Text and Transmission
From the openings of the righteous ones is heard her voice; and from the congregation of the pious ones her song. Psalm 154:12 DSS
The righteous ones – Go ahead. Look this psalm up in your Bible. Ah, wait a minute. It isn’t there. In the Masoretic text there are only 150 psalms. But the Dead Sea Scrolls have more. And the DSS isn’t the only place where more psalms appear. This one, for example, is found in Syriac 5ApocSyrPs 2.[1] It parallels the DSS 11QPsa 154. Others are found in the LXX but are not in the MT. If believers in the first century had more than 150 psalms in their sacred collections, what happened to them? Why do we have only 150? The answer is standardization. The Masoretes did much more than simply provide diacritical markings (vowel points). They also provided cantillation and they decided what would be included and what would be excluded from the sacred Scriptures. In other words, they put a fence around the text and then told you how to read and sing it.
Why would they do such a thing? That answer comes from the need to have religious uniformity. We have a modern example in the usual Erev-Shabbat ritual. Before Rabbi Isaac Luria of Tzfat the evening service was unregulated. Rabbi Isaac changed all that, and his influence has now become the standard for the Erev Shabbat candle lighting and prayers. Religious men and women like conformity. They like things to be the same from one location to another. They like certainty in their faith even if it’s just certainty in practice. And what needs to be more certain than the biblical text. Orthodoxy would be impossible if the text were whatever a religious group thought it should be. Just remember Marcion and his influence on the canonization of the Christian Bible. Christianity might be the first to canonize the Bible, but the process was well underway in the Jewish world long before the Christian bishops and the Emperor decided what to put in and what to leave out. What people want more than anything else in their faith is to know that they are right, and standardization makes that possible. Imagine how you would function in a religious faith where the sacred documents kept changing, where new prophets were constantly showing up, where there were no fixed rules and rituals. Oh, actually you don’t have to imagine this. It’s already part of the world today. Did you know that the Quran is being constantly reinterpreted, that the real meaning of the verses is whatever the last mullah decides it means? An unstable text is theological quicksand.
But wait! Haven’t we discovered that the biblical text does have a certain uncertainty about it. It’s right here in this extra-canonical psalm. And in the qere ketiv. And the DSS. And the Samaritan Pentateuch. Haven’t we discovered that there are lots of uncertain things about the text and the translation? No, not quite. Let me explain.
First, a comment from my rabbi friend. “There are no arguments in the Talmud about the letters of the text or about how it is read, but there are many arguments about the meaning of the text.” This means that text itself was fixed by the time of the Talmud. Everyone agreed that these words, these letters were correct (well, almost everyone). What the rabbis debated was what the words and letters meant. So, while there was a degree of certainty about the construction of the text (i.e., the order and shape of the words), there was a lot of debate about what those elements meant. And there still is debate about this, even when orthodoxy accepts a standardized text.
What about the differences in the letters of the text found in the DSS or the Samaritan Pentateuch? It seems to me that this is an issue about what each believing community accepted. And since there was no canonized text before the 3rdCentury of the common era, different believing communities had different collections of sacred material (1 Enoch, for example). This doesn’t mean that the difference in the letters creates uncertainty about what the community accepted. It just means there were different communities. And the reason that’s interesting to us today is not because we think we can arrive at the original pure unique text but because it shows us the diversity of religious belief in the ancient world.
Notice the difference with the apostolic writings. There are hundreds of alternative words and letters in the Greek fragments. The corpus of apostolic material was not treated with the same sanctity as the Tanakh. Why? The text of the New Testament was not fixed until the Church canonized it. Before that this material was simply narrative and personal letters that benefitted the believing communities. Minor variations didn’t matter. But when the Church determined it needed uniformity and certainty, principally to support its doctrines and determine who was a heretic, then the exact construction of the text did matter—and so it had to be fossilized. No more prophets. No new revelation. A closed canon guaranteed nothing could come along that would radically change things. The doctrines were secure. Once canonized, the bishops and priests could take up the same role played by the rabbis and sages, that is, what does this mean? It wasn’t until the 19th Century that serious investigation began to challenge the assumption of one unified inerrant text.
So, what do you do with Psalm 154? Well, you could read it like those early believers who used it and find spiritual comfort in another psalm. Or you could reflect on what it means about the transmission of sacred material. Or both.
Topical Index: Psalm 154, Syriac, Dead Sea Scrolls, certainty, doctrine, standardization, 5ApocSyrPs 2
[1] https://readingacts.com/2018/06/26/more-psalms-of-david/
