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SECONDARY READINGS
Alexander Rofe
(ini~:;i).
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ALEXANDER ROPE
"Before the Lord" is said about a ritual act: the water is presented
to Him, presumably upon the altar. The Greek closely follows the
Hebrew text, but having translated the words "and poured it out
before the Lord," it adds three words, ETTL TT)v yflv, which equal one
word in Hebrew, i1l~ ("onto the earth"). This is self-contradictory.
One does not pour water "before the Lord" onto the earth; a proper
dedication requires pouring it on the altar. Obviously, the LXX at
this point runs a secondary text. Its origin will become evident once
we recall the divergences between Pharisees and Sadducees concerning the libation of water during the festival of Sukkot. The Pharisees
prescribed a proper oblation on the altar while the Sadducees denied
its legitimacy, throwing, whenever they could, the water down to the
floor. This explains the inconsistency present in the LXX. The words
"onto the earth" were inserted here by a Sadducean scribe bent on
denying the Pharisees any support from Scripture for their custom
of water-libation on the altar during the fall festival. The addition
was plausibly penned in Hebrew by a Palestinian scribe familiar with
the details of worship at the temple of Jerusalem. A Greek translator
or copyist would scarcely be interested in what were for him ritual
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minutiae.2
The historical implications of this secondary reading cannot be
exaggerated. In the first place, we have gained evidence to the
existence of a class of Sadducean scribes who were involved in the
task of copying the sacred books. One wonders if it is not against the
activity of such people that their opponents, the Pharisees, came
forth with the ruling that "the sacred books defile hands", thus
thwarting the everyday handling of these books by the priestlySadducean circles.3
No less significant are the implications of this LXX reading for the
history of the Jewish sects. Since the Greek translation of the Book
of Samuel was made at about the end of the third century BCE, and
its Vorlage certainly contained the 'Sadducean' correction, here is a
piece of evidence, small but revealing, that in the third century, well
before the crisis of Antiochus IV, the divergences that in time would
come to characterize the Sadducean-Pharisaic polemics, already
existed in Jerusalem. The schism that featured Hasmonean times was
already latent in the early Hellenistic period.
Essenians too contributed their share to the correction of Biblical
manuscripts. About forty years ago Isac Leo Seeligmann dedicated a
detailed study to Isa 53: 11 where the LXX rendering 8Et~m aim~ cp63s
is supported by two Qumranic Biblical manuscripts, lQisaa and
lQisab, which read iiK i1Ki~ instead of the MT il~T. Seeligmann
demonstrated the superiority of MT in this passage and argued that
the concept of "light" as parallel to "knowledge" (auvECJ'LS, n.p~),
belonged to the stock of ideas of the Qumran people and found its
way to circles in Alexandrian Jewry.4 The addition of "light" was
meant to insist on the divine source of knowledge, as against human
2 A. Rofe, "The Onset of Sects in Postexilic Judaism: Neglected evidence
from the Septuagint, Trito-Isaiah, Ben Sira and Malachi," in J. Neusner et al.
(eds.), The Social World of Formative Christianity and Judaism (Essays in Tribute
to H. C. Kee; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988) 39-49. References in Rabbinical
literature are quoted there.
3 E. Rivkin, "Defining the Pharisees: the Tannaitic Sources," HUCA 40-41
(1969-70) 205-249, on p. 233: "The so/rim-Pharisees were thus, it seems, using
the technicalities of the laws of ritual purity to discourage priestly handling of Holy
Scriptures .... "
4 I. L. Seeligmann, "8E'l~m aim'.i) c/>GiS' ," Tarbiz 27 (1957-58) 127-41 = idem,
Studies in Biblical Literature (ed. A. Hurvitz et al., 2nd ed., Jerusalem: Magnes,
1996) 411-26 (Hebrew).
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ALEXANDER ROFE
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front of the city (Gen 33: 18) i.e. on its outskirts, either on the slopes
of Mount Ebal or down in the valley. Thus it appears that the
sanctuary on Mount Gerizim was a parvenu among the holy places in
the area of Shechem, a fact which explains why the Samaritan community felt the need of inserting the election of Mount Gerizim into
the holy of holies, the Ten Commandments. Seen in this context, the
composition of this literary-textual layer appears as a legitimization
of Gerizim against competing Samarian sites, rather than a defiance
against the supremacy of Jerusalem.
It is difficult to tie the composition of the "Gerizim-layer" in the
SP to any specific episode. A superb Samaritan temple on Mount
Gerizim, founded in the times of Antiochus III the Great (ea. 200
BCE), has been unearthed at the site.13 But excavating beneath that
stratum, the archeologist Dr. Yitzhak Magen has recently reached the
remains of a former temple, dating to the late fifth or early fourth
century BCE.14 It is possible, indeed, that building activities coincided
with scribal ones, but archeology does not offer a clue to a more
specific identification. The Persian era as the time of composition of
the SP "Gerizim-layer" is to be excluded, since at that time the Torah
was still in the process of its formation. A low date in Hasmonean
times is not very plausible, if one infers from the analogy of the
paucity of sectarian corrections as discussed above. Of course, one
might argue that the state of affairs in Jerusalem did not apply to
Shechem while Jewish scribes preceded their Samaritan colleagues in
developing a conservative attitude towards text transmission. All in
all, a date at the end of the third century BCE, shortly preceding the
building of the large sanctuary under Antiochus III, seems the most
plausible. This would, up to a point, also take into account the
paleographical character of the script in the Samaritan Pentateuch.15
A similar type of correction was introduced into biblical manuscripts by another dissident group. I refer to the mention of a city
"in the Land of Egypt speaking the language of Canaan and taking
13 Y. Magen, "Mount Gerizim and the Samaritans," in F. Manns and E. Alliata
(eds.), Early Christianity in Context. Monuments and Documents (Studium
Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior; Jerusalem: Franciscan Press, 1993)
91-148, esp. 104. Cf. also U. Rappaport, "The Samaritans in the Hellenistic
Period," Zion 55 ( 1989-90) 373-96 (Hebrew).
14 Oral communication by Dr. Y. Magen. I hereby thank him for his kindness.
15 See J. D. Purvis, The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Origin of the Samaritan
Sect (HSM 2; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968).
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oath by the name of the Lord" in Isa 19: 18. For the name of that city
we have a number of variants:
01i1i1 1'll
MT
(rr6A.Ls-acrE8EK)
Plausibly, the primary text ran O"JC,l;:T 1'.V, hinting at the Egyptian
city Heliopolis which was greatly populated by Jews. No sanctuary is
mentioned in the verse in connection with the city. Later on, when a
sanctuary was established in Leontopolis by the fugitive high-priest
Onias III or his son Onias IV, the mention of the city in this verse
was adapted to the name of Onias' family, Sadoq: Pl~V 1'.V, city of
justice. Jerusalemite circles responded with a derogatory appellative:
O"'.)();:T 1'.V, city of destruction.16 In this case we have an exceptional
instance of theological modifications introduced into the Biblical text
as late as the second century BCE.
The study of secondary readings is instructive for the history of
Jewish aggadah, especially concerning its very beginnings. Most
significant in this context is the Qumran scroll of Samuel known as
4QSama which still awaits publication. This contains a text that at
times departs from all other textual witnesses, such as the MT and the
LXX. One such deviation is a large plus which obtains right in the
middle of I Sam 10:27. The passage runs in English rendition:
(completions are not marked here):I7
And Nahash king of the Ammonites sorely oppressed the Gadites and the
Reubenites and gouged out all their right eyes and struck terror and dread in
Israel. There was not left one among the Israelites in Transjordan whose
right eye was not gouged out by Nahash king of the Ammonites; only seven
thousand men fled from the Ammonites and entered Jabesh Gilead. About a
month later ...
I still adhere to my opinion, expressed about a decade ago, that the
extra-sentences of 4QSama in this passage, also known to Josephus,
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40 I
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ALEXANDER ROFE
out.24 The same lot befell the vessels of the temple that had remained
after the first despoilment with Jehoiachin's exile. According to the
MT Jer 27:19-22 they would one day be restored from Babylon;
according to the LXX in this passage (34:19-22), they were never to
be returned! 25 These allegations accord with those Deuteronomistic
speeches announcing salvation to the exiles of the first deportation as
against annihilation to the remainder (Jer 24:1-10; 29:10-14, 16-20).
These speeches, and later the deletions in LXX Jeremiah 27 and 52,
reflect the mutual aversion of two Jewish factions in the exilic and
early postexilic periods, 26 an antagonism that can hardly be dated
later than the fourth generation after the fall of Jerusalem.
Thus, if I see it right, the shorter text of Jeremiah submits important data for the history of Israel in a period for which the documentation at our disposal is extremely scanty.
The corollary of the present discussion is that in the study of the
texts of sacred literature secondary readings frequently are more
revealing than primary ones, since secondary readings can be used as
a source for the history of the community that preserved the holy
writings.
One additional conclusion is in order as to the principal aim of
biblical text-criticism. It is not the recovery of a presumed original
text,27 but rather the pursuit, step by step, of the history of the text.
The task is to follow, as far as possible, the various phases of the
transmission of the texts, in order to extract from them all possible
information concerning the religious community which preserved
and transmitted the sacred books.
24 See A. Rote, "Not Exile but Annihilation for Zedekiah's People: The Purport of Jeremiah 52 in the Septuagint," in L. Greenspoon and 0. Munnich (eds.),
VIII Congress of the Intemational Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies:
Paris I 992 (SB LS CS 41; Atlanta: Scholars, 1995) 165-70, where the argument is
made in detail.
25 This point was brought to my attention by Prof. Christopher Seitz, Yale
University, at my lecture there in April 1994.
26 These conclusions also affect the date of Ezek 11: 14-21. In another way,
M. Greenberg, Ezekiel 1-20 (AB 22; Garden City: Doubleday, 1983) 203-205.
27 See Tov, Textual Criticism, 288, where he writes: " ... textual criticism
aims at the 'original' form of the biblical books as defined by scholars." However,
further on he admits: "it is now possible to formulate the aims of the textual
criticism of the Bible. The study of biblical text involves an investigation of its
development, its copying and transmission and of the processes which created
readings and texts over the centuries" (pp. 289-90).