Frank Moore Cross

The History of the Biblical Text in the Light of Discoveries in the Judean Desert

The publication in January, 1953, of fragments of an unknown recension of the Greek Bible gave the first unambiguous warnings of a revolution to come in the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Earlier the publication of the great Isaiah scroll of Qumrân, Cave I (IQ Isa a ), and later of the second fragmentary roll of Isaiah (IQ Isa b ), created noise and excitement, but none of the major text-critical schools was forced to shift significant ground. Champions of the Hebraica veritas who had increasingly dominated the field, especially in Europe, noted the close affinities of the scrolls with the traditional text. The failure of IQ Is a to produce a significant number of superior readings despite its antiquity embarrassed lingering survivors of the great critical tradition of the nineteenth century, and delighted biblical exegetes and historians who wished to ply their trade without entering the miasmal precincts of text-critical labors. Despite some attention paid to its occasional affinities with the Old Greek, most scholars, whether prompted by traditionalist prejudgment or sheer inertia, were pleased to label the text vulgar or even sectarian, avoiding thereby a serious reexamination of their text-critical theories.

Studies in ancient Yahwistic poetry

This classic study of ancient Yahwistic poetry untangles some of the serious textual difficulties and linguistic obscurities that for many years have been a challenge to students of the Hebrew Bible.

Yahweh and the God of the Patriarchs

The modern discussion of Patriarchal religion may be said to begin with the brilliant essay of Albrecht Alt, Der Gott der Vater, published in 1929. Alt proposed to use new means to penetrate into the pre-history of Israels traditions of the old time. He repudiated the methods of such earlier scholars as Robertson Smith and Julius Wellhausen, who attempted to reconstruct the pre-Yahwistic stage of the tribal forebears of Israel by sifting Israels early but fully Yahwistic sources for primitive features, primitive in terms of an apriori typology of religious ideas derived largely from nineteenth century idealism. Such procedures, Alt recognized, yielded merely the superstitious dregs of Israelite religion at any of its stages. As early as 1929, it was obvious to him that the archaeological data bearing on the second millennium gave a very different picture from that painted by the older historians. At least it was clear that the religion of Israels neighbors was on a very much more sophisticated level than that being predicated for the pre-Mosaic tribes.

The effects of possible contamination on the radiocarbon dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls I : Castor oil

Some fragments of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts were contaminated with castor oil in the late 1950s. We have conducted experiments in order to establish if the AAA pretreatment cleaning procedures conducted on Dead Sea Scroll manuscript samples in the last two dating series (Bonani et al. 1992; Jull et al. 1995) were effective in removing oil contamination. Our experiments show that not all oil contamination can be expected to have been removed by the acid-alkaline-acid (AAA) pretreatment, and that the radiocarbon ages previously reported therefore cannot be guaranteed to be correct. Any samples contaminated with castor oil were most likely reported with ages that are too young by an unknown amount.

An Inscribed Jar Handle from Raddana

touched a handle to participate in a ritual. What was the nature of the ritual? It could have been some unknown ceremony of pouring out a drink offering which would have been practiced by agricultural villagers like those at Raddana in Iron Age I. These and other problems, hopefully, will be solved as we learn more about the Raddana village in further excavations and as specialists attempt to answer some of the technical questions raised above.

A Ugaritic Abecedary and the Origins of the Proto-Canaanite Alphabet

Advances in the decipherment of Proto-Canaanite texts during the past twelve years 1 together with the discovery of the el-Khadr arrowheads in 1953 2 have furnished definitive evidence that the conventional Phoenician alphabet 3 evolved directly from the Proto-Canaanite pictographic script. Twelve of the most frequent signs can be traced in detail through their evolution from transparent pictograph to Phoenician letter in deciphered contexts.4 Five others, whose pictographs remain more or less obscure, can also be traced from pictograph to conventional sign, making a total of some seventeen of twenty-two signs whose historical typology is now clear.5 With the establishment of this evolution, there appears to be no escape from the conclusion that the Proto-Canaanite alphabetic system has its beginnings in an acrophonically devised script under direct or indirect 6 Egyptian influence, somewhere in Syria-Palestine. Further, it was reasonable, if not necessary, to argue on the basis of these data that the names of the individual signs, and probably the order of the signs as well, went back in principle to the time of the origin of the script at the end of the Middle Bronze Age. The discovery of abecedaries at Ugarit, the first recognized specimen

Reply to Israel Carmi (2002): “Are the 14C Dates of the Dead Sea Scrolls Affected by Castor Oil Contamination?”

Carmi (2002) is a response to our study published in Radiocarbon 43(1) by Rasmussen et al. (2001). We noted widespread possible exposure to castor oil of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) in the Rockefeller Museum in the 1950s and reported experiments showing that the AAA pretreatment used in the first 2 series of radiocarbon datings of the DSS (Bonani et al. [1992] and Jull et al. [1995]), “cannot be guaranteed to have removed all of the modern carbon in any samples if they had been contaminated with castor oil and hence could have produced some 14C dates that were younger than the texts’ true ages.” Carmi, a coauthor of the Bonani et al. (1992) study, criticizes our analysis on 4 grounds:

The Name of Ashdod

3 C. F. A. Schaeffer-J. C. Courtois, Syria, 1963, pp. 341-347. H. de Contenson, BULLETIN, No. 172 (December, 1963), pp. 35-40. In BULLETIN, No. 172, p. 35, the writer inadvertently failed to say that all the work at Ras Shamra was carried out under the general direction of Professor C. F. A. Schaeffer and as part of the stratigraphical research program of the French Archaeological Expedition at Ras ShamraUgarit. THE NAME OF ASHDOD

An Archaic Inscribed Seal from the Valley of Aijalon

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Singular Readings in 4QSamuela and the Question of Rewritten Scripture

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