Biblical Hebrew Forum

[dwashbur AT nyx.net]

On 1 Sep 2009 at 10:27, Randall Buth wrote:

> vayyixtov David
> >That's exactly what I was talking about when I spoke of the
> accident of
> > preservation.  The Alexandrian and Rabbinic material may or may
> not
> > have anything to do with the DSS materials; once again, the
> evidence
> > is more than a little equivocal.
> 
> You are correct, it's possible that two copies of Job at Qumran have
> nothing
> to do with two rabbinic stories about a targum to Job, and the LXX
> comment about using an Aramaic Job. But it would be silly to
> ignore
> the concatenation of testimony from divrese sources. We can't be
> positive, but we need to investigate such things and point them
> out.

Investigate and point out, I quite agree.  Draw conclusions?  I don't think 
we have enough 
material to go that far yet.  That's all I'm saying.
 
> > And that's the crux of the problem: the DSS can't tell us as much
> as
> > we would like about things like Targum use
> 
> All true.
> As mentioned, I'm happy with viewing 4Q156 as a Leviticus targum,
> and
> happy to list it as a targum. But it just stands so starkly alone
> that I must
> add a question mark. It's called weighing probabilities.
> We have four copies of Aramaic Tobit,
> but what about central, undisputed canon? 4Q156 is alone. 

Except for Job :-D

> It's
> possible that 4Q156 was among many targumim in cave 4, that got
> pulverized so badly that only the Hebrew and Greek Bible fragments
> remained. But the question at least arises, perhaps there weren't
> other
> targumim in Cave 4 beyond Job? Or maybe one or two. But if so, the
> question must be raised, why so few? There are more than one
> answer
> to the question, but the question needs to remain visible.

Again, I agree completely.  One tentative answer is that whoever collected 
the documents 
that were secreted away in the caves clearly favored, or at least focused on, 
documents in 
Hebrew, and hence had a handful or less of Targums and/or Greek translations 
strictly for 
reference, or to round out his/their collection, or whatever.  But that's 
pure speculation, i.e. 
guesswork.  I like to think, or hope, that when I engage in such things I 
label them as clearly 
as I can.

Of course, another question comes up that I haven't seen very often: Cave 11 
is quite some 
distance from the others.  Is it possible that whatever documents were in 
there were put 
there by someone other than the people who hid their books in Caves 1-10?  It 
seems pretty 
clear that we have more than one group of document-hiders at work; the Nahal 
Hever 
caves, for example, probably had nothing to do with the original Qumran-area 
caves.  And 
so it goes.

> Targumim
> at
> Qumran need to have a question around them. I find that the sense
> of
> "question" is usually missing from discussions of Qumran targumim.

I'll try to correct that, at least in my own material, because your point is 
a good one.  When it 
comes to calling things like 4Q156 a Targum, or some of the other items 
phylacteries or 
mezuzot, I go with the experts but reserve the right to come to a different 
conclusion later.  I 
haven't always been explicit about that, though.
 
> > or the nature of colloquial
> > Hebrew (if there was such a thing) during the Second Temple
> period.
> 
> Your comment was an aside, but it bothers me. Why the repeated
> doubt
> on colloquial Hebrew? In '88 James Barr accused NT scholarship of
> being
> out of touch with mishnaic Hebrew scholarship and not having
> digested or
> incorporated its results. Should he have included Literary Hebrew
> scholarship, too? Maybe he had more hope for biblical Hebraists?

I still have my doubts, mainly because all of the evidence we have from the 
period points to 
Hebrew as a religious language, not a street language.  Is Barr correct that 
I, at least, am 
out of touch with Mishnaic scholarship?  Absolutely.  I haven't a clue.  To 
be very blunt, I 
really don't care about the Mishna or the scholarship surrounding it.  My 
field is BH, 
secondarily the DSS but primarily from a text-critical viewpoint.  I use 
Jastrow occasionally 
when looking into particularly difficult or obscure words, but that's about 
it.
 
> >> For me the bigger leap is to jump from virtual silence to claim
> that
> >> Qumran
> >> establishes the use of the targum. (I'm not saying that you
> claim
> >> this, just
> >> that many claim this.) The character of Job, and the virtual lack
> of
> >> targum
> >> leave probability on the side of no widespread, general use of
> >> targum in Judea in the first century.
> 
> >You've made several appeals to the nature of Job, but I think too
> much may be made of
> >that; we have other books of the Tanakh that are equally
> problematic.
> 
> Like what?
> What other book is like Job, either in its essence or problems?
>  the dialect pattern of Job is sui generis. At least Qohelet has
> some
> distinct mishnaic and northern links, but Job hovers out on the
> eastern
> fringe somewhere. Job is the only book that the Greek translators
> explicitly claimed to use Aramaic for help.

Karl has answered this much better than I could have, so I defer to him.
 
> >Why did some
> >ancient authorities focus on Job?  I have no idea.  But I'm not
> sure its "nature"
> > is sufficient to explain the evidence.
> 
> You're free to reserve commitment about Job's nature. For me it is
> sufficient
> to explain the ancient focus and the discovery profile. From
> literarture we
> knew it was special (LXX and rabbis) and then we find two copies
> at
> Qumran. It fits, it's congruent. It's nice to have archaeology that
> overlaps
> known data some of the time.

I tend to think that, at least in this discussion, we've reached that spot 
where we need to 
agree to disagree.  What do you think?

Dave Washburn

http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur