The Notion of Textual Comparison between the Judean Desert Biblical Texts and of Variant Readings

Abstract Were there any so-called “variants” in the scrolls? The assumption of contact between any two scrolls has been inferred from corrective additions and deletions. It has usually been claimed that corrections were based on MT . I divide the scrolls into different groups because in each group there could have been a different incentive for correction towards an external source. The strength of the argument depends on this division. In an analysis of the evidence (see the Appendix) in each of the groups, a different correction pattern was detected, and often the corrections were revised towards a text different from MT . In all these cases, the corrections were not made towards external sources, but the source of the scrolls. Strengthened by theoretical arguments, we suggest that the scrolls contain no notations of variants, that is, elements that were copied as variants from other scrolls or were corrected according to external sources.