editing of the dead sea scrolls
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Editing the Dead Sea Scrolls: What Should We Edit and How Should We Do It?
Eibert Tigchelaar (KU Leuven)
Lecture Copenhagen Conference on Dead Sea Scrolls and Material Philology, April 5, 2014
(cleaned up with minor revisions in 2018 and 2019)
I.
In the 1990s the American classicist Glenn Most organized a series of conferences in
Heidelberg in which the participants reflected upon key elements of classical history of
philology in the light of new tendencies in the humanities and philology. The conference
resulted in 6 volumes in the series Aporemata: Kritische Studien zur Philologiegeschichte. In a
sense, the sequence of the conferences reflects the different stages in classical philology, as
seen by Most: collecting fragments, editing texts, commentaries, historicizing, and disciplining
classics. Each of these volumes was concluded by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, literary theorist at
Stanford University.
The important thing is that Most initiated in the field of classicists a reflection on their
own history of philology. And that too, reflection on the kinds of philology that inform and
determine our editing and scholarly research, has been a major contribution of this
conference. I have heard great papers, from many different perspectives, that all commented
on different perspectives on the project of editing or interpreting manuscript, in conversation
with what has been called new, material, or artefactual philology. Especially on the first day,
there were no less than four papers (by George Brooke, Michael Langlois, Trine Hasselbalch,
and Kipp Davis) that touched upon issues that I had wanted to discuss in my paper. George
discussed the principles that have governed previous editions, something I had thought to do
myself, Michael presented in a very sophisticated way the different steps of a what one might
call a philology of fragments, Trine covered several questions I had wanted to discuss, for
example on the reason why scrolls scholars did not use Karl Lachmann, and Kipp
appropriated and superbly illustrated my own thesis that manuscripts are scholarly