Thank you everyone. This is perfect!
You’re welcome. To be more specific, here’s
Chapter 8 from VanderKam’s
The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Also a short section from Fr. Fitzmyer’s
The Impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls (pp. 50-51). There’s also Craig A. Evan’s
Holman QuickSource Guide to the Dead Sea Scrolls (pp. 280-282).
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books also makes a mention of them in the introduction to the ‘Apocrypha’. Also Peter W. Flint and Tae Hun Kim’s
The Bible at Qumran: Text, Shape, and Interpretation (pp. 89-93). Vermes’
The Story of the Scrolls isn’t available for preview, so I’ll quote the relevant section here (pp. 109-112).
(c) The Apocrypha
Of the fifteen books of the Bible of Hellenistic Jewry which are additional to the Palestinian Hebrew canon, only two are presumed to have been originally composed in Greek (Wisdom of Solomon and 2 Maccabees), while the rest are translations into Greek from Hebrew or Aramaic. None of these were known in their Semitic original until the discovery of the Hebrew Ecclesiasticus in the Cairo Genizah in 1896. Even there, as has been noted in chapter 1 (p. 14), scholarly opinion was divided between those who held that the Hebrew was that of the author, Jesus ben Sira, a priest from Jerusalem who flourished at the beginning of the second century BCE, and those who thought it was a medieval retranslation into Hebrew from the Greek of the Septuagint. How did Qumran affect the complex of the Apocrypha?
Compared to the Scrolls’ impact on the study of the Bible, their influence on the Apocrypha has been more limited. The only two titles belonging to this class, yielded by Qumran in a Semitic form, are Ecclesiasticus and Tobit. The first of these is the Hebrew Ben Sira, of which in addition to small insignificant fragments from Qumran Cave 2 (2Q18), belonging to Ecclesiasticus chapter 6, the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11 has preserved eleven verses of a poem in Hebrew, starting with Ecclesiasticus 51:13. This manuscript, dated to the first half of the first century CE, and the incomplete scroll found at Masada, necessarily in existence before the fall of the fortress in 73/74 CE, both substantially identical with the Hebrew Ecclesiasticus of the Cairo Genizah, prove that the Genizah text is definitely not a medieval retranslation into Hebrew of the Greek Jesus Sirach. Moreover, the Cave 11 passage is demonstrably closer to the original than the corresponding section in the Genizah manuscript. The Qumran version of Ecclesiasticus 51 presents an alphabetical acrostic poem, that is one in which each line correctly begins with the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet, line 1 starting with
alef or A, line 2 with
bet or B, whereas in the Genizah manuscript the sequence of the opening letters has been jumbled.
The twenty-six leather fragments of the Masada Ecclesiasticus, dated by the editor, Yigael Yadin, to the early or mid-first century BCE, furnish badly damaged portions of chapters 1 to 7 and reasonably well-preserved columns corresponding to chapters 39 to 44 and thus allow a somewhat better grasp of the original work of Ben Sira than the medieval documents or even his grandson’s Greek translation, written half a century after the original composition, before the death of Ptolemy VII Euergetes in 116 BCE.
The Book of Tobit is the other apocryphal work for which Qumran has yielded important fresh information; but even at the level of the Greek translation Tobit’s text fluctuates. There is a long and short version of which the long, attested in the fourth century CE Codex Sinaiticus and in the Old Latin translation (third century), is considered the more authentic. The Qumran evidence, copied in the first century BCE or at the turn of the era, and attested by five fragmentary scrolls, is equally fluctuating. Four manuscripts are in Aramaic and one in Hebrew. The Aramaic appears to be the original. All of them represent a Semitic text from which the reasonably free longer Greek version was made. For instance, in Tobit 1:22 the Aramaic text reads: ‘He was the son of my brother, of my father’s house and of my family’ as against the Greek: ‘He was the son of my brother and of my kindred’. In Tobit 2:11 the Aramaic has ‘On the festival of Weeks’ and the Greek, ‘On the feast of Pentecost which is the sacred festival of the seven weeks’. Finally, compare the Aramaic Tobit 14:2, ‘He was fifty-eight years old when he lost his sight and afterwards he lived fifty-four years’ to the Greek ‘He was sixty-two years old when he was maimed in his eyes’ (Sinaiticus) or ‘He was fifty-eight years old when he lost his sight and after eight years he regained it’ (Codex Vaticanus).
Bearing in mind that the Apocrypha are treated as Scripture in the most ancient branches of Christianity (Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches), perhaps the most significant feature disclosed by the Qumran Scrolls in their regard is the fact that neither the Semitic texts nor the Greek translations display the same level of unification as do the canonical books of the Hebrew Bible.
All in all Lim, Vermes, VanderKam and Fitzmyer are IMHO four of the few reliable authors on the subject of the DSS (considering that so much conspiracy theories and other trash have been written about the Scrolls, I’d generally advise that you take everything you read about them with a grain of salt.)