Clarification on Dead Sea Scroll notation

[TYA]

Good day everybody.  I am reading this passage in "Qumran Non-Biblical Manuscripts."

 

4Q204 f5ii:18‏ עבר֯ו [מלת מריא מן אורית ? שמיא.  וארו חטי]י֯ן ועב[רין --  ה]ו֯ן֯ שניו למע֯[ל]

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In the "Accordance Module Info," it states the following with regards to single brackets []

 

"[] material between single square brackets represent the modern editor’s reconstruction."

 

What exactly does "modern editor's reconstruction" mean with regards to what actually appears in the original manuscript?  And who is the "modern editor"?

 

For the first question, does this mean that there was absolutely no visible text there in the manuscript, and the editor just thought to himself, "Hmm... this would be a good thing to put there?"  Or, was there partially visible text?  So what is meant by "modern editor's reconstruction"?  It is vague.

 

Personally, I think this could all be clarified a bit better, so anyone who knows about this, I'd really appreciate your input.  Thanks

Edited November 28, 2019 by TYA

[Donald Cobb]

Hi TYA,

 

The brackets in the Qumran non-biblical material show that the text is missing. The reconstructed text is therefore, in varying degrees, hypothetical. It's not quite a case of "Hmm... this would be a good thing to put there," though.

1) In some cases (such as CD or MMT, for instance), the same text is attested in multiple copies so—to the extent that the content is identical in both—the one can fill in the gaps for the other.

2) As I'm sure you know, the Qumran documents are heavily dependent on the language and expression of the Hebrew Scriptures, so when a passage uses typical biblical phrasing, the editors have remained dependent on Scripture itself to reconstruct the missing parts of it (there are some good examples in 1QSb).

3) Parallelism is also taken into account. As in the Hebrew Scriptures, a missing text that seems to be made up of parallel members is reconstructed with what "might logically" have been part of a parallelism. 

4) In some cases, the editors have simply been led to add "what they thought should have been there", having nothing else to go on than the general content of the surviving text itself.

 

As you can see, there's no one answer, so it would have been impossible to justify each individual reconstruction. Unfortunately, I'm away from my library for a while, so I can't refer you to specific works on that, but I imagine you could find the same thing in some of the standard introductions, as well as, perhaps, some specific examples.

 

Hope that helps a little.

[TYA]

Donald, perfect.  Exactly what I was looking for.

 

It would be nice to have this fuller explanation included such texts or works.

[MattChristianOT]

Donald, perfect.  Exactly what I was looking for.

 

It would be nice to have this fuller explanation included such texts or works.

If you have access to it, the Discoveries in the Judean Desert series would be helpful to look at so you can see the plates and the majority compilers. I believe most of the Accordance stuff was edited by Martin Abegg but that could be a sweeping generalization. Multiple copies and borrowed phrases from other DSS may influence what is "reconstructed" and oftentimes, the material is guessed at based on context, lacuna length, typical character size, and similar phrasing in other portions of the non- biblical scrolls.