Forgotten Legacy. A Reassessment of Paul Kahle’s views on the Dead Sea Scrolls

Since the Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered, Paul Kahle was deeply interested in them. This is hardly surprising given Kahle's interest and masterful expertise, among other things, in Jewish history and the history of the text of the Bible as well as the close relationship between these two fields. Kahle's contribution to the dawning Dead Sea Scrolls studies was a major one, from the point of view of both the study of the origins of the Qumran group and the impact of the "biblical" scrolls on our knowledge and comprehension of the making of the Hebrew Bible. Kahle devoted several studies to the scrolls, along with a short but dense monograph, Die Hebräischen Handschriften aus der Hohle (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1950). Thus, it is not by chance that several pages (pp. 13-17) near the opening of Kahle's masterpiece The Cairo Geniza, just after the eponymous Geniza discoveries, are devoted to the Dead Sea discoveries. Moreover, Kahle did not content himself with the Qumran scrolls but he did carefully study the then available Greek scroll from Nahal Hever dating back to the Bar Kokhba Revolt first published by Dominique Barthélemy. Thanks to this scroll Kahle was able to corroborate his own views on the origins of the LXX translation. Kahle died in 1964 and at this time he only had a small number of Dead Sea documents at his disposal on account of the well-known problems regarding the late and slow pace of the publication of the manuscripts in the first phase of the Scrolls discoveries. We may only conjecture what his contribution to this discipline may have been if he would have had access to the manuscripts that appeared in the years to follow. In spite of all of this, Kahle's contributions to Dead Sea Scrolls studies are almost completely forgotten today. A couple of examples illustrate this observation. In the authoritative Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) the only time that Kahle is referred to in the entire work is in S. Reif's entry Geniza (!), and even here Kahle’s contribution is not discussed. Even worse, Kahle is virtually absent from a recent work explicitly devoted to the history of Qumran research in various countries, The Dead Sea Scrolls in Scholarly Perspective: A History of Research (D. Dimant, ed. Leiden: Brill, 2012). Here Kahle's name occurs a few times in passing and never in the chapter devoted to Scrolls scholarship in Germany. As a first attempt to put this situation right, this paper will present an outline of Kahle's views on the scrolls, trying to reassess them in the light of the spate of new texts published since Kahle's death.