all suspicion aside and trying to work just with the texts we have to say the following on Gottstein's findings.

7. An analysis of the variants in the Isaiah scroll and shared by the Peshitta and Targum, is that it seems that due to difficult paleographical shapes of the letters, misreading originated by fast reading (see Isaiah 3:25) where it is possible to misread the right leg of the taw (as in the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition) as a yod (as was done by Qumran Isaiah, Peshitta and Targum).

8. The errors at Qumran, the Peshitta and the Targum, are paleographical and phonological. Phonological means that the scribe could not hear so well and wrote what he thought he heard. This is the case in Isaiah 6:10 where the sounding of the waw gave the scribe the impression that he heard an extra beth in the front of the word. The error is also in the Peshitta and in the Targum.

9. The following are considered acoustic errors: Isaiah 5:8 where the guttural proximity caused the listener to make an acoustic misperception and so the he after the initial waw [so in the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition] fell out [Qumran Isaiah, Peshitta, Targum and Byzantine form of the Septuagint]. 

10. The article deals with nearly 236 comparisons of the Pesthitta to variants in 1QIsaiah and about 111 shared by the Targum and about 129 shared by the Byzantine form of the Septuagint.

11. The only rests we have of the Septuagint, is the Byzantine form of it.

12. The only fragments we have of the Targumim is the later copies we have of it.

13. The Peshitta from the Leiden edition, is based upon manuscripts between the 6th to the 12th centuries CE.

14. This researcher's approach is to take the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition as the very Word of God and the very original form of Isaiah. The reason is that if one compares 4QDana with the Daniel text in Codex Alleppo, then the correspondences are almost 99.9%. That high rate of correspondences with a form of the text, is not shared by any of the versions.

15. How did it come that the Peshitta especially has such a high rate of correspondences, that the Targum and Septuagint also share about the same amount of correspondences with the variants in this cave?

16. The cave manuscripts were defective manuscripts due to speed writing, misreadings, misperceptions on an acoustical level and other levels, and some of these manuscripts came into the hands of Origen in 218 CE. Whether they were copied and placed back in cave one, we do not know but utilizing them as one of a wide variety of errorful manuscripts floating around, it may be that the Targum translator and the Byzantine Greek LXX translators in the days of Constantine, who ordered quickly 50 Greek manuscripts to be duplicated, shared with the defectiveness in these manuscripts, taking the speed in which the read, translate and write down the text. This period explains the differences between Codices Alexandrinus, Sinaiticus, and Vaticanus.

17. In the ninth century, manuscripts were found in the caves near Qumran (811 CE, see Paul Kahle) and this may have placed the form of 1QIsa in the hands of copyists and if Peshitta translators obtained them at that time, variants could have originated from that source and explain the high number of connections to the Peshitta that 1QIsa has.

18. Our problem with Qumran is that we do not know if it was a mobile library that moved from Alexandria to Tarsus to Caesarea to elsewhere before it found its way into the specific caves near the Dead Sea.