Religion: Criticism from a Cave

Ever since the discovery of Biblical manuscripts in a Palestine cave seven years ago (TIME, Oct. 31, 1949), archeologists have been looking with renewed diligence for more. Seventeen months ago, in a cave at Wadi Qumran, in Jordan, a band of diggers found a stone writing table almost 2,000 years old, and strewn about it scraps of leather and papyrus, enough to fill several bushel baskets. The Hebrew script on the papyrus was minuscule,'and many fragments could be read only with the help of an infrared camera. But the texts, when examined, turned out to cover almost half of the Old Testament. Their date, from 200 B.C. to 70

A.D., make them the oldest Hebrew version of the Bible ever discovered.

Last week, writing in the current issue of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Dr. Frank M. Cross Jr., now at the school in Jerusalem, discussed a part of the Qumran find—27 fragments from the first and second chapters of Samuel I—recently pieced together and translated. Some of his fragments differ from existing Hebrew Biblical texts, and Scholar Cross believes they should be accepted as older and nearer the original than any other extant version. Among the corrections and additions he offers: Eli, the priest, was 90 years old at his death (not 98, as the King James version has it); Samuel, whose mother pledged him to the Lord's service for "all the days of his life," was thereupon enrolled as one of the Nazarites, and as such, Samuel might never touch strong drink or cut his hair.

Such corrections and additions, Dr. Cross hints, are only the beginning. When the Qumran fragments are finally edited, scholars will have for the first time a roughly contemporary Hebrew check on the Greek Septuagint, for centuries the bulwark of Old Testament translators. They will also have some important revisions to make in the work of those scholars who had a habit of trying to solve a corrupted Biblical text by speculation on the translator's sociological background. The entire job of editing the Qumran texts, now being done jointly by the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem and French Roman Catholic scholars, may take "tens of years," but its results may be impressive. Predicts Biblical Scholar William F. Albright, head of the Oriental Seminar at Johns Hopkins University: "All handbooks on the Bible, early Christianity and the history of Judaism will soon be in need of drastic revision."