Hebrew Voices #231 – The Lost Scroll of Moses (Shapira): Part 1

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Nehemia: If these were what you claim they are…

Idan: Yeah…

Nehemia: …they would be one of the most important finds of all time. In other words, and I hope I’m not mischaracterizing this, your argument, which we’ll get to in a little bit, is that these are one of the sources of the book of Deuteronomy.

Idan: That’s right.

Nehemia: Okay. So, if that’s true…

Idan: Well, the source is… yeah, it’s a cross between a source and an ancestor. Yeah.

Nehemia: What’s the difference?

Idan: Like, let’s say an ancestor of a source, or something.

Nehemia: Okay.

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Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Idan Dershowitz. He has earned his PhD in Biblical Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was elected a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2017 and has served as Chair of Hebrew Bible and its Exegesis at the University of Potsdam. Since 2024 he has been senior lecturer in Pre-Modern Jewish Studies at Monash University. Is Monash in Brisbane, Australia?

Idan: Monash is in Melbourne.

Nehemia: Melbourne. Okay, sorry, I’m bad at geography. Welcome Idan to the program. Thank you for joining us.

Idan: A pleasure, thanks for having me.

Nehemia: We’ll talk today about… you have a book called The Valediction of Moses. And why did you choose that title? That’s my first question. I had to look up what valediction is. Is it like, something like, farewell speech or something?

Idan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, you must have known that no native English speaker, 99 percent of native English speakers, don’t know what a valediction is.

Idan: But you’ve heard of a valedictorian.

Nehemia: For sure.

Idan: Right. So, it’s the same…

Nehemia: Is that related?

Idan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Idan: Yeah. The valedictorian is the one who gives the valediction.

Nehemia: But really, what was your… like, I’m not trying to be difficult here, what was your process when you… like, I’m really curious about that. Before we even get to what it’s about.

Idan: Okay. Well, it does have something to do with what it’s about. So, basically, I felt like the literary work that’s included in these manuscripts that I was studying, that are usually called the Shapira Strips or Shapira Scrolls or Shapira Manuscripts… So, they contain a text, and that text is something that’s related to the book of Deuteronomy but isn’t the book of Deuteronomy. I felt like it needed a name.

Nehemia: Okay.

Idan: So, what are we going to call it? And so, the content is that it’s a farewell speech of Moses.

Nehemia: Okay.

Idan: And, you know, frankly speaking, all the normal words for that were already taken. There were already…

Nehemia: Fair enough.

Idan: You know, for the words of Moses or…

Nehemia: Farewell speech does not sound as good as valediction, I’ll grant you that. It’s a good title. All right. So, let’s back up.

Idan: Okay.

Nehemia: What are the Shapira Scrolls? How were they viewed basically up until your work? And I think maybe by most people still. What is your hypothesis that you’re proposing about the Shapira Scrolls?

Idan: Okay, so, the Shapira Scrolls… I prefer to call them Shapira Manuscripts because they’re actually not scrolls in the sense that they weren’t rolled up; they were found flattened and folded, which is another interesting topic. But anyway, these manuscripts came to light… in other words, they were discussed in the 1800s. The first discussions were in 1878, but then the main affair was in 1883. And it started when a man by the name of Moses Wilhelm Shapira, who was a manuscript dealer and antiquities dealer, and the owner of a shop in the Old City of Jerusalem, he said that he got these manuscript fragments from Bedouins who had discovered them in a cave near the Dead Sea on the eastern side.

And initially, the first person he spoke to in 1878 was very skeptical about the possibility of their authenticity because they were different from the canonical text. They had a different version of the Decalogue, of the Ten Commandments, and that seemed, to this scholar, who was quite a devout scholar, that that meant that it had to be some sort of forgery because we have the actual Ten Commandments. So, he shelved it for a while and then got back to it five years later or so.

And there was excitement, some skepticism and excitement mixed together, and at one point it seemed like there was a serious chance that the British government or the British Museum would purchase the manuscripts for some astronomical amount of money, which would have made him extremely wealthy.

Nehemia: It was a million pounds in 1883, right?

Idan: Right, that’s the number that people…

Nehemia: That’s a lot of money today. What is that… like…

Idan: It would have been, you know, more than a hundred times that, obviously, accounting for inflation. So, it was a huge, huge amount of money. If it was authentic, which I think it was, then it was worth that. But to cut a long story short, the scholar who was looking at it, together with, or actually separately from, another scholar who traveled there sort of on a rogue mission, traveled to the British Museum to get a look for himself.

Nehemia: Look, I’m in Masoretic studies. Can you say the name, please?

Idan: Yeah. So, okay. Ginsburg is the Masoretic studies…

Nehemia: Christian David Ginsburg, who is essentially the scholar, let’s say the modern scholar, who established Masoretic studies as a discipline. And as his name implies… and this is an interesting kind of little tidbit, which you didn’t mention; Moses Wilhelm Shapira was a Jewish convert to Christianity. And so was Ginsburg, as you know.

Idan: Right.

Nehemia: In other words, when he converted, he added the name Christian. And it’s interesting. I did my PhD at Bar-Ilan University, an Orthodox university, and there is deep interest in study of Christian David Ginsburg. I mean, the fact that he converted to Christianity is irrelevant. He’s a great scholar.

Idan: Right. Right, right.

Nehemia: So, Ginsburg goes to the British Museum secretly to, or clandestine…

Idan: Yeah. Ginsburg was employed by the British Museum. But another name you’ve probably heard is Clermont-Ganneau.

Nehemia: Okay.

Idan: Clermont-Ganneau.

Nehemia: I’ve heard of him. I don’t know that my audience has, but…

Idan: Yeah. He was a very interesting character, and he had a history with Shapira. And he went to the British Museum himself and sort of got involved, to the chagrin of both Shapira and Ginsburg.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Idan: And then ended up announcing, you know, that it’s a forgery. According to Ginsburg, he was told that he wasn’t allowed to do anything of the sort, and he was only given very, very little time, like minutes, with one or two fragments, if I remember correctly.

Nehemia: You’re saying Clermont-Ganneau only had one or two minutes or…

Idan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, Ginsburg had plenty of time.

Nehemia: Okay.

Idan: But Clermont-Ganneau did not.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Idan: But Clermont-Ganneau sort of, you know, wanted to make an announcement to the press, supposedly against the agreement that he had had with Ginsburg. Anyway, all of this is to say that within a relatively short period of time, the excitement turned into something else, and both Ginsburg and Clermont-Ganneau declared the manuscripts to be a forgery.

Nehemia: Okay.

Idan: The implication was that Shapira himself had forged the manuscripts, or was involved in their forgery, because the theory was that they were cut from the bottom margins of Yemenite Torah scrolls. And as Clermont-Ganneau said, “Shapira will surely be familiar with such scrolls, given that he is the purveyor of these Yemenite manuscripts.” Shapira had sold many Yemenite Torah scrolls to the British Museum and to others. He traveled to Yemen and obtained a whole lot of important manuscripts there, which he then sold.

And so, the theory was that Shapira used the bottom margins of some of those scrolls, and then, you know, just cut the blank margins and wrote texts on them. And Clermont-Ganneau, because he didn’t have so much time to look at them, said in his report, you know, “I’m sure that if you look, you’ll find the bottoms of some letters at the top of the margin.”

Nehemia: Hmm.

Idan: You know, the bottom of some letters from the Torah scroll. Which didn’t happen, but anyway… So, they declared the manuscripts a forgery. There were other things that seemed to implicate Shapira supposedly, like, there was supposedly scribal errors in the text that only an Ashkenazi Jew could have made.

Nehemia: Like what? Supposedly.

Idan: It doesn’t really make much sense, but the idea is that confusion…

Nehemia: Like if you have a Tav and a Samekh…

Idan: …so, let’s see, one second… between a Tet and a Tav. But that doesn’t make sense, because actually, you know, an Ashkenazi Jew just differentiates between Tav, that is, what’s called rafeh, so a Tav without a dagesh, and a Tet are pronounced very differently. So, there’s this one place where instead of with le’totafot with Tets, it says something with two Tavs. And so, the idea was that there, for example, this was some sort of error, and an Ashkenazi Jew would have made it so. But like I said…

Nehemia: If he had a Tav and a Samekh, I would find that more convincing.

Idan: Yeah, yeah. I think of all the examples… I don’t remember now what all the supposed examples were, but there was one where, potentially, there was a confusion between a Kaf and a Chet, which, even there… Oh, no, I was going to grant them that one, but I think it doesn’t work either, because again, it has a dagesh, so it would be like kevel versus chevel. Anyway, so the theory was that this was a forgery. We could see this for various reasons, and those reasons point to Shapira as the culprit.

Shapira was obviously devastated by that announcement, and he wrote a letter to Ginsburg saying, you know, “How could you do this to me, to publicize this knowing that you’re going to say that it’s a forgery?” And he’s like, “I don’t think I’ll be able to bear the shame.” And then the British press announced this, that Shapira was basically threatening suicide or, you know, expressing suicidal thoughts. And one newspaper even said, “hopefully he does it”, and…

Nehemia: Well, that didn’t age well.

Idan: Yeah. And then he did commit suicide…

Nehemia: Wow.

Idan: …a few months later. And after that, the British Museum still had the manuscripts, and they passed them on to Sotheby’s, and Sotheby’s sold them. And the fragments, or most of the fragments at least, were purchased by a bookseller who then sold them to someone else. And then we don’t really know what happened. It seems like Ginsburg might have somehow purchased a couple of fragments. It’s not a hundred percent clear.

Nehemia: Really?

Idan: In any case, we don’t really know what happened to the manuscripts after that.

Nehemia: So, wow. If these were what you claim they are…

Idan: Yeah…

Nehemia: …they would be one of the most important finds of all time. In other words, and I hope I’m not mischaracterizing this, your argument, which we’ll get to in a little bit, is that these are one of the sources of the book of Deuteronomy.

Idan: That’s right.

Nehemia: Okay. So, if that’s true…

Idan: Well, the source is… yeah, it’s a cross between a source and an ancestor. Yeah.

Nehemia: What’s the difference?

Idan: Like, let’s say an ancestor of a source, or something.

Nehemia: Okay. All right. So, in other words, like, in New Testament studies… some people will be familiar… there’s this claim that there was a source called Q, I mean, just the German word for source, and that when Mark is quoting Jesus, it’s actually just using Q and then combining it with stories, right? And you’re making, if I’m right… l well, I mean, so you’re saying it’s the source of the source, a precursor.

Idan: Well, I’m saying that it’s a… I don’t want to… the exact details aren’t so important, but I think that it’s not… it’s a source in the sense that it only contains the narrative elements that we have in Deuteronomy. So, Deuteronomy is a mix between stories, laws which are also told as stories, but, you know, there’s a legal chunk in the middle of the book that this doesn’t have, and poetry. There are two poems at the end of the book. So, this only has the story part, sort of recounting what had happened previously in their joint experiences, the children of Israel and Moses. And then a little bit of perspective speech, you know, talking about what’s going to happen after Moses’s death.

But Deuteronomy has all these laws that aren’t here. So, it’s a source in the sense that this would be, say, the narrative source of the book of Deuteronomy, but it’s also different. And those differences, I think, are mostly because it’s an earlier incarnation of the text. And in some ways very similar, in some ways radically different. We can get into those details. I’d be happy…

Nehemia: Yeah…

Idan: So, whether it’s a direct ancestor or closely related to a direct ancestor is… you know, something that I’m not a hundred percent sure about.

Nehemia: Wait, so you’re saying it could be that Deuteronomy and the Valediction of Moses were copied from a common source or used a common source as one of their sources. Is that what you’re saying?

Idan: Not exactly. I think that it’s possible that the Valediction of Moses is from a branch that is, you know… Let’s say you have this common ancestor which is the narrative source. It’s possible that one branch developed in a certain way, and then the laws were added, and the poems were added, and all these things happened. And after it broke off, you know, the narrative just by itself could have evolved a little bit, and then that could be what we have in the Valediction of Moses. So, it could be, say, an uncle as opposed to…

Nehemia: Okay.

Idan: …a parent or grandparent.

Nehemia: And the standard explanation is that what you’re calling the Valediction of Moses, the Shapira Manuscripts, are just forgeries that Shapira or maybe one of his colleagues wrote. Am I right?

Idan: That’s definitely the consensus. There is one other option, which is, you know, very minority opinion, but is worth mentioning, which is that it’s authentic but based on Deuteronomy. So, it’s ancient, not a forgery, but rather than being an older version of Deuteronomy, or one of the sources of Deuteronomy, it’s some sort of abridgment of Deuteronomy. And that theory was first articulated, I believe, after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

So, the story that Shapira told seemed really crazy at the time. He said, “Oh, the Bedouins found these other manuscripts in caves near the Dead Sea. They were wrapped in linen and some sort of black sticky substance on them, and, you know, they have some version of the book of Deuteronomy in them.” All of that, every piece of that story, sounded ridiculous. And people said so. They said like, “Oh, you really want me to believe that that manuscript survived that long in some cave by the Dead Sea? Give me a break.”

And then the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered some 70 years later, and people immediately realized that this was a similar story to Shapira’s story. So, little known fact; when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, there was a fair bit of skepticism about their authenticity. It was not clear at all to many scholars initially that these manuscripts were authentic. And there was one scholar in particular, by the name of Zeitlin, who insisted… you know, he never backed down from his claim that the Dead Sea Scrolls, also including the Bar-Kokhba Letters, were not ancient, or…

Nehemia: He argued they were from the Middle Ages, and one of his proofs was that you have, you know, in the Cairo Geniza, you have the so-called Covenant of Damascus or Damascus Document, and then you have pieces of that in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so, therefore that’s all from the Middle Ages. Whereas…

Idan: Yeah, and he had a similarly circular linguistic argument, where he’s like, “Oh, this linguistic feature is something that we see in the Middle Ages, and therefore this can’t be ancient.” But in both cases it’s logically flawed. I mean, we all agree that these manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the Bar-Kokhba Letters that were discovered in the 20th century, were all authentic.

Nehemia: But we only agreed because, number one, Carbon-14 was carried out on some of the scrolls, and then number two, more scrolls were found in situ. Not a lot, but little fragments were found in situ, meaning they were found in the caves… So, here’s part of the problem; the initial Dead Sea Scrolls were found by Bedouin who brought them to, like, to a shoe dealer or something like this, to sell them as shoe leather, is one of the stories. I mean, they weren’t found by archeologists. But then the archeologists went back and they found stuff. Whereas in this case, nobody has found more pieces of the Valediction of Moses, and we can’t…

Idan: Nobody found more pieces of the great Isaiah Scroll or of the, you know… I mean, I don’t think it’s the fact that they found the exact same text. I mean, I guess you can…

Nehemia: No, but they…

Idan: They did find other copies of Isaiah, but…

Nehemia: They found more pieces in those caves, meaning… like, so, Cave 4 wasn’t part of what was pillaged, or at least not the bulk of it, by the Bedouin. Meaning, there they found, I don’t know, over a thousand fragments. I don’t know what the number is. It’s some vast number of fragments. And that was found by archeologists, so…

Idan: We don’t actually know… You know, some scholars recently have said that the things that we say were from Cave 1, we don’t really know. You know, it’s just like…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Idan: It’s what the dealers claimed. Right? So, as you say, many of the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of the most impressive ones, were purchased on the gray market, black market. They advertised, you know, in the Wall Street Journal and whatnot. And yeah… And we all think that they’re authentic for all sorts of different reasons. There are some fragments that came to light more recently that are, you know, probably forgeries.

Nehemia: Although ironically, the parchment probably is original, so…

Idan: Right.

Nehemia: So, if they’re too small to C14, but if you did Carbon-14 test them, you might find out it’s 2,000 years old. It’s just a little bit…

Idan: It might have been left over…

Nehemia: …the edges, or whatever.

Idan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re going all over the place here, but basically… Yeah, so, I’ll just summarize the different opinions about the manuscripts, and then we can dive into the details. So, after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars immediately realized the connection between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Shapira Manuscripts. And one way of explaining this connection was to say that, just like the Shapira Manuscripts aren’t ancient, the Dead Sea Scrolls aren’t ancient. And Zeitlin said that explicitly. And so, it was a little bit inconsistent, right? On the one hand, he thought that some of these things might be medieval, and on the other hand, he said, “Oh, you know, we’ve heard this story before. The Bedouins found these manuscripts in caves by the Dead Sea. Like, give me a break.” So, you know, he was quite skeptical of the whole story.

So, anyway, one way of resolving it was to say that, like the Shapira Manuscript isn’t ancient, the Dead Sea Scrolls aren’t ancient. Another way of resolving it is to say that, like the Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient, the Shapira Manuscripts are ancient. And so, some people, most prominently Menahem Mansoor, argued that the Shapira Manuscripts are probably another Dead Sea scroll. In other words, another…

Nehemia: So, when did he argue that? Like, way before you?

Idan: Way, way, way before me, yeah. I think it was maybe even the 50s. Very early on after the discovery of the…

Nehemia: Okay.

Idan: …the Dead Sea Scrolls. And he’s not the only one. There were a few other people, but it didn’t really catch on here. So, I see something of his from 1959…

Nehemia: Okay. So, you’re not the first person to say this, that they’re authentic, or, let’s say, that they’re ancient. Authentic is a complicated word. Meaning, we’ll talk about when you think they’re from in a minute, but…

Idan: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, there’s this famous story of this Christian leader named Timotheus, who talks about how, around the year 800, Jews go down to the Dead Sea, and he tells a very similar story that a Bedouin was going after his dog or something.

Idan: No, he doesn’t… that story, it’s not as similar, it’s not as similar.

Nehemia: No, it’s similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947.

Idan: Yeah, there isn’t anything about a Bedouin, I don’t think.

Nehemia: I think there is, meaning, I remember something about, like, the Bedouin was going after his hunting dog and went into a cave and found a bunch of scrolls. And the Jews heard about it, and they went down to Jericho… which is, I mean, effectively the Dead Sea area, right?

Idan: Right.

Nehemia: Especially if you’re not from Israel, it might as well be the Dead Sea. And they found a bunch of manuscripts. And then Timotheus wants to know; are there textual variants that match what he finds in the New Testament when it quotes the Old Testament? That’s, interestingly, the context. And we never get the answer, which is kind of almost tragic.

Idan: Yeah.

Nehemia: But from that, we learned that somebody, around the year 800, found a bunch of scrolls near what we would call the Dead Sea today, right? Meaning, the area of Jericho. And then, I believe Origen tells a similar story in, like, the 2nd century. So, were they not aware of this in 1883, that there are these earlier accounts?

Idan: It’s a good question. So, first of all, if I remember correctly… and now, you know, it’s been a while since I’ve looked at this. If I remember correctly, the Timotheus passage either hadn’t been published or had just been published in some obscure way, and maybe that’s what it was. But again, the details… it didn’t match nearly as closely as the Shapira and Dead Sea Scrolls stories. So, the Shapira and Dead Sea Scrolls stories had in common Bedouins, caves explicitly near the Dead Sea, leather wrapped in linen, this black sticky substance, and many of those details.

Nehemia: Talk about the black, sticky substance; why is that significant?

Idan: Well, it’s significant because it’s something that people reported about both.

Nehemia: I know the answer, but tell everybody what the black, sticky substance is.

Idan: Oh, the black sticky substance; it’s actually a little bit tricky, what exactly is going on. Because on the one hand you have asphalt from the Dead Sea region, so that’s one thing that could be a black sticky substance. On the other hand…

Nehemia: Asphalt is native to the Dead Sea area. You can still rarely see it today, but it was called the Mara Asphaltum, or something like that, the Asphalt Sea, by the Romans. And that was a major source of what we call pitch, or bitumen in, you know, in common parlance.

Idan: But then there’s another phenomenon, which is the gelatinization of leather over millennia. It might have been that.

Nehemia: Ah. So, not necessarily the…

Idan: Sometimes leather… it just breaks down in a certain way over the centuries and millennia, and in some cases that can lead to some sort of dark, gooey substance.

Nehemia: Okay.

Idan: In any case, that’s something that was reported in both instances, and yeah… So, in any event, what’s important to remember is that when Shapira told the story in 1878 and 1883, people thought it was a ridiculous story. People weren’t like, “Oh, yeah, that that makes sense, you know, Timotheus and Origen.” They were like, “Give me a break. You want us to believe that nonsense? Like come up with a better one!”

Nehemia: And it was known that there were manuscripts found in Egypt, if I’m not mistaken. But Egypt’s super dry.

Idan: Yeah, very.

Nehemia: Very different than Israel, which is, even the Dead… well, maybe not the Dead Sea area, but which has salt, right? But it’s much more humid than Egypt, than the deserts of Egypt.

Idan: That’s right, that’s right. So, from Egypt, we have incredible manuscripts, mostly papyrus, but also some leather. Even that detail, by the way, was somewhat surprising, you know, that it was leather and not papyrus. So, this story was ridiculous in the 1800s, or, you know, people… I haven’t seen a single person who said, “Oh, this story makes sense,” and connected it to, you know, to Timotheus or Origen…

Nehemia: But there must have been a moment in 1947, right, or certainly in the following years when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered… there must have been kind of like a face slap, like…

Idan: Exactly, exactly. That was a big part of what drove Mansoor, and later also… I mean, there are various people, Helen Jefferson, and then Allegro also, various scholars. I think a very big part of what made them think that this was likely to be authentic was that this is now… the story that in 1883 sounded so ridiculous now sounds exactly like what we would expect. And in fact, it seems hard to believe that someone would have concocted a story that sounded so ridiculous in 1883 that would then magically align so perfectly with the things that happen around 1950.

And that’s just a useful heuristic, I think. And this is something that comes up in a lot of different ways in this story. A useful heuristic is that forgeries look faker and faker with the passage of time, right? Because a forger is working with the knowledge that they have in a particular time, trying to evade detection based on the technologies that exist at that time, and so on. So, if someone forges something in, you know, in the Middle Ages, then by modern times it looks fake. If someone forges something in the 1800s, then by the 1900s or the 2000s, it looks fake. You see this all the time. People, you know, forge paintings, but they used a pigment that now we know was only invented later. But in the 1800s, when it was forged, there was no reason to worry about the pigments because there was no way to detect it, and nobody knew that yet. And so, you know, people are always forging based on the technologies and knowledge of their era.

Nehemia: Wasn’t this one of the problems if we Carbon-14 tested the scrolls? We would immediately know if they’re 150 years old or if they’re 2,000 years old, right? Or 500 years. Let’s say they’re taken from the Yemenite Torah scrolls in the British Museum, then they would show up as 500 years old rather than 2,000 or…

Idan: Absolutely, absolutely. But we don’t have that, unfortunately, and so, that’s why I think it’s worth keeping in mind this heuristic; that fake things tend to look faker and faker. And here was an example of something where the thing that seemed… this is just one of many examples, but the story that sounded so ridiculous in the 1800s sounded less ridiculous with the passage of time, and that’s not the direction that things usually go.

So, these scholars suggested that maybe this is another Dead Sea scroll. We’re familiar from the findings in Qumran, texts that are inspired by biblical narratives. And so, maybe this is also inspired by biblical narratives, and it’s some sort of abridgment of Deuteronomy.

Nehemia: So, let’s just talk about that for a minute. So, I’m going to call this, like, a different version of the Book of Deuteronomy, and it’s a very sort of pared down version. You’re saying maybe it is an uncle of Deuteronomy. Why would you say that? And not that it’s a… you know, we have this genre today we call rewritten Pentateuch, right?

Idan: Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: Which is, somebody retells some of the biblical stories, often in a different person or in a paraphrase. Wouldn’t that be… In other words, let’s say we Carbon-14 tested it and found it 2,000 years old. I still think most scholars won’t accept that it’s the uncle of Deuteronomy. They’re still going to say it’s just rewritten Pentateuch, aren’t they? Let’s say we found the scrolls tomorrow…

Idan: Yeah, but the thing is…

Nehemia: They’re still not going to accept your theory. They’re still going to say it’s rewritten Pentateuch.

Idan: I don’t know what people will or won’t accept, but we can talk about what the actual evidence is, and then people, your listeners, can judge for themselves. So, there’s a difference between an abridgment and an ancestor. They don’t look the same, typically, right? If you give me War and Peace and ask me to abridge it, that’s not going to look like anything that we would expect; some sort of short story, early draft of War and Peace or, you know, some text that inspired War and Peace would look like. We’d expect various differences. And so, we can look at this text and try to see whether it looks like an abridgment or not. And I can give you some…

Nehemia: Please, let’s give some examples.

Idan: Maybe I’ll start by just characterizing this text generally…

Nehemia: All right, beautiful.

Idan: … and then we can look at some specific examples and see what it is. But just… So, we’ve now covered the theory, which is the consensus view, that these are modern forgeries where Shapira would seem to be implicated. Then there’s the theory that this is not a forgery, but it’s something like a 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scroll that’s an abridgment of Deuteronomy. And then what I claimed is that it’s a version that is, like we said before, like a source or something closely related to a source, or an ancestor, or something like that, of a source, of the Book of Deuteronomy. So, these are the different options. And now, so just to characterize the text, it’s much shorter than Deuteronomy. But one of the big reasons that it’s shorter is that it just does not have any of the laws of Deuteronomy. So, Deuteronomy is called… you know, it means the second teaching, Mishneh Torah. And what gives it that name is this chunk of laws from Deuteronomy 12 through 26 in the middle of the book. And none of that is in this text. And as I mentioned earlier, there’s also no poetry at the end of the book. So, there are two poems.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Idan: We have Ha’azinu and Ve’zot Ha’brakha at the end of Deuteronomy. Neither of those are present here either. Other than that, it covers a large percentage of what we have in Deuteronomy, but with endless, endless differences. Most of those differences are just tiny differences that don’t make a difference in terms of the meaning. But in many cases, we end up with radically different stories that share a lot of the same language but actually end up… when you think about it, they end up being really quite radically different.

And one radical difference between the Valediction of Moses and Deuteronomy, on the macro level, is that the Valediction of Moses, not only does it not have those laws that we have in Deuteronomy, but it also seems to imply that those laws don’t exist. And that’s a key point when it comes to whether it’s an abridgment or not. So, if it’s an abridgment, you could say, “Oh, like, and then he gave lots of laws,” or something like that, and you don’t need to actually get into the details. But you can see that this book does not refer to the Deuteronomic laws in the way that Deuteronomy does, even in the narrative. So, in places where Deuteronomy’s narratives match the Deuteronomic law, that’s not the case in the Valediction of Moses. And maybe we’ll talk about that.

Nehemia: Okay. So, I want to back up a little bit for the audience who is asking, “Wait a minute; didn’t Moses write the Book of Deuteronomy?” And you’re coming from what we might call a critical perspective. Meaning, mainstream critical scholarship doesn’t think Moses wrote the Book of Deuteronomy either. They would, if I’m not mistaken, it’s been a while, they would argue that it was written probably in the time of King Josiah. Meaning, when Josiah’s people found a scroll in the Temple, that was the Book of Deuteronomy. So, either they wrote it, or somebody shortly before that wrote it. Is that fair to say?

Idan: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. But an important point is that the Book of Deuteronomy doesn’t say that it was written by Moses, nor does it imply that it was written by Moses. In fact, it implies the opposite. I mean…

Nehemia: When Moses is speaking in first person, isn’t that a claim that Moses wrote it?

Idan: The opposite. Moses does not speak in first person. Moses is quoted speaking in first person.

Nehemia: A-ha. Okay.

Idan: Right? So, I mean, every book, almost, that you would read, you know, has dialog and someone speaks in first person. But the first words of the Book of Deuteronomy are, “These are the words that Moses spoke.”

Nehemia: All right, I’m trying to wrap my head around this. So, in the Book of Joshua, where it opens up in chapter 1 and it says… I’m reading it here, it’s chapter 1 verse 7: “Be strong and very diligent to guard, to do according to all the Torah that Moses My servant commanded you.” What was the author of Joshua referring to, in your view?

Idan: Well, it wouldn’t make any sense for that to be a reference to, say, the Pentateuch the way that we use Torah today, because, you know, we have the same term also in the Torah, “Ve’zot ha’Torah asher sam Moshe…” you know, “This is the Torah…” You know, or what I mentioned before, the second Torah, like a king is supposed to make a copy of the Torah. It doesn’t really make so much sense to understand that as some sort of recursive thing. It’s some teaching, or some law code, right?

So, there was something that was Moses’s teaching, but that something, just like the Torah references various compositions, all sorts of biblical books refer to, you know, like the chronicles of this king or that king or the Sefer Hayashar or…

Nehemia: So, that’s an important question. When do you believe, or think, that the Book of Deuteronomy was completed?

Idan: Completed? I mean, I think that the Book of Deuteronomy evolved over a long period of time.

Nehemia: You’re saying there’s a source…

Idan: Hmm?

Nehemia: You’re saying the Valediction of Moses is a source. At what point in history, in your view, do we have the Book of Deuteronomy?

Idan: So, these sorts of questions… on the one hand, it’s a good question. On the other hand, it’s a question that’s hard to answer, not only because of difficulty determining what the answer is, but also because of difficulty determining what the question is. Because these books were evolving over such a long period of time in so many different ways… so, it’s basically this long spectrum, broad spectrum, and now you need to say, this is when it was written. When, over those hundreds of years, is the moment that it was written? I don’t know. I think that it has elements that are very ancient, that certainly go back to First Temple times. Maybe not the time of Moses, but quite early by a critical scholarly perspective. But then you have elements that are much later, and I think that that’s true for many biblical works; that they evolved over a long period of time. And so, it’s a little bit tricky to say, “Oh, this is when it was written.”

Nehemia: When 2 Kings talks about them finding a scroll in the Temple, do you have some thoughts about what that would have looked like?

Idan: I do, but maybe that’s too much of another rabbit hole to go down.

Nehemia: Why? I think it’s really important.

Idan: I think that it probably has something to do with the story of this manuscript.

Nehemia: Oh.

Idan: But it’s a bit complicated.

Nehemia: So… all right.

Idan: Another kind of…

Nehemia: So, when do you think this manuscript is from? Maybe that’s a better question.

Idan: So, again, what does “this manuscript” mean? I think that…

Nehemia: I don’t mean the source; this actual copy. When is it from?

Idan: The actual copy, okay.

Nehemia: Okay, maybe it’s an autograph. Meaning, maybe it’s the original copy by whoever the author is…

Idan: I don’t think it is. I’m pretty sure it’s not the original copy of anything. And there were two copies, so certainly they can’t be original.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Idan: I think that probably it would be earlier than just about any Dead Sea Scroll in terms of the actual object. I say that only because both the handwriting and the spelling are unlike anything that we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls. We have Dead Sea Scrolls that are written in the so-called Paleo-Hebrew, like, not the familiar square writing, but something that’s much more like Phoenician or Moabite. But this was a different type of Paleo-Hebrew, so we don’t really have… we don’t have anything that looks like this among the Dead Sea Scrolls. And the spelling; we don’t have anything with this sort of spelling. The spelling that we have here is much, much more similar to what we see in inscriptions from the First Temple period than anything that we see among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

So, therefore, I would imagine that this is much earlier. But these things are very tricky because you never know how conservative a particular scribal branch might be. You had people, you know, continuing to write in Paleo-Hebrew, while others are writing in so-called Aramaic script. You had people writing with very conservative orthography, while others were updating the orthography. You have different branches that can be very different from one another. So, it’s, therefore, hard, on the basis of the contents, to say with certainty when the object is from. But…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Idan: But all of those caveats aside, I do think probably the object is older than any of the other Dead Sea Scrolls, or the vast majority.

Nehemia: Do you think it’s the Second Temple period or First Temple period? Let’s…

Idan: I think probably First Temple…

Nehemia: Really? Okay.

Idan: …period, but I wouldn’t bet my house on it. And there’s… of course, there’s in between the temples, there’s a period of time, and so, it could be from that period. You know, not everyone was exiled. So, it’s hard to say. But I feel much more confident talking about the contents.

Nehemia: Okay, let’s talk about this.

Idan: We don’t have the object. You know, if you ever find it, we can carbon date it. And then we’ll have a pretty good idea.

Nehemia: But we do have the contents, and you actually discovered a source of the… am I wrong? You discovered a source of the contents that wasn’t really known.

Idan: That’s right, yeah. So, after Shapira committed suicide, his widow gave away a lot of his papers. And some of those papers, they went from one person to another, ended up in Berlin. An important scholar by the name of Moritz Steinschneider seems to have collated them and bound them, and they were sitting, you know, on the shelf in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, where they still are today. And this particular volume that I’m talking about… it’s not the only volume of his writings, there were a few different ones, but this particular one was a sort of a mix of a few different things but was primarily catalogs of manuscripts sold by Shapira. And they had purchased some of his manuscripts, and so, it was a useful thing to have around. You may as well… if someone’s giving it to you, don’t toss it out. So, it had these numbered lists of manuscripts that he had for sale.

Nehemia: The Staatsbibliothek purchased some of his manuscripts?

Idan: Yeah, yeah. I mean, its ancestor, yeah. And they’re still there. And the British Museum purchased a huge number of manuscripts from him. So, for a time at least, the Judaica collection was, I think, mostly things that they purchased from him, and some of them were incredibly important. And he sold to others, private and public, so…

Nehemia: And I’ll just say, there’s really no question about the authenticity of, let’s say, the Yemenite manuscripts in the British Museum, or the British Library today, back then the British Museum. Even though there was a whole controversy, that we probably won’t go into, of how he obtained those and then eventually sold them to the British Museum, which later became branched off into the British Library.

Idan: That’s right, that’s right. But there’s no question about the authenticity, and…

Nehemia: When he was seen in the streets of Jerusalem by some of the Yemenite immigrants to Jerusalem, they wanted him arrested. They said, “This is the man who arranged for our manuscripts to be stolen.” But, in any event, that means they’re real, right? The manuscripts… and they’re really not disputed, so…

Idan: Right, right. It’s a complicated story. There’s some recent publications that shed some light on all of that story of him obtaining them. But yeah, as you say, the manuscripts themselves are clearly authentic, and that’s an important detail, because… I haven’t looked at the Wikipedia entry on Shapira recently, but at some point, when I looked at it, you know, it said, “Shapira, famous forger known for forging Moabite pottery,” which is a story that maybe we’ll get into, depending on time, “and forging the Shapira Scrolls.” And left out of that was, “the purveyor of hundreds of authentic manuscripts”. In fact, other than this manuscript, we don’t… you know, all extant Shapira manuscripts are authentic. So…

Nehemia: That’s an interesting point. It reminds me kind of the controversy around Abraham Firkovich…

Idan: Absolutely.

Nehemia: …who was accused of being a forger and probably did forge some things.

Idan: But…

Nehemia: But there are thousands of manuscripts in the two Firkovich collections which are not forgeries. You should be a little suspicious of all the dates, because maybe he tweaked a Hey and turns it into a Dalet making something a thousand years older. But as far as the actual contents of literally thousands of manuscripts, he didn’t have the skill to forge something of that scale.

Idan: Yeah. Some of the same people who said that the Shapira Manuscripts were forgeries at the time also said that the Firkovich Manuscripts were forgeries. It’s interesting.

Nehemia: I don’t think anyone today says that all of the Firkovich, or even the majority of the Firkovich Manuscripts, are forgeries. There are specific documents that they’ll question, and then, when there’s a date, that’s always… and a colophon, that’s questioned. But, you know, like, the Leningrad Codex, which is what we use as the standard biblical text… scholars across the world use that as the standard by which you compare every other biblical text of the Hebrew Bible, that’s part of the Firkovich Collection.

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Nehemia: So, talk to me about the contents of the Valediction of Moses. That’s what we’re really excited…

Idan: Okay, all right.

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