Early Texts of the Torah

Abstract

The paper seeks a new way to understand the early activity within versions of the Torah. It builds on two recent developments. First, a refined understanding of the so-called “harmonizations” in the pre-Samaritan Pentateuch and the circulation of this version in early Hellenistic Palestine. Second, new insights with regard to the extent of Homeric scholarship in contemporary Alexandria, and of the type of contact between this activity and Jewish literati. The result is a new view of the pre-Samaritan text as an academic – rather than popular – text, which corresponds with academic textual practices elsewhere. It seeks to smooth out narratological problems in the text, basing itself on the image of Moses as a faultless author. This view explains the continuum between the various attestations of the pre-SP in Qumran and elsewhere. We show that previous explanations of the pre-Samaritan text duplications as a sequel to phenomenon in cuneiform literature are unwarranted. Finally, it is suggested to project from the explicit discussions about the legitimacy of academic Torah texts in Jewish-Hellenistic writings on their less explicit contemporaries in Judea. This reasoning paves the way for a renewed evaluation of the early stages of the conservative version, known as proto-MT, being part of the same dynamics.