Molly M.

 Zahn

Introduction: Perspectives on Editing

in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism

The essays in this issue originated in a workshop entitled “What Do We

Really Know about Editing?,” convened at the 21st meeting of the Interna-
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tional Organization for the Study of the Old Testament in Munich in August
2014. The panelists were invited on the basis of their expertise in various
areas relevant to this question, including pentateuchal theory, textual criti-
cism, and Qumran studies. Yet the question posed in the workshop’s title was
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left open to each contributor to construe as he or she saw fit. The result was a
lively interaction of different approaches, methodologies, and points of view.
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The open-ended title, with its focus on “editing” and on what we “really
know,” references two related concerns that have risen to prominence in
recent years. The first is the role played by editing (or, as it is more usually
known, redaction) in the composition of the books of the Hebrew Bible.
While most scholars (though not all) imagine editors / redactors playing
some part in the composition of biblical books, there is great debate in pen-
tateuchal theory in particular as to the nature and extent of their activities.
The second issue is the question of the relevance of documented examples of
textual revision and reuse to pentateuchal theory and other branches of his-
torical criticism. With the discovery and publication of the Qumran materi-
als and the subsequent rethinking of our approach to other materials like the
Septuagint and Samaritan Pentateuch, we now have a large body of evidence
for the ways in which scribes of the late Second Temple period revised or
rewrote texts in the course of their transmission. Some have argued that such
evidence constitutes a model for understanding earlier stages in the compo-
sition of biblical books, stages for which we do not have any documentary
evidence. That is, this Second Temple evidence might be said to constitute
something we “really know” about editing, which in turn may be applied to
stages about which we “really know” very little.
Against this general background – the questions of the role of editors/
redactors in traditional versions of the Bible and of the relevance of Second
Temple manuscripts for studying earlier periods – several specific areas of

HeBAI 3 (2014), 293–297 DOI 10.1628/219222714X14115480974817

ISSN 2192–2276 © 2014 Mohr Siebeck
 294 Molly M. Zahn

investigation emerge. Each is explored in different ways by the contributors

to this issue of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel.
1. One approach is to focus on individual documented cases of textual
interventions – namely, instances where a given text is preserved in two (or
more) different versions and thus testifies to some kind of scribal interven-
tion – and to ask what such interventions actually look like and what exe-
getical or ideological explanations can be posited for them. Alexander Rofé’s
essay provides an in-depth study of one such case, the different versions of
2 Samuel 24 preserved in MT, 4QSama (4Q51), and the parallel in 1 Chroni-
cles 21. He argues that here we see signs of a complex chain of development:
an interpolation in MT produced contradictions in the narrative that are
partially resolved in the reworking preserved in 4Q51. A reworking such
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as this in turn serves as the source for the version of this episode included
by the Chronicler. Another case study that will be published elsewhere and
thus is not included here was offered at the Munich workshop by Hermann-
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Josef Stipp, who analyzed the MT Sondergut in the book of Jeremiah as an

editorial layer superimposed upon an earlier Hebrew edition corresponding
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largely with the Old Greek.

The contributions by myself and by Juha Pakkala focus on documented
cases of textual development from a perspective of more breadth but less
depth. I attempt to provide a representative survey of prominent types of
textual development witnessed in the Qumran corpus, both in new copies
of existing texts and in cases where scribes drew on earlier works in order to
create new compositions. My main argument is that these kinds of interven-
tions, whether they are referred to as “editing” or by some other name, have
substantially shaped the texts as we know them today and must therefore be
considered an integral stage in the compositional process. Pakkala takes a
different tack, focusing on another aspect of the Second Temple textual evi-
dence: the presence of heavily revised / rewritten texts alongside others that
appear to have been copied more precisely or with relatively limited inter-
ventions. Pakkala offers a sociological explanation for this state of affairs
by means of the notion of the “paradigm shift”: a culture, or sub-culture, is
content to preserve texts essentially as they stand or to revise them only in
relatively minor ways, as long as that culture’s historical circumstances and
ideological outlook continue to correspond to that of the texts. But when
that culture undergoes a paradigm shift – a sudden change in ideology or
worldview due to social or historical upheavals – more radical revision of its
core texts is necessary in order to conform the texts to the new paradigm.
2. A second approach involves addressing the question of whether, and if
so, how, the documented cases of scribal intervention witnessed in late Sec-
 Introduction: Perspectives on Editing in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism 295

ond Temple texts might profitably be applied to the study of earlier, nondoc-
umented stages of composition. All of the contributors address this question
in some way. Van Seters provides a negative answer, rejecting the very idea
that the books of the Bible underwent an “editing process.” Rather, he argues,
they are the products of authors who creatively reshaped earlier materials in
the process of composition. For Van Seters, the Second Temple manuscript
evidence for scribal intervention should be regarded as “corruption,” not as
“editing” or “redaction,” and such scribal corruption does not bear on the
compositional process that took place in earlier stages of the texts’ histories.
A more affirmative response to the idea of using documented cases
of scribal intervention as a model for earlier stages is advocated by Rofé,
Pakkala, and myself (as well as by Stipp in his analysis of the MT Sondergut
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of Jeremiah). Although Rofé begins his essay with the caveat that “[t]he pro-
cess of editing the biblical books usually remains hidden from our eyes,” he
nevertheless suggests that some extrapolation is possible from documented
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cases such as the one he examines. Rofé notes that the reworking of 2 Samuel
24 attested in 4Q51 and in 1 Chronicles 21 seeks to resolve an inconsistency
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of the same kind as those source and redaction critics usually take as indica-
tions of a composite text. Thus, it affirms the basic methodology of historical
criticism. More specifically, the reworking of 2 Samuel 24 in 1 Chronicles
21 contains omissions as well as additions, meaning that scholars must con-
sider the possibility of omission as a scribal technique in other cases as well.
Pakkala draws on a variety of examples to make a similar point regarding
the kinds of interventions we can expect to have taken place in the course
of the development of biblical texts. For him, it stands to reason that the
types of scribal/redactional interventions that can be documented in rewrit-
ings, translations, and Second Temple manuscript copies would also have
occurred earlier on. As a result, “many texts in the Hebrew scriptures may
have developed in a complicated process lasting centuries before the text was
stabilized.” On the basis of this presumed analogy, Pakkala stresses that the
process of development must at times have included omissions and rewrit-
ings as well as additions, even though it is the latter which tend to figure as
the main or even sole mode of editorial intervention in many redaction-
critical models.
The conclusions of my essay point in the same direction. Since the Qum-
ran materials and other products of the Second Temple period stem from
a historical and cultural situation not all that dissimilar from that in which
most of the texts now in our Bibles likely took their preliminary shape, it
seems quite probable that the same kinds of scribal techniques impacted
both of these stages. Like Pakkala, I believe we must take seriously the
 296 Molly M. Zahn

possibility that each of the books of the Hebrew Bible experienced multi-
ple rounds of revision or rewriting before they reached the earliest forms
documented in the manuscript witnesses. I attempt to draw out some of
the practical implications of this observation for redaction critics, and here
the results are somewhat sobering. Many of the scribal interventions docu-
mented for us in Second Temple manuscripts would not be detectable if we
did not have at our disposal two different versions of the text in question.
(Stipp made a similar point in his workshop presentation on Jeremiah, not-
ing that only the largest MT plusses might possibly be identifiable as sec-
ondary if we did not have the Old Greek to compare with the MT; most
plusses would be undetectable.) Pakkala, Stipp, and I all suggest in different
ways that while the Second Temple evidence for editing is of considerable
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relevance for the study of textual development in earlier periods – indeed,

I think we would all agree that it constitutes an endorsement, to a certain
degree, of the redaction-critical approach – this relevance takes the form of
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a methodological challenge to most current redaction criticism. It does not

provide easy solutions to questions of textual development, much less vin-
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dicate particular redaction-critical theories.

3. A final angle from which the question of editing can be approached is
that of terminology. It has frequently been observed in recent years that the
labels that we use for certain phenomena actually shape the ways we con-
ceive of and understand those phenomena, and thus merit careful interroga-
tion. The title of the workshop and the particular research areas of the par-
ticipants encouraged the identification of “editing” with the types of scribal
intervention documented in Second Temple texts, and for most of us it was a
natural step to identify such “editing” with “redaction” as well. In this sense,
Van Seters’s contribution constitutes an important challenge to our termino-
logical complacency, arguing that such scribal interventions are not “editing”
at all, and in fact the idea of the ancient “editor” (or “redactor”) is a figment
of the scholarly imagination – such figures simply did not exist. Van Seters’s
point is more than a terminological one, but it highlights the degree to which
terminology shapes understanding. If the scribal interventions found in Sec-
ond Temple manuscripts are labeled examples of “editing” or “redaction,”
they are naturally and automatically associated with the editing/redaction
that many scholars postulate for earlier, nondocumented stages of the Bible’s
textual history. The label that Van Seters gives these interventions, “scribal
corruptions,” implies rupture and discontinuity instead of analogy, and sup-
ports a conceptual model in which the compositional processes that shaped
biblical books are unrelated to the scribal processes of later periods of trans-
mission. The arguments Van Seters presents have influenced my choice of
 Introduction: Perspectives on Editing in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism 297

more neutral terms (“scribal interventions” and the like) here and in my
essay when referring to the Second Temple manuscript evidence. “Editing,”
in other words, is a contested term, and how one understands it depends
upon one’s attitudes towards a host of theoretical and methodological issues.
* * *
The four essays presented here range not only in their breadth and depth
but also in their methodologies, their prior assumptions or starting points,
and (of course) their conclusions. Their diversity is a testament to the rich-
ness of the idea of “editing” in biblical and Second Temple studies as well as
to the depth of scholarly interest in the issues the term touches upon. It is
our hope that these essays will provoke continued reflection on the uses of
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this term and on the various phenomena to which it has been taken to refer.
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