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orion XII/Minor Prophets question
I have been intrigued by discussions in articles by E. Tov
and E. Ulrich on approaches toward text criticism. Ulrich has
argued that the purpose of biblical textual criticism is not
the recovery of a single starting edition but recovery of a history of
successive literary editions, each expanding on the previous. This
seems to be stated as a global principle applicable to all biblical text
criticism generically.
While there seems to be support for this picture in the Pentateuch,
Jeremiah, etc. my question focuses on whether there is any evidence
to apply this picture to the Minor Prophets, that is the Book
of the Twelve. That is, is there any evidence that all existing manuscript
traditions of the XII do not stem from a single production (as a
collection of XII), i.e. an ur-text. (This has nothing to do with
the issue of prior sources--only the issue of an ur-text of XII as
XII which never received a further literary reworking but only
scribal transmissions, or to put it in other terms, there is no
higher criticism on XII once it first became XII, there is only lower
criticism involved in recovery of the ur-text.)
A missing third chapter of Habakkuk in 1QpHab, while interesting,
falls short of evidence of a different version of Habakkuk to me for
the simple reason that the length of peshers, and when to stop
quoting, seems naturally accounted for to me by considerations of
number of columns or content units rather than to assume a principle
of "one scroll, one complete book" (which in any case seems
inconsistent with the Isaiah and the Psalms pesharim).
A more substantial point, which I have read several times, is that a
Cave 4 copy of XII has the book of Jonah following Malachi. In DJD
XV (Ulrich et al, XII texts by R. Fuller), this text is 4QXII(a).
There this claim is presented as a fact. There is no single fragment
with Malachi followed by Jonah on it. The support for the claim
is a fragment with the end of Malachi with three letters from a
following column which are suposed to be identified with expected
letters consistent with another fragment with Jonah 1:1-5. This is
found in the photograph at Plate 76 and the transcription on p. 129.
While there is evidence of a further column of writing following the
end of Malachi, its identification as belonging to the Jonah column
does not look right to me. Specifically, where Fuller reads a Waw
(start of col. 5, line 10) and He Kaph (start of col. 5, line 11)--which
is the claim to a match with what is expected in those positions for
the Jonah column--only the He looks like a correct reading. The other two
letters do not look like Waw and Kaph to me (yet they must be, in
order to make the Jonah match claim). Since there is no other
evidence for the Malachi-Jonah sequence than this single point of the
match with these three letters, if these readings are not secure the
Malachi-Jonah sequence claim must be abandoned as lacking any
evidence.
I solicit input or views both on the specific 4QXII(a) reading and
on the larger question of evidence for variant text traditions of XII
which can demonstrate multiple literary editions as distinguished from
an ur-text--for the Book of the XII. (There is the issue that 4QXII(a)
seems to have _something_ following the end of Malachi--the only
question is what.)
Greg Doudna
Copenhagen