Cory Daniel Crawford and Dr. Stephen D. Ricks, Asian and Near Eastern Languages

Although the first writings on the banks of the Dead Sea, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, were first discovered in 1947, not all were made accessible to more than a handful of scholars; indeed, not even the subject matter of the writings were made known until 1992. This guarding of the material retarded (and preserved) the study of the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, so that today traces of the ancient world are still percolating through the hands of scholars to the general public.

I noticed that there were no comprehensive works regarding the biblical writings of Qumran, though I knew that many had examined and even compared these. My original plan was to examine Genesis, comparing the Masoretic Text (the traditional Hebrew Bible, henceforth MT) and the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament, 300B100 BC, henceforth LXX) with the Genesis documents at Qumran. I planned to look specifically for evidences of anti-anthropomorphism (textual change toward human characteristics, usually with reference to God) because scholars have long noted and debated anti-anthropomorphic changes in LXX, and have tried to discover the reason that such changes were made. I hypothesized that my examination would shed a little more light on the issue; if antianthropomorphic changes to the biblical text were a purely Greek phenomenon, then we could perhaps expect to not see the same changes at Qumran, farther from the Hellenistic influences which the Septuagint translators experienced at Alexandria. If the tendency toward anti-anthropomorphism arose from an internal Judaic debate, then we might expect that the biblical texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls would resemble LXX.

As I began my research, I discovered a new scholarly work that greatly reduced the tedious comparison that I was about to undertake. The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible was made available shortly after I began my research, and it is a scholarly comparison of the biblical scrolls from Qumran with not only MT and LXX, but also with the Samaritan Pentateuch and with >duplicate= scrolls (more than one instance of a biblical book found at Qumran). I modified my approach to now include a wider range of books (the Pentateuch instead of only Genesis) and the deeper study of anthropomorphism in Judaism. I also developed my Greek skills.

My expectations were that I would find more evidence of anthropomorphism at Qumran than I actually did. I expected the Dead Sea Scrolls Bible to be more closely in harmony with LXX. In fact, the results were the opposite. Exodus, for example, which is one of the most frequently attested books of the Bible found at Qumran, aligns mostly with MT, or the traditional text. There was a Greek version of Exodus found in cave 7, and even this Greek text is closest in form to MT. Even where there were slight variations in the text, these were usually simple grammatical changes or spelling variations, not changes aimed at taking the human characteristics away from Deity.

Unfortunately, there are still too many possibilities for us to know exactly why the Qumran scribes copied texts that resemble the one from which the canon of most churches comes today. Was this the only text available to them? Did they make a choice as to which texts they would use? Some believe that this is an indication that the canon was already being formed, and that texts such as LXX were already being weeded out as non-authoritative. The only real facts my research shows are that there appears to be no anti-anthropomorphic variations or changes in the biblical texts preserved in the caves at Qumran. Whether or not this is the result of a heated debate or if the scribes and theologians didn=t give a second thought to the subject remains yet to be discovered.