From the Case for Authenticity by IDAN DERSHOWITZ AND JAMES D. TABOR
For this coauthored article at BAR, James Tabor wrote the introductory section “Dead Sea Scroll Similarities,” and Idan Dershowitz contributed the section “Genuine Manuscripts.” See pdf copy in DropBox. The following italicized paragraphs are extracts from that excellent article.
I (Idan) will first present new evidence that undermines the consensus theory that Shapira forged his Deuteronomy fragments. I will also rebut some recent scholarly claims made against their authenticity.
While Shapira’s errors and corrections are perfectly understandable in view of his efforts to understand and work through the text, none of this comports with Shapira’s complicity in the manuscripts’ forgery. If Shapira were unfamiliar with the text in the manuscripts, as his previously unknown notes now indicate, he surely wasn’t behind their fabrication.
The other elements of the forgery hypothesis are similarly misguided, and I offer here several observations to refute two specific and more recent claims that the manuscripts were forged.
There is something very strange about the structure of the Book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 11:26 begins, “Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse” (author’s translation). This continues for several verses, stipulating that the blessing and curse are to occur on Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Ebal. But then the narrative breaks off abruptly. What about the blessing and curse? We don’t find out and instead encounter chapter after chapter of laws. These laws run from chapter 12 all the way through to chapter
26, and make up the legal code that gives Deuteronomy (meaning “second law”) its name. Then, all of a sudden in chapter 27, toward the end of the book, we’re back at Gerizim and Ebal, and we finally hear the rest of the narrative from chapter 11. This is an odd literary structure, to put it mildly, and it suggests that the laws were inserted secondarily into the Gerizim and Ebal passage.8 Amazingly, V’s version of the episode is uninterrupted, and the entire Deuteronomic law code is nowhere to be found. By Idan Dershowitz.
A similarly disjointed structure is found in Deuteronomy 2, where we find the story of Israel’s conquest of King Sihon’s Transjordanian territory. In recent years, biblical scholars have realized that the canonical version contains various edits whose purpose was to bring the story in line with the law of warfare in Deuteronomy 20.9 Th at law stipulates, “When you approach a town to battle it, you must (first) offer it peace.” The law also states that Israel may go to war if—and only if—their entreaty is refused, and that they may then take spoils. Recent scholars have theorized that a later editor added a passage to the original Sihon story about Moses sending messengers with “words of peace” (Deuteronomy 2:26), bringing the narrative in line with the law. The canonical text has Sihon make the first move, so the war is justified, and Israel proceeds to take spoils. Incredibly, the version preserved in V is one protracted transgression of the law: Moses offers no peace, and Israel—not Sihon—is the aggressor. Furthermore, V lacks any mention of spoils. It is not as though the version in the Shapira manuscripts is an abridgment of Deuteronomy. Rather, it tells a different story. We see that the version of the Sihon story found in the Shapira manuscripts matches modern Bible scholars’ reconstructions of the original proto-Deuteronomic text. These scholars didn’t know the text of the Shapira manuscripts, and no one in Shapira’s day had imagined anything even remotely similar. How could Shapira or any other 19th-century forger have based his or her forgery on research that wouldn’t be published for another century, which would only become
sensible after major advances in the field of biblical studies? The answer clearly is: They couldn’t. V matches scholars’ recovered proto-Deuteronomic Sihon story because it is the proto-Deuteronomic Sihon story. Pg. 52.
My final example is the famous spies story, which is found in the first chapter of Deuteronomy. This passage tells the story of 12 men—one from each tribe of Israel—who were sent into the land of Israel on a reconnaissance mission. In 2002, Bible scholar David Frankel drew attention to many previously overlooked problems in this Deuteronomic narrative.10 Frankel realized that an earlier version of the text told a dramatically different story—one that featured no spies at all. Instead, the early text described a commandment for the nation (not spies) to conquer (not explore) Canaan. The people refused, God
became angry, and he killed off the sinners in the desert. Deuteronomy 9:23 alludes to this early story,
but not to the familiar spies narrative. That verse reads, “And when YHWH sent you on from Kadesh-barnea, saying, ‘Go up and take possession of the land that I am giving you,’ you flouted the command of YHWH your God; you did not put your trust in him and did not obey him.” As Frankel writes, “It is striking that [this verse] makes no mention whatsoever of the sending of the scouts.” Instead, God commands the entire nation to conquer the land of Israel—which is quite different from commanding 12 men to gather intelligence, as told in the canonical story. By Idan Dershowitz.
Here’s where things get really interesting: V’s version of this episode is almost precisely Frankel’s reconstructed story! Unlike the canonical versions, here the spies are nowhere to be found, and the story progresses straight from a commandment to conquer the land of Canaan, to the people’s refusal, to God’s punishment. How can we explain this incredible coincidence? Surely no forger in the 1800s could have based his text on source-critical insights first suggested in 2002. We can also rule out the idea that V is an abridgment of Deuteronomy, since it isn’t a paraphrase but an altogether different story—no recap of the spies story would neglect to mention the main characters. Like the Sihon narrative, the story in V matches what recent scholars have reconstructed as the original version of the Deuteronomic text. By Idan Dershowitz.
Citation – Dershowitz, Idan, and James D. Tabor. “The Shapira Scrolls: The Case for Authenticity,” Biblical Archaeology Review 47.4 (2021): 47–53.
