Tov on the Torah in the Dark Ages

Time for an office clean-out, and what do I rediscover, but an interesting article by Emanuel Tov published earlier this year in a Festschrift. The article is called "The Dark Ages of the Textual Transmission of the Torah," and it turns out that the Dark Ages mentioned in the title refers to the period before the composition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Since the Scrolls are more-or-less our earliest physical evidence for the Torah, the period before the third century BCE constitutes the Dark Ages, when most biblical scholars assume that the Torah existed in some form but the contours of that form are debated. (For some reason, Tov says that "The earliest written evidence for the Torah is that of the LXX" [221], but we do not have Greek manuscripts of the Pentateuch that predate the DSS Torah manuscripts.)

The Festschrift is available open access here.

As Tov points out, for the period of the Dark Ages (pre-third-century BCE), different forms of the Torah have been hypothesized by modern scholars, but the textual form of the MT has usually been presupposed by all forms of the Documentary Hypothesis. Tov searched the books of the Bible for vestiges of a deviating text form for the Torah. “The practical result of the search for early deviating texts is that I see little or no textual evidence that differed in a major way from the proto-MT. In other words, it seems that the MT has no serious competitor among possibly early texts” (227). He cautiously suggests “that for several centuries a text like the proto-MT (the forerunner of the MT) was the sole reigning text through the Dark Ages. This assumption was possible only if very few copies of the Torah or only a single one were circulating. The single-copy theory … is the tacit supposition of all those who adhere to a documentary hypothesis of some kind” (227). “I don’t think that the SP and the LXX had antecedents before the fourth or third century; I rather think that these texts were created as popular offshoots from the proto-MT family” (230).