Reviewed by: Textual Criticism and the Ontology of Literature in Early Judaism: An Analysis of the Serekh ha-yaḥad by James Nati Elena Dugan james nati, Textual Criticism and the Ontology of Literature in Early Judaism: An Analysis of the Serekh ha-yaḥad (JSJSup 198; Leiden: Brill, 2022). Pp. xvi + 357. €119/$144. This thorough and careful book provides a welcome bridge between cutting-edge scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the developing new frontiers in textual criticism [End Page 344] of the Hebrew Bible. Concern over how to handle multiply attested texts among the Scrolls, and the focusing of this concern upon the Serekh ha-Yaḥad (or Community Rule, as it is sometimes called), has become more popular in recent years, especially in concert with the rise of New or Material Philology. Nati's contribution to students of the Scrolls is his provision of exquisite and comprehensive detail with which to parse these problems—the synoptic edition of the manuscripts he includes as an appendix will surely become an essential reference for students of the Serekh ha-Yaḥad (though the lack of an accompanying translation will make its use forbidding for some). But N. also explicitly tilts the discussion toward the study of the Hebrew Bible, the methodology undergirding the production of critical editions, and the practice of textual criticism writ large. Aptly, then, the book comprises five chapters advancing his case concerning the Serekh, with an epilogue drawing out the implications for recent discussions of the editing of the Hebrew Bible In chap. 1, N. provides a précis of the recent history of textual criticism and theories of the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish literature. He importantly establishes the relevance of his project for these broader fields by joining with scholarship insisting that "all biblical books in their canonical forms are Second Temple … literature" (p. 3). By this token, the window provided onto processes of composition gained by careful study of the development of Second Temple works like the Serekh ha-Yaḥad may (and perhaps must) also be used to consider the development of biblical books. The key problem for classically rendered historical criticism, as outlined by N., is the demonstrable "pluriformity" of our manuscript tradition for early Jewish texts like the Serekh (pp. 3, 11). Pluriformity is a key word for N., signaling that one entity exists in multiple forms. Our witnesses for works like the Serekh ha-Yaḥad (if, indeed, we should group all of its manuscripts under the heading of a single work or composition, a supposition that N. criticizes) demonstrate dynamic change at every stage of development. Few of the changes he details throughout the volume can be accounted for in terms of mechanical errors—pluriformity cannot be explained away as copying errors. Similarly, it does not make sense to situate variants as accretions, like unwanted barnacles on the bottom of a boat, given the overall trend toward growth and lengthening evidenced in this manuscript tradition. Scholars interested in establishing either an Urtext, or a final form, would be thwarted when confronted with the dynamic and developing Serekh tradition. In chap. 2, N. provides an exposition of some of the differences on the level of text, often noting discrepancies in single words. The most stunning conclusion of his work, more evident from perusing the synoptic edition than the chapter by itself, is the phenomenon of absence—as he concludes, "the operating assumption that any witness to one unit of the Serekh probably contained all the other units … is not only not supported by the preserved evidence, but is contradicted by it" (p. 102). Attention to the absence of literary units among manuscripts of the Scrolls can be difficult to signal in presentation and is even harder to prove with certainty given the demonstrably fragmentary nature of some of our manuscripts. Nevertheless, these patterns of presence and absence represent resounding larger-scale evidence of pluriformity, so long as scholars are interested in weighting their probability appropriately. Chapter 3 provides a new description of the development of the Serekh over time. Though N. does away with the idea of a "short" and "long" recension to which all manuscripts...