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THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF

SECONDARY READINGS
Alexander Rofe

Textual criticism is a historical discipline. This applies in the first


place to our endeavors at restoring primary readings. Here we are
led by arguments drawn from the realm of history, be it political,
geographical, linguistic, literary or religious. All these facets determine our conscious or unconscious decisions as to which readings are
primary and which should be considered secondary.
However, there is an additional aspect to the historical character of
textual criticism: it lies in the contribution the discipline can make to
historical knowledge. This is mainly obtained by the study of textual
transmission. Especially in the case of religious texts, the way they
were handled while being copied sheds light on the circumstances of
the transmission. In other words, the opinions of the copyists, their
intellectual milieu, affected their work and its end-product, the text.
This amounts to saying that changes introduced by the scribes into
the manuscripts i.e. secondary readings, sometimes have considerable
historical significance. The proposition will be discussed at the hand
of several examples.
We start with the issue of sectarian corrections in Biblical
manuscripts, a well known subject, since it was already explored by
Abraham Geiger in the middle of the nineteenth century. Among
other things, Geiger drew attention to the textual divergence between
the MT and LXX in Prov 14:32.1 The MT submits:
The wicked man is felled by his own evil;
the righteous man finds shelter in his death

(ini~:;i).

The LXX reads instead of ini~:;i: Tlj E-avToD oaLOTTJTL, which


probably reflects a Vorlage reading i~tJ:;i. The whole verse in the
LXX, when retroverted into Hebrew, would translate:
I
A. Geiger, Urschrift und Uebersetzungen der Bibel in Ihrer Abhaengigkeit
van der Innern Entwicklung des Judentums (2nd ed., Frankfurt am Main: Madda,
1928) 175.

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ALEXANDER ROPE

The wicked man is felled by his own evil;


the righteous man finds shelter in his own integrity.

Thus construed the verse conveys a fine antithetical parallelism, the


hallmark, in this case, of a superior reading. Geiger argues that the
reading of MT is not due to graphical metathesis (i~n:::i - im~:::i), but
a deliberate correction: im~:::i introduced the concept of retribution
in the afterlife into the proverb. The text has been manipulated out
of a theological concern which can be defined as Pharisaic or ProtoPharisaic, since the Pharisees, among the religious movements of the
Second Commonwealth, were those who upheld the belief in afterlife
and retribution therein.
An opposite case, of a Sadducean manipulation of a Biblical text, is
extant in the LXX to 1 Samuel. If I am not mistaken, I had the privilege of first recognizing it, some years ago, while reading with my
students the first chapters of the Book of Samuel. I refer to the passage in 1 Sam 7:6. The MT reads:
They assembled at Mizpah, drew water and poured it out before the Lord;
they fasted on that day and confessed their sins to the Lord.

"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

THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SECONDARY READINGS

395

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

wisdom, gained by experience or through the teaching of elders.


The fact that a "Qumranic" correction entered a manuscript that
reached Alexandria and influenced, perhaps even served as, the
Vorlage of the LXX to Isaiah proves, if I am right, that the circles
peripheric to the Qumran Ya}Jad were rather wide. This conclusion
is confirmed by the wide circulation enjoyed by books kindred to the
Qumranic religion, such as Jubilees and Enoch. As against them,
there existed an esoteric Qumranic literature, comprising the
serakim, the hodayot, the pesarim, the Damascus Document, the
Temple Scroll which did not circulate outside the Essenian denomination and therefore were not afterwards translated into Greek.5
The number of "sectarian" corrections in the textual witnesses of
the Hebrew Bible is limited. I doubt if one can add many more to
those recorded here. 6 This situation changes, of course, if one counts
the Biblical lemmata in the pefarim.1 But we may rightly question
whether these were exact quotations from extant manuscripts or
reworded ones, done ad hoe for the sake of the peser.s All in all, the
evidence yields that by the time of the emergence of the three Jewish
sects, in the mid-second century BCE, copyists of biblical manuscripts
usually abstained from modifying the texts according to their creeds.
Let us recall in this context the early date suggested above for the
Proto-Sadducean addition in LXX 1 Sam 7:6. The other "sectarian"
modifications cannot be dated, though it is probable that they too
5
The Damascus Document seems to be an exception to this group, since it
first surfaced in the Cairo Geniza. A plausible explanation is that the Geniza
manuscripts were copied from scrolls discovered in a cave by Qumran in the eighth
century CE. Cf. J. T. Milik, Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea
(SBT 28; London: SCM, 1959) 19 n. 2. Here perhaps belongs the note of alQirqisani concerning the sect whose writings were discovered in a cave; cf. L.
Nemoy, "Al Qirqisani's Account of the Jewish Sects and Christianity," HUCA 7
(1930) 317-97, esp. 326-27, 363-64; B. Chiesa and W. Lockwood, Ya'qub alQirqisani on Jewish Sects and Christianity (Judentum und Umwelt 10; Frankfurt
am Main: Lang, 1984) 102, 134-35.
6
Is Isa 9: 14, attested by all textual witnesses, a polemical actualization inserted
by a sectarian scribe? Cf. M. Goshen-Gottstein, "Hebrew Syntax and the History
of Bible Text," Textus 8 (1973) 100-106;
7
See S. Talmon, "Yorn Hakkippurim in the Habakkuk Scroll," Bib 32 ( 195 l)
549-63, esp. 554.
8
See, however, C. Rabin, "Notes on the Habakkuk Scroll and the Zadokite
Documents," VT 5 (1955) 148-62. On p. 152 Rabin pointed out that the sectarian
reading hon in Hab 2:5 also appears paraphrased in CD 8:7.

THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SECONDARY READINGS

397

preceded the formation of the sects themselves.


Thus it appears that in Hasmonean times a complex situation
obtained: on the one hand, a variety of text-types were in use side by
side, as witnessed by the Qumran libraries; on the other hand,
respect for the biblical text (as an ideal) and attention in the process
of copying it were already becoming the rule in the learned circles
of the Jewish people. This may be considered as a first stage in the
stabilization of the text.9
The situation just described does not apply to the Samaritan
schism. It is well known that their copies of the Pentateuch contain a
series of expansions asserting the sanctity of Mount Gerizim. I refer
to the insertion of the words o:HZJ Sm in Deut 11: 30 and especially
to the additional commandment, appended to the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, enjoining the erection of an
altar on that mountain. This precept has been forged with elements
from Deut 11:29-30 and 27:2-7 where the Samaritan Pentateuch ( =
SP) reads Gerizim instead of Ebal extant in the MT. As a by-product
of the addition of this new Tenth Commandment, all passages in
Deuteronomy that mention the Lord's future choosing of a place "to
set His name there" have been turned by the SP from imperfect
(in:J') to perfect (in::i).10
In my view, all these deviations of SP from the MT represent
secondary Samaritan revisions. This applies to Deut 27:4 as well
where the Vetus Latina corroborates SP by reading Garzin as against
Ebal of the MT .11 Suffice it to say that Mount Gerizim never appears
as a holy site in the patriarchal legends nor in the historical books of
the Bible. The sacred place of Elon Moreh (Gen 12:6-7) was near
Shechem (Tel Balla.tab), situated on the lowest slopes of the opposite
mountain, Ebal. And the temenos containing the grave of Joseph
(Josh 24:32) and the pillar erected by Jacob (Gen 33: 19-20)12 was in
9
S. Talmon, "The Old Testament Text," in P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans
(eds.), The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. l (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1970) 159-99, esp. 165-66.
10 Cf. J. A. Montgomery, The Samaritans - The Earliest Jewish Sect: Their
History, Theology and Literature (Philadelphia, Winston, 1907) 234-39.
11 Cf. E. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Assen/Maastricht: Van
Gorcum; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992) 95 n. 67. In his opinion, l:l'l'1l i;i::i in SP
Deut 27:4 reflects the original reading.
12 Cf. J. Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis (2nd ed.,
ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1930) 416.

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ALEXANDER ROFE

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).

THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SECONDARY READINGS

399

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

oin;i 1'll MTMSS I Qisaa LXXS (rr6A.Ls acrE8 i]A.(ou) et al.


p1:!>i1 1'll LXX

(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,

16 In another way, I. L. Seeligmann, The Septuagint Version of Isaiah: A


Discussion of its Problems (Leiden: Brill, 1948) 68. Concerning the identity of the
founder of the temple at Leontopolis, see his excursus: "Onias III and the Onias
Temple in Heliopolis," 91-94.
I 7 F. M. Cross, "The Ammonite Oppression of the Tribes of Gad and Reuben:
Missing Verses from 1 Samuel 11 Found in 4QSamueJa," in H. Tadmor and M.
Weinfeld (eds.), HistOI)', Historiography and Interpretation (Jerusalem: Magnes
1983) 148-58.

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ALEXANDER ROPE

are a secondary midrash aggadah.IB Indeed the additional story bears


an evident hallmark of midrash: one trait of a biblical hero is
exaggerated to the point of becoming his permanent property. Here
Nahash, the Ammonite king, is transformed into an inveterate eyegouger. Thus, midrash has entered into this biblical manuscript as a
kind of supplement to one of its stories.19
I believe we can even reckon the approximate date of the composition of this midrash. At the end of the Book of Samuel, in the story
of the consecration of the altar on Araunah' s threshing floor (2
Samuel 24), 4QSama again deviates from the MT. 4QSama runs a text
similar to 1 Chronicles 21, a secondary text vis-a-vis the MT of 2
Samuel 24, since it solves the queries contained in that narrative one
by one.20 A Samuel text similar to the one in 4QSama was before the
Chronicler, which amounts to saying that it took shape before the
composition of the book of Chronicles in the mid-fourth century
BCE. In other words, stories such as the Nahash-midrash were
composed in the Persian period. The year 350 BCE is to be considered as a date ante quern for the beginnings of the Jewish midrash.
On our trail backwards to uncover earlier historical information
by the evidence of secondary readings, we now come to the question
of the double text of Jeremiah. There is a longer text, mainly
represented by the MT, and a shorter one, which presumably served
as Vorlage to the LXX of Jeremiah, and has been very partially
retrieved in the manuscript 4QJerb.21 I believe that the relation
between these two should not be explained on the basis of the routine
ruling brevior lectio potior est; rather both texts must be looked into
in detail, in order to find out the possible reasons for their
differences.
18 Cf. A. Rofe, "The Acts of Nahash according to 4QSama," !El 32 ( 1982)
129-33.
19 For further arguments, cf. J. A. Sanders, "Hermeneutics of Text Criticism," Textus 18 (1995) 1-26, esp. 22-26.
20 For further details I refer the reader to my study: "4QSama in the Light of
Historico-Literary Criticism: The Case of 2 Sam 24 and I Chr 21," in A. Vivian
(ed.), Biblische und Judaistische Studien (Festschrift fiir P. Sacchi; Frankfurt am
Main: Lang, 1990) 100-119.
21 J. G. Janzen, Studies in the Text of Jeremiah (HSM 6; Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1973). E. Tov ("Three Fragments of Jeremiah from Qumran
Cave 4," RevQ l 5 [ 1992] 531-42) has recently introduced a distinction between
three separate scrolls, 4QJerb,d,e.

THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SECONDARY READINGS

40 I

A case in point is the divine epithet ni~:t~.22 In the MT of Jeremiah


it appears eighty-two times; in the LXX it is represented sixteen times
only, most of them in two well defined collections: the book of restoration (Jeremiah 30-33; LXX 37-40) and the prophecies against the
nations (~haps. 25; 46-51; LXX 25-32). How can this phenomenon be
explained?
In my opinion, it should be considered in conjunction with the
absence of the epithet ni~:t~ from the books Genesis-Judges and
Ezekiel and the traces of its being erased from several passages in
Samuel and Kings: certain editors of biblical books endeavored to
obliterate this appellation of the Lord from the sacred books.
Apparently, they took offense to the "Hosts" (ni~:t~), because they
sensed in it a recognition of the "Host of Heaven." Actually, polemics
against the worship of astral deities is clearly preserved in Hos 13:4
according to the LXX and one Qumran manuscript (4QXIIc):23
But I am the Lord your god, who establishes the heaven and creates the
earth, whose hands have created all the host of heaven; but I did not show
them to you that you would go after them ...
The reading is undoubtedly secondary. However, it joins the
editorial operations mentioned above in documenting an opposition
to astral worship at a certain phase of the formation of the biblical
canon. Thus we reach the conclusion that astral religion, far from
being limited to the times of the Assyrian supremacy (2 Kgs 21:3-5;
23:5, 11), still troubled observant Jews in the late Persian days. The
interpolation in Hos 13:4, together with the editorial deletions from
biblical books, particularly from Jeremiah, have led us to this result.
The shorter, sometimes secondary, text of Jeremiah presents, by
its very omissions, some substantial information even about the sixth
r.entury BCE, i.e. late Babylonian and early Persian era. LXX Jeremiah 52 lacks all three mentions of the exile of Zedekiah's people
contained in the MT (vv. 15, 27b, 28-30). How is this difference to be
construed? As far as I can see, the reports about exiles at the fall of
Jerusalem in 586 BCE were deleted from Jeremiah 52 in order to
deny Zedekiah' s people any survival: they were all and sundry wiped
22 I summarize here the arguments presented in "The name YHWH SEBA'OT
and the Shorter Recension of Jeremiah," in Prophetie und geschichtliche Wirklichkeit
im alten lsrael (Festschrift fiir S. Herrmann; Stuttgart: Kohl hammer, 1991) 307-15.
23 4QXUC frag. 8 has recently been published; cf. R. Fuller, "A Critical Note
on Hosea 12:10 and 13:4," RB 98 (1991) 343-57.

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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).

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