Chaos Theory and the Text of the Old Testament (2020)
Peter J. Gentry
https://sbts-wordpress-uploads.s3.a...-Theory-and-the-Text-of-the-Old-Testament.pdf
starts on p. 55
Masada Psalms Scroll
p. 65
The Character of our Earliest Witnesses
Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has highlighted the fact that before the
second century AD. differences arc attested between our earliest preserved
copies of the text as well as between the parent texts of the earliest trans-
lations. What are these differences like and what do they tell us about the
history of the transmission of the text?
We can classify our earliest witnesses to the text according to two types:
(1) manuscripts or translations that represent a simple, straightforward
copying and transmitting of the text exactly and precisely as received, and
(2) manuscripts and translations that represent scribes revising and updating
the text to make it relevant and understood to the current circumstances/
generation. James A. Sanders labels the former the repetition factor and
the latter the resignification factor.31
============================================
Let us take time to grasp and illustrate both of these approaches or scribal
models. First, an example of a conservative or repetition approach, which
copies the parent text exactly and precisely in every way: the Masada Psalms
Scroll from the last third of the first century BC.
The Masada Psalms Scroll has a precise format and layout.33 As we all
know, the book of Psalms is written in poetry, and
Hebrew poetry is based
on couplets of parallel lines. Each column of this scroll has approximately
29-30 lines and one couplet is placed on each line, with an appropriate space
between the parallel lines of the couplet. Only about ten of the manuscripts
from the Judaean Desert are carefully laid out in this way. ...
We can compare MasPs3 with both earlier and later traditions. First,
the text of MasPs3 agrees almost completely with the Aleppo Codex, and
the divisions marked by blank spaces and line breaks in MasPs3 agree very
closely with the Masorctic terminal markers (accents and pausal forms). The
Aleppo Codex also employs a system of division by blank spaces, but this
does not correspond well with meaningful breaks or the pattern in MasPs3.
This suggests that the Masorctic tradition of the Psalter retained the visual
concept of the line layout of earlier scribal praxis, but without necessarily
preserving the ancient content divisions. The differences in layout between
MasPs3 and the Aleppo Codex are largely due to changing the book format
from scroll to codex and using additional symbols for accents and vowels to
mark what was indicated earlier by spacing in the manuscripts. Otherwise the
text 1,000 years later is identical. There is a scroll of Ben Sira at Masada no
more than 150 years later than the original text, but it already has mistakes
and shows that the text of 1,000 years later was not copied as carefully as
theOT.34
The stichometry or layout of parallel lines of poetry in MasPs3
agrees closely
with the layout of lines evident in the Greek codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.
This proves a common tradition going back much earlier than MasPs3 at least
to the third century BC. Therefore, the textual tradition in MasPs3 is old.
p. 67
The stichometry or layout of parallel lines of poetry in MasPs3 agrees closely with the layout of lines evident in the Greek codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. This proves a common tradition going back much earlier than MasPs3 at least to the third century BC. Therefore, the textual tradition in MasPs3 is old.
