To be fair, I have not yet read Molly M. Zahn's new chapter. But, if it proposed abandoning text criticism for literary criticism of each text by itself, then my question would be: why such an either/or? Text criticism may not reach an endpoint, and not everyone must pursue it. For those who do, recall Rabbi Tarfon's saying: "It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it".
This reminds me of a comparable situation by Angela Kim Harkins, coincidently, like Zahn, a former student of James C. VanderKam. (By mentioning this, I do not claim this view characterizes VanderKam's textual work, as I was fortunate to observe when we both taught at North Carolina State.) Harkins wrote in BAR (Spring, 2025) "Are We Still Searching for the Teacher of Righteousness?" proposing we abandon that and instead focus on the reception, how people felt. Why not both? Clearly, I'm am biased, having published in the 2023 Jodi Magness Festschrift "Qumran-Related History: Jannaeus, Absalom, and Judah the Essene," which proposes identifications of three contemporaries from the Scrolls, freely available at: https://people.duke.edu/~goranson/Qumran-Related%20History.pdf
To be fair, I have not yet read Molly M. Zahn's new chapter. But, if it proposed abandoning text criticism for literary criticism of each text by itself, then my question would be: why such an either/or? Text criticism may not reach an endpoint, and not everyone must pursue it. For those who do, recall Rabbi Tarfon's saying: "It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it".
This reminds me of a comparable situation by Angela Kim Harkins, coincidently, like Zahn, a former student of James C. VanderKam. (By mentioning this, I do not claim this view characterizes VanderKam's textual work, as I was fortunate to observe when we both taught at North Carolina State.) Harkins wrote in BAR (Spring, 2025) "Are We Still Searching for the Teacher of Righteousness?" proposing we abandon that and instead focus on the reception, how people felt. Why not both? Clearly, I'm am biased, having published in the 2023 Jodi Magness Festschrift "Qumran-Related History: Jannaeus, Absalom, and Judah the Essene," which proposes identifications of three contemporaries from the Scrolls, freely available at:
https://people.duke.edu/~goranson/Qumran-Related%20History.pdf