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Dennis Mizzi, Is There a Text in this Cave? Studies in the Textuality of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Honour of George J. Brooke. Edited by Ariel Feldman, Maria CioatĂ, and Charlotte Hempel, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 71, Issue 1, April 2020, Pages 316–318, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flz167
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This outstanding volume is a fitting tribute to one of the most generous, influential, and prolific scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The strength of the Festschrift in part lies in the fact that there is a running thread connecting its many contributions. The editors have done a tremendous job in producing a tightly knit collection of papers which approach the same theme—in this case, the question of textuality in the Scrolls—from a plurality of perspectives. The benefits of thematic coherence in a Festschrift, a genre more often known for its eclecticism, hardly need stating, but here I highlight the additional reward of reading some papers as if in conversation with each other, which lends the volume added depth.
Given the brevity of this review, I offer only a cursory overview of the contents, followed by some brief remarks on select papers. Besides the customary introduction outlining the honorand’s many significant achievements, the volume has 27 essays dealing with the issue of sacred texts, textual authority, and canonicity (cf. Hanne von Weissenberg and Elisa Uusimäki, Philip S. Alexander, and Judith H. Newman), textual communities and scribal culture (cf. Charlotte Hempel, Sidnie White Crawford, Eibert Tigchelaar, Mladen Popović, and Jonathan Ben-Dov), the interplay between materiality and text, with special focus on individual scrolls (cf. Émile Puech, Joan E. Taylor, Ariel Feldman, and Kipp Davis), intertextuality and exegesis (cf. Armin Lange, Matthew A. Collins, Helen R. Jacobus, and Carol A. Newsom), the notion of texts and textual growth (cf. Emanuel Tov, Philip R. Davies, and Maria Cioată), ancient readers’ experience of specific texts or textual figures, aided by insights from anthropology and the social sciences (cf. Jutta Jokiranta and Angela Kim Harkins), and a miscellany of studies which bring different texts into conversation with one another (cf. James C. VanderKam, Devorah Dimant, John J. Collins, Hindy Najman, Jean-Sébastien Rey, and Reinhard G. Kratz).
