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The Qumran Psalms Scroll (11 QPsa) and the Canonical Psalter: Comparison of Editorial Shaping
THE DISCOVERY, early in 1956, of the Qumran Psalms Scroll (11 QPsa), which contains apocryphal compositions interspersed with canonical psalms in a radically different order, has resulted in continuing debate concerning the scroll's status and authority, and concerning its relationship to the standard arrangement of 150 psalms known in the masoretic Psalter. Some have seen in the Psalms Scroll a "library edition" completely dependent on the masoretic arrangement and having no canonical authority of its own.1 For others, 11QPsa represents a "signpost in the multi-faceted history of the canonization" of the psalms, reflecting a time before the stabilization of the final third of the Psalter.2 It is not my present concern to debate these issues, since I have already done so elsewhere.3 My purpose here is to consider the editorial "shaping" of 11 QPsa as it relates to the growing body of evidence for the purposeful editorial arrangement of the psalms in the canonical Psalter.
I. The Content of the Qumran Psalms Scroll
The Qumran Psalms Scroll is composed of five connected leather sheets with a combined length of almost thirteen feet.4 Together with a series of five related fragments,5 the scroll contains the remnants of thirty-four columns of text that preserve parts of fifty-one compositions: forty psalms known from the masoretic Psalter, and eleven other compositions of which seven were previously known to scholars, some in other parts of canonical Scripture (2 Sam 23:1-7; Catena; Sir 51:13-20,30), and others in related literature (the Syriac Psalms 151A, 151B, 154, and 155). The remaining four compositions (Plea for Deliverance; Apostrophe to Zion; Hymn to the Creator; David's Compositions) were completely unknown before the discovery of this scroll. As can be seen from table 1, the scroll intersperses these "apocryphal" compositions with those known from the canonical Psalter and arranges the forty masoretic psalms in a new and unexpected order.6 In table 1, material included between square brackets, [ ], is restored on the basis of the MT and confirmed by considerations of space on the scroll. Material within parentheses, ( ), is restored on the basis of the MT alone, because at those places spatial considerations are impossible to make on the...