The Ein Gedi Torah Scroll?

See e.g., the New York Times article, “Modern Technology Unlocks Secrets of a Damaged Biblical Scroll,”  and in USA Today, “Charred manuscript is one of oldest known copies of Torah ever found,” and the Times of Israel, “3D tech proves Hebrew Bible ‘unchanged for 2000 years.’”

See http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/about-the-project/a-note-from-the-iaa-director .

The complete scientific paper is:  William Brent Seales et al., “From Damage to Discovery Via Virtual Unwrapping: Reading the Scroll from En-Gedi,” Scientific Advances 21 September 2016.

I am bypassing the chicken-egg question: Did this mode of exposition necessitate developing such a text, or is it the result of the development of such a text?

In truth, the Torah text never fully stabilized a full 100%—see the important book of B. Barry Levy, Fixing God’s Torah:  The Accuracy of the Hebrew Bible Text in Jewish Law (NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).

For more on this manuscript, see http://cojs.org/ashkar-gilson-hebrew-manuscript-7th-8th-century-ce/, and in more detail, Paul Sanders, “Missing Link in Hebrew Bible Formation,” BARevNovember/December 2105, 46-52, 74, 76, available on-line at https://www.pthu.nl/Over_PThU/Organisatie/Medewerkers/p.sanders/downloads/bar-nd15-sanders.pdf .  For a full, technical discussion, see http://www.imj.org.il/journal/images/Ancient%20Scroll.pdf .

Although we assume that wooden boxes were placed inside these stone niches, none has been found in excavations and they are assumed to have been destroyed through fires or the elements.

For more information of these synagogues, see, e.g., Eric M. Meyers and Mark A. Chancey, Alexander to Constantine: Archaeology of the Land of the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 208-233, and more specifically on Torah shrines, Eric M. Meyers, “The Torah Shrine in the Ancient Synagogue: Another Look at the Evidence” in Jews, Christians, and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue: Cultural Interaction During the Greco-Roman Period, ed. Steven Fine (London: Routledge, 1999), 201-223.  I would like to thank Professor Eric Meyers for calling these sources to my attention.

This and all of what follows relies on the just-published technical article: Michael Segal, Emanuel Tov, William Brent Seales, Clifford Seth Parker, Penina Shor, Yosef Porath, and Ada Yardeni, “An Early Leviticus Scroll from En-Gedi: Preliminary Publication,” Textus 26 (2016). This article offers a detailed, technical assessment of the scroll, which I am summarizing here.

 Ibid. 

It is possible that the non-Samaritan, Jewish community, for polemical reasons, rejected texts close to the Samaritan Pentateuch, but why they rejected other text-types, e.g., those close to the LXX, is less clear.

The best treatment of this issue is in the just-published Armin Lange, “Ancient and Late Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic Texts,” in Textual History of the Bible, 1A, ed. Armin Lange and Emanuel Tov (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 112-166.