ABSTRACT
A new manuscript of the Psalms was published in 1965 in the regular series of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan—that is, of the Dead Sea manuscripts not owned by the Hebrew University but supervised by Père de Vaux and brought out by the Clarendon Press. It has been edited by Dr. J. A. Sanders, of the New York Union Theological Seminary, who has also published a more informal and very readable book on the subject, The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll (Cornell). This scroll, says Mr. Sanders, when found, was covered with bat dung and partly decomposed, but it contains forty-one psalms, either fragmentary or complete. The tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name of God, for which, in reading the Bible aloud, Adonai must be substituted, is here made even more remote by being always written in Old Hebrew characters as. (This is usual in the literature of the Sect, but not in its Bible texts.) There are variants here from the Masoretic Bible—that is, from the official Hebrew text, as there are in fragments of the Psalms that have been found in one of the other caves-rbut the most interesting feature of this manuscript is the inclusion of eight apocryphal compositions. (Scraps of such uncanonical psalms have also been found elsewhere.) Four of these pieces were already known in Greek, Latin or Syriac translations. One has been identified as a Hebrew version 258of a canticle at the end of the Book of Sirach (known in the apocrypha as Ecclesiasticus): one of the curious eulogies of the pursuit of Wisdom as a woman, which approaches the erotic so closely that Mr. Sanders is led to suggest that it was used for encouragement to ' sublimation" by the celibate community in the monastery. But three of the non-Biblical Psalms had never before been seen: a paean of praise to God for having saved the psalmist from sins that had brought him near to death; a paean of praise to Zion; and a glorification of God as the creator of the world. There is also a short prose passage, hitherto unknown, which speaks of the high qualities of David and asserts that he wrote thirty-six hundred psalms (the Hebrew word tehillim means "songs of praise") and four hundred and fifty songs of other kinds.
