Page 272 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

252 THE HISTORY OF THE QUR'ANIC TEXT

The second set of caves, in Wadi:Murabba'at, have their own history.
This tale begins in the autumn of 1951, when Bedouins discovered four
caves in an area almost twenty kilometres south of Qumran. Subsequent
excavations revealed that "the caves had been inhabited repeatedly from
4000B.C. to the Arabian period".106 Several of the documents found within
indicated that these caves had served as refuge for insurgents during the
Second Jewish revolt. Fragmented scrolls of the OT were uncovered in
these caves as well, though the script was more advanced than that found
in Qumran; in fact, the text in these scrolls was very akin to that of the
Masora (i.e. the text type that eventually displaced all others and formed
the basis for the OT as it exists todayl.l'" Western consensus holds that
these manuscripts "may be dated with certainty at the time of the [Second
Jewish revolt] (A.D. 132-135)".108 Among the finds is the Minor Prophets
scroll which dates (according toJ.T Milik) from the second century C.E.,
though the script is so advanced that it even bears "striking similarities to
the script of medieval manuscripts... The text is in almost complete agree-
ment with [the Masoretic text type], suggestingthat an authoritative standard
text already existed in the first half of the second century A.D." 109
Having highlighted Wurthwein's own contradictory remarks, in which
he continually shiftsfrom proclaiming the Wadi: Murraba'at seroUs as auth-
oritative to stating that no authoritative text existed till the 10th century
C.E., in this next section I will focus my arguments against the validity of
the Qumran and Wadi: Murraba'at termina datum,110 presenting the necessary
evidence.

ii. The Counter View: The Termina Datum of
Qumran and Other Caves is False

Western scholars claim that where the recovered fragments disagree with
the Masoretic text, they must have been deposited in Qumran prior to
the FirstJewish revolt (66-70 C.E.), since that is when the nearby town of
Khirbet Qumran was decimated by Roman troops. Fragments agreeing
with the "Masoretic text come from the cave at Wadi:Murraba'at, which
was sealed after the Bar Kochba (Second Jewish) revolt in 135 C.E. Thus

106 ibid,p. 164.
107 ibid,p. 3I, footnote 56.
108 ibid,p. 31, footnote 56. I have yet to find the reasoning behind this 'certainty'.
109 ibid,p. 164.
l!O The 'terminal dates', signifYing the cut-off points after which no further parchments
were deposited in these caves.