Inter-Testamental Literature: The Dead Sea Scrolls
Introduction
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 981 texts discovered between 1946 and 1956 at Khirbet Qumran in the West Bank. They were found inside caves about a mile inland from the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name. Nine of the scrolls were rediscovered at the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) in 2014, after they had been stored unopened for six decades following their excavation in 1952.[1] The texts are of great historical, religious, and linguistic significance because they include the earliest known surviving manuscripts of works later included in the Hebrew Bible canon, along with deutero-canonical and extra-biblical manuscripts which preserve evidence of the diversity of religious thought in late Second Temple Judaism. The texts are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabataean, mostly on parchment but with some written on papyrus and bronze. The manuscripts have been dated to various ranges between 408 BCE and 318 CE. Bronze coins found on the site form a series beginning with John Hyrcanus (135–104 BCE) and continuing until the First Jewish-Roman War (66–73 CE).[2]
The scrolls have traditionally been identified with the ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes, although some recent interpretations have challenged this association and argue that the scrolls were penned by priests in Jerusalem, Zadokites, or other unknown Jewish groups.[3] Due to the poor condition of some of the Scrolls, not all of them have been identified. Those that have been identified can be divided into three general groups: (1) some 40% of them are copies of texts from the Hebrew Bible, (2) approximately another 30% of them are texts from the Second Temple Period and which ultimately were not canonized in the Hebrew Bible, like the Book of Enoch, Jubilees, the Book of Tobit, the Wisdom of Sirach, Psalms 152–155, etc., and (3) the remaining roughly 30% of them are sectarian manuscripts of previously unknown documents that shed light on the rules and beliefs of a particular group or groups within greater Judaism, like the Community Rule, the War Scroll, the Pesher on Habakkuk and The Rule of the Blessing.[4]
Search for the Qumran caves (1948–1949)
Early in September 1948, Metropolitan bishop Mar Samuel brought some additional scroll fragments that he had acquired to Professor Ovid R. Sellers, the new Director of ASOR. By the end of 1948, nearly two years after their discovery, scholars had yet to locate the original cave where the fragments had been found. With unrest in the country at that time, no large-scale search could be undertaken safely. Sellers attempted to get the Syrians to assist in the search for the cave, but he was unable to pay their price. In early 1948, the government of Jordan gave permission to the Arab Legion to search the area where the original Qumran cave was thought to be. Consequently, Cave 1 was rediscovered on 28 January 1949, by Belgian United Nations observer Captain Philippe Lippens and Arab Legion Captain Akkash el-Zebn.[5]
Qumran caves rediscovery and new scroll discoveries (1949–1951)
The rediscovery of what became known as "Cave 1" at Qumran prompted the initial excavation of the site from 15 February to 5 March 1949 by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities led by Gerald Lankester Harding and Roland de Vaux.[6] The Cave 1 site yielded discoveries of additional Dead Sea Scroll fragments, linen cloth, jars, and other artefacts.[7]
Excavations of Qumran (1951–1956)
In November 1951, Roland de Vaux and his team from the ASOR began a full excavation of Qumran. By February 1952, the Bedouin people had discovered 30 fragments in what was to be designated Cave 2.The discovery of a second cave eventually yielded 300 fragments from 33 manuscripts, including fragments of Jubilees, the Wisdom of Sirach, and Ben Sira written in Hebrew. The following month, on 14 March 1952, the ASOR team discovered a third cave with fragments of Jubilees and the Copper Scroll. Between September and December 1952 the fragments and scrolls of Caves 4, 5, and 6 were subsequently discovered by the ASOR teams.[8]
With the monetary value of the scrolls rising as their historical significance was made more public, the Bedouins and the ASOR archaeologists accelerated their search for the scrolls separately in the same general area of Qumran, which was over 1 kilometre in length. Between 1953 and 1956, Roland de Vaux led four more archaeological expeditions in the area to uncover scrolls and artefacts. The last cave, Cave 11, was discovered in 1956 and yielded the last fragments to be found in the vicinity of Qumran.[9]
Origin
There has been much debate about the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The dominant theory remains that the scrolls were the product of a sect of Jews living at nearby Qumran called the Essenes, but this theory has come to be challenged by several modern scholars.
Qumran–Essene theory
The view among scholars, almost universally held until the 1990s, is the "Qumran–Essene" hypothesis originally posited by Roland Guérin de Vauxand Józef Tadeusz Milik, though independently both Eliezer Sukenik and Butrus Sowmy of St Mark's Monastery connected scrolls with the Essenes well before any excavations at Qumran. [10] The Qumran–Essene theory holds that the scrolls were written by the Essenes, or by another Jewish sectarian group, residing at Khirbet Qumran. They composed the scrolls and ultimately hid them in the nearby caves during the Jewish Revolt sometime between 66 and 68 CE. The site of Qumran was destroyed and the scrolls never recovered. A number of arguments are used to support this theory.
· There are striking similarities between the description of an initiation ceremony of new members in the Community Rule and descriptions of the Essene initiation ceremony mentioned in the works of Flavius Josephus – a Jewish–Roman historian of the Second Temple Period.
· Josephus mentions the Essenes as sharing property among the members of the community, as does the Community Rule.
· During the excavation of Khirbet Qumran, two inkwells and plastered elements thought to be tables were found, offering evidence that some form of writing was done there. More inkwells were discovered nearby. De Vaux called this area the "scriptorium" based upon this discovery.
· Several Jewish ritual baths (Hebrew: miqvah = מקוה) were discovered at Qumran, which offers evidence of an observant Jewish presence at the site.
· Pliny the Elder (a geographer writing after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE) describes a group of Essenes living in a desert community on the northwest shore of the Dead Seanear the ruined town of 'Ein Gedi.
The Qumran–Essene theory has been the dominant theory since its initial proposal by Roland de Vaux and J.T. Milik. Recently, however, several other scholars have proposed alternative origins of the scrolls.[11]
Christian Origin theory
In recent years, Robert Eisenman has advanced the theory that some scrolls describe the early Christian community. Eisenman also argued that the careers of James the Just and Paul the Apostle correspond to events recorded in some of these documents.[12]
Jerusalem origin theory
Some scholars have argued that the scrolls were the product of Jews living in Jerusalem, who hid the scrolls in the caves near Qumran while fleeing from the Romans during the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Karl Heinrich Rengstorf first proposed that the Dead Sea Scrolls originated at the library of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.[13] Later, Norman Golb suggested that the scrolls were the product of multiple libraries in Jerusalem, and not necessarily the Jerusalem Temple library. Proponents of the Jerusalem Origin theory point to the diversity of thought and handwriting among the scrolls as evidence against a Qumran origin of the scrolls. Several archaeologists have also accepted an origin of the scrolls other than Qumran, including Yizhar Hirschfeld[14] and most recently Yizhak Magen and Yuval Peleg, who all understand the remains of Qumran to be those of a Hasmonean fort that was reused during later periods.[15]
Qumran–Sectarian and the Qumran–Sadducean theory
Qumran–Sectarian theories are variations on the Qumran–Essene theory. The main point of departure from the Qumran–Essene theory is hesitation to link the Dead Sea Scrolls specifically with the Essenes. Most proponents of the Qumran–Sectarian theory understand a group of Jews living in or near Qumran to be responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls, but do not necessarily conclude that the sectarians are Essenes.
A specific variation on the Qumran–Sectarian theory that has gained much recent popularity is the work of Lawrence H. Schiffman, who proposes that the community was led by a group of Zadokite priests (Sadducees).[16] The most important document in support of this view is the "Miqsat Ma'ase Ha-Torah" (4QMMT), which cites purity laws (such as the transfer of impurities) identical to those attributed in rabbinic writings to the Sadducees. 4QMMT also reproduces a festival calendar that follows Sadducee principles for the dating of certain festival days.[17]
Dating
Radiocarbon dating
Parchments from number of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been carbon dated. The initial test performed in 1950 was on a piece of linen from one of the caves. This test gave an indicative dating of 33 CE plus or minus 200 years, eliminating early hypotheses relating the scrolls to the mediaeval period.[18] Since then two large series of tests have been performed on the scrolls themselves. The results were summarized by VanderKam and Flint, who said the tests give "strong reason for thinking that most of the Qumran manuscripts belong to the last two centuries BCE and the first century CE."[19]
Palaeographic dating
Analysis of letter forms, or palaeography, was applied to the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls by a variety of scholars in the field. Major linguistic analysis by Cross and Avigad dates fragments from 225 BCE to 50 CE.[20] These dates were determined by examining the size, variability, and style of the text. The same fragments were later analyzed using radiocarbon dating and were dated to an estimated range of 385 BCE to 82 CE with a 68% accuracy rate.[21]
Ink and parchment
The scrolls were analyzed using a cyclotron at the University of California, Davis, where it was found that two types of black ink were used: iron-gall ink and carbon soot ink. In addition, a third ink on the scrolls that was red in colour was found to be made with Cinnabar (HgS, mercury sulfide). There are only four uses of this red ink in the entire collection of Dead Sea Scroll fragments. The black inks found on the scrolls that are made up of carbon soot were found to be from olive oil lamps. Gall nuts from Oak trees were present in some, but not all of the black inks on the scrolls were added to make the ink more resilient to smudging common with pure carbon inks. Honey, oil, vinegar and water were often added to the mixture to thin the ink to a proper consistency for writing. In order to apply the ink to the scrolls, its writers used reed pens.[22]
The Dead Sea scrolls were written on parchment made of processed animal hide known as vellum (approximately 85.5 – 90.5% of the scrolls), papyrus (estimated at 8.0 –13.0% of the scrolls), and sheets of bronze composed of about 99.0% copper and 1.0% tin(approximately 1.5% of the scrolls). For those scrolls written on animal hides, scholars with the Israeli Antiquities Authority, by use of DNA testing for assembly purposes, believe that there may be a hierarchy in the religious importance of the texts based on which type of animal was used to create the hide. Scrolls written on goat and calf hides are considered by scholars to be more significant in nature, while those written on gazelle or ibex are considered to be less religiously significant in nature. [23]
In addition, tests by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Sicily, Italy, have suggested that the origin of parchment of select Dead Sea Scroll fragments is from the Qumran area itself, by using X-ray and Particle Induced X-ray emission testing of the water used to make the parchment that were compared with the water from the area around the Qumran site.
Deterioration, storage, and preservation
The Dead Sea Scrolls that were found were originally preserved by the dry, arid, and low humidity conditions present within the Qumran area adjoining the Dead Sea. In addition, the lack of the use of tanning materials on the parchment of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the very low airflow in the Qumran caves also contributed significantly to their preservation. Some of the scrolls were found stored in clay jars within the Qumran caves, further helping to preserve them from deterioration. The original handling of the scrolls by archaeologists and scholars was done inappropriately, and, along with their storage in an uncontrolled environment, they began a process of more rapid deterioration than they had experienced at Qumran. During the first few years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, adhesive tape used to join fragments and seal cracks caused significant damage to the documents. The Government of Jordan had recognized the urgency of protecting the scrolls from deterioration and the presence of the deterioration among the scrolls. However, the government did not have adequate funds to purchase all the scrolls for their protection and agreed to have foreign institutions purchase the scrolls and have them held at their museum in Jerusalem until they could be "adequately studied".[24]
In early 1953, they were moved to the Palestine Archaeological Museum (commonly called the Rockefeller Museum) in East Jerusalem and through their transportation suffered more deterioration and damage. The museum was underfunded and had limited resources with which to examine the scrolls, and, as a result, conditions of the "scroll" and storage area were left relatively uncontrolled by modern standards. The museum had left most of the fragments and scrolls lying between window glasses, trapping the moisture in with them, causing acceleration in the deterioration process. During a portion of the conflict during the 1956 Arab-Israeli War, the scrolls collection of the Palestine Archaeological Museum was stored in the vault of the Ottoman Bank in Amman, Jordan. Damp conditions from temporary storage of the scrolls in the Ottoman Bank vault from 1956 to the spring of 1957 led to a more rapid rate of deterioration of the scrolls. The conditions caused mildew to develop on the scrolls and fragments, and some of the fragments were partially destroyed or made illegible by the glue and paper of the manila envelopes in which they were stored while in the vault. By 1958 it was noted that up to 5% of some of the scrolls had completely deteriorated. Many of the texts had become illegible and many of the parchments had darkened considerably.[25]
Until the 1970s, the scrolls continued to deteriorate because of poor storage arrangements, exposure to different adhesives, and being trapped in moist environments. Fragments written on parchment (rather than papyrus or bronze) in the hands of private collectors and scholars suffered an even worse fate than those in the hands of the museum, with large portions of fragments being reported to have disappeared by 1966. In the late 1960s, the deterioration was becoming a major concern with scholars and museum officials alike. Scholars John Allegro and Sir Francis Frank were some of the first to strongly advocate for better preservation techniques. Early attempts made by both the British and Israel Museums to remove the adhesive tape ended up exposing the parchment to an array of chemicals, including "British Leather Dressing," and darkening some of them significantly. In the 1970s and 1980s, other preservation attempts were made that included removing the glass plates and replacing them with cardboard and removing pressure against the plates that held the scrolls in storage; however, the fragments and scrolls continued to rapidly deteriorate during this time.[26]
In 1991, the Israeli Antiquities Authority established a temperature controlled laboratory for the storage and preservation of the scrolls. The actions and preservation methods of Rockefeller Museum staff were concentrated on the removal of tape, oils, metals, salt, and other contaminants. The fragments and scrolls are preserved using acid-free cardboard and stored in solander boxes in the climate-controlled storage area.[27]
Biblical significance
Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest Hebrew language manuscripts of the Bible were Masoretic texts dating to the 10th century, such as the Aleppo Codex. (Today, the oldest known extant manuscripts of the Masoretic Text date from approximately the 9th century). The biblical manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls push that date back a millennium to the 2nd century BCE. Before this discovery, the earliest extant manuscripts of the Old Testament were manuscripts such as Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209 and Codex Sinaiticus (both dating from the 4th century) that were written in Greek. The biblical manuscripts from Qumran, which include at least fragments from every book of the Old Testament, except perhaps for the Book of Esther, provide a far older cross section of scriptural tradition than that available to scholars before. While some of the Qumran biblical manuscripts are nearly identical to the Masoretic, or traditional, Hebrew text of the Old Testament, some manuscripts of the books of Exodus and Samuel found in Cave Four exhibit dramatic differences in both language and content. In their astonishing range of textual variants, the Qumran biblical discoveries have prompted scholars to reconsider the once-accepted theories of the development of the modern biblical text from only three manuscript families: of the Masoretic text, of the Hebrew original of the Septuagint, and of theSamaritan Pentateuch. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the Old Testament scripture was extremely fluid until its canonization around A.D. 100.[28]
At the time of their writing the area was transitioning between the Greek Macedonian Empire and Roman dominance as Roman Judea. The Jewish Qahal (society) had some measure of autonomy following the death of Alexander and the fracturing of the Greek Empire among his successors. The country was long called Ιουδαία or Judea at that time, named for the Hebrews that returned to dwell there, following the well-documented Diaspora. The majority of Jews never actually returned to Israel from Babylon and Persia according to the Talmud, oral and archaeological evidence.
Biblical books found
There are 225 Biblical texts included in the Dead Sea Scroll documents, or around 22% of the total, and with deutero-canonical books the number increases to 235. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain parts of all but one of the books of the Tanakh of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament proto-canon. They also include four of the deutero-canonical books included in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles: Tobit, Ben Sirach, Baruch 6, and Psalm 151. The Book of Esther has not yet been found and scholars believe Esther is missing because, as a Jew, her marriage to a Persian king may have been looked down upon by the inhabitants of Qumran, or because the book has the Purim festival which is not included in the Qumran calendar. Listed below are the sixteen most represented books of the Bible found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1970s, including the number of translatable Dead Sea texts that represent a copy of scripture from each Biblical book.[29]
Non-biblical books
The majority of the texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls are non-biblical in nature and were thought to be insignificant for understanding the composition or canonization of the Biblical books, but a different consensus has emerged which sees many of these works as being collected by the Essene community instead of being composed by them. Scholars now recognize that some of these works were composed earlier than the Essene period, when some of the Biblical books were still being written or redacted into their final form.[30]
Qumran Community and the New Testament
Since the Qumran community and early Christianity partly overlap, it is not surprising that from the very beginning of Dead Sea Scrolls research some scholars endeavoured to identify the two. The first attempt came from England in the early 1950s; with Jacob Teicher of Cambridge modestly advancing the thesis that Jesus was the Teacher of Righteousness and Saint Paul the Wicked Priest. As for Robert Eisenman, he ignores Jesus, instead his brother, James, in the role of the Teacher of Righteousness, with Paul playing the Wicked Priest. In my opinion all these theories fail the basic credibility test: they do not spring from, but are foisted on, the texts. These to say the least improbable speculations as well as the no less fantastic claim that Qumran Cave 7 yielded remains of the Gospel of Mark and other New Testament writings in Greek need not detain us any longer. [31]
Turning to the real relationship between the Scrolls and the New Testament, this can be presented under a threefold heading. (1) We note (a) fundamental similarities of language (both in the Scrolls and in the New Testament the faithful are called ‘sons of light’); (b) ideology (both communities considered themselves as the true Israel, governed by twelve leaders, and expected the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God); (c) attitude to the Bible (both considered their own history as a fulfilment of the words of the Prophets). However, all correspondences such as these may be due to the Palestinian religious atmosphere of the epoch, without entailing any direct influence. (2) More specific features, such as monarchic administration (i.e. single leaders, overseers at Qumran, bishops in Christian communities) and the practice of religious communism in the strict discipline of the sect and at least in the early days in the Jerusalem church (Acts 2:44, 45), would suggest a direct causal connection. If so, it is likely that the young and inexperienced church modelled itself on the well-tried Essene society. (3) In the study of the historical Jesus, the charismatic eschatological aspects of the Scrolls have provided the richest gleanings for comparison. For example, the Prayer of Nabonidus, known since the mid-1950s, and concerned with the story of Nabonidus’ cure by a Jewish exorcist who forgave his sins, provides the most telling parallel to the Gospel account of the healing of a paralytic in Capernaum whose sins Jesus declared forgiven.[32]
Significance of the Qumran Discovery
The Qumran finds have also substantially altered our views concerning t he text and canon of the Bible. The many medieval Hebrew scriptural manuscripts, representing the traditional or Masoretic text, are remarkable for their almost general uniformity, compared to the often meaningful ivergences between the traditional Hebrew text and its ancient Greek, Latin or Syriac translations, the few variant readings of the Masoretic Bible manuscripts, ignoring obvious scribal errors, mainly concern spelling. By contrast, the Qumran scriptural scrolls, and especially the fragments, are characterized by extreme fluidity: they often differ not just from the customary wording but also, when the same book is attested by several manuscripts, among themselves. In fact, some of the fragments echo what later became the Masoretic text; others resemble the Hebrew underlying the Greek Septuagint; yet others recall the Samaritan Torah or Pentateuch, the only part of the Bible which the Jews of Samaria accepted as Scripture. Some Qumran fragments represent a mixture of these, or something altogether different. In short, while largely echoing the contents of biblical books, Qumran has opened an entirely new era in the textual history of the Hebrew Scriptures.[33]
The Community’s attitude to the biblical canon, i.e. the list of books considered as Holy Writ, is less easy to define, as no such list of titles has survived. Canonical status may be presumed indirectly either from authoritative quotations or from theological commentary. As regards the latter, the caves have yielded various interpretative works on the Pentateuch (the Temple Scroll, reworked Pentateuch manuscripts, the Genesis Apocryphon and other commentaries on Genesis) and the Prophets (e.g. Isaiah, Habakkuk, Nahum, etc.), but only on the Psalms among the Writings, the third traditional division of the Jewish Bible.[34]
In connection with Tobit one can note that four out of the five Cave 4 manuscripts are in Aramaic and only one in Hebrew, but they all reflect the longer version of the Greek Tobit. So the long-debated original language of this book is still uncertain, but Aramaic has become the likeliest candidate. On the other hand, the Hebrew poem from Ben Sira L1 has a patently better chance of reflecting the original than either the Greek translation by the author’s grandson, preserved in the Septuagint, or the Hebrew of the medieval Cairo Genizah manuscripts, because the Qumran version alone faithfully reflects the acrostic character of the composition with the lines starting with the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, bet, gimel, etc. [35]
Qumran has also added to the Pseudepigrapha several new works dealing with biblical figures such as Joseph, Qahat, Amram, Moses, Joshua, Samuel. Among the works in this category which were previously known, the Aramaic fragments of Enoch deserve special mention because they appear to attest only four out of the five books of the Ethiopic Enoch. Book 2 (i.e. chapters XXXVII-LXXII), which describes the heavenly apocalyptic figure called son of man, a subject on which New Testament scholars have wasted a considerable amount of ink without approaching even the vaguest consensus, is missing at Qumran. Thus the Aramaic Enoch does not support their speculations any more than do the Greek manuscripts, which are also without chapters XXXVII-LXXII of the Ethiopic Enoch. [36]
The contribution of the Scrolls to general Jewish history is negligible, and even to the history of the Community is fairly limited. The chief reason for this is that none of the non-biblical compositions found at Qumran belongs to the historical genre. The sectarian persons and events mentioned in the manuscripts are depicted in cryptic language as fulfilment of ancient prophecies relating to the last age. The chief sources of sectarian history, the Damascus Document and the Bible commentaries or pesharim, identify the Community’s principal enemies (Greece) and the rulers of the Kittim (Romans). Also, the Nahum Commentary’s historical perspective extends from Antiochus (no doubt Epiphanes, c. 170 BCE) to the conquest by the Kittim (probably 63 BCE).[37]
The mainstream hypothesis, built on archaeology and literary analysis, sketches the history of the Qumran Community (or Essene) as follows. Its prehistory starts in Palestine some claim also Babylonian antecedents with the rise of the Hasidic movement, at the beginning of the second century BCE as described in the first book of the Maccabees (I Mac. 2: 42-44; 7: 13-17). Sectarian (Essene) history, itself originated in a clash between the Wicked Priest (Jonathan and/or possibly Simon Maccabaeus) and the Teacher of Righteousness, the anonymous priest who was the spiritual leader of the Community. The sect consisted of the survivors of the Hasidim, linked with a group of dissident priests who, by the mid-second century, came under the leadership of the sons of Zadok, associates of the Zadokite high priests. This history continues at Qumran, and no doubt in many other Palestinian localities, until the years of the first Jewish rebellion against Rome, when possibly in 68 CE the settlement is believed to have been occupied by Vespasian’s soldiers. Whether the legionaries encountered sectarian resistance - such a theory would be consonant with Josephus’ reference to an Essene general among the revolutionaries and to a massacre of the Essenes by the Romans - or whether the threatening presence of the contingents of Zealot Sicarii, who had already expelled the Essenes from Qumran, provoked a Roman intervention, are purely speculative matters. One fact is certain, however. No one of the original occupants of Qumran returned to the caves to reclaim their valuable manuscripts.[38]
The early assumption of Scroll scholars that every non-biblical Dead Sea text was an Essene writing might have justified to some extent Norman Golb’s scepticism. But nowadays specialists distinguish between Qumran manuscripts written by members of the Essene sect, and others either predating the Community, or simply brought there from outside. Emanuel Tov, for instance, has drawn a dividing line on scribal grounds between scrolls produced at Qumran and the rest.[39]
However, in my view the soft underbelly of the Jerusalem hypothesis is revealed - apart from the patent weakness of the archaeological interpretation, for Qumran is not a fortress - by the composition of the manuscript collection itself, definitely pointing towards a sectarian library. If Cave 4 is taken as representative, whereas several biblical books (Kings, Lamentations, Ezra and Chronicles) are attested only in single copies; and others, as important as Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Proverbs, Ruth and Ecclesiastes, in two copies, we find ten copies of the Community Rule and nine of the Damascus Document. Over a dozen manuscripts contain sectarian calendars, yet not one mainstream calendar figures among the 575 (or 555) compositions found in that cave! So, if the texts discovered at Qumran came from the capital, can their source have been an Essene library in Jerusalem?
Reflection
If one had to single out the most revolutionary novelty furnished by Qumran, its contribution to our understanding of the genesis of Jewish literary compositions could justifiably be our primary choice. Comparative study of biblical manuscripts, where no two copies display the same text, and of sectarian works, attested in a number of sometimes startlingly different redactions, has revealed in one leading scholar’s words ‘insufficiently controlled copying’.[40]
In my view, however, the phenomenon would better be described as scribal creative freedom. Qumran manuscripts of Scripture, and even more of the Community Rule and the War Scroll, indicate that diversity, not uniformity, reined there and then, and that redactor-copyist felt free to improve the composition which they were reproducing. The Dead Sea Scrolls have afforded for the first time direct insight into the creative literary-religious process at work within that variegated Judaism which flourished during the last two centuries of quasi-national independence, before the catastrophe of 70 CE forced the rabbinic successors of the Pharisees to attempt to create an ‘orthodoxy’ by reducing dangerous multiplicity to a simple, tidy and easily controllable unity.[41]
Looking at the Qumran discoveries from an overall perspective, the student of history of the Palestinian Judaism in the Inter-Testamental era is their principal beneficiary. For such an expert, the formerly quite unknown sectarian writings of the Dead Sea literature have opened new avenues of exploration in the shadowy era of the life of Jesus, the rise of Christianity and the emergence of rabbinic Judaism. From the Jewish side, it was previously poorly documented. The rabbis of the first and second centuries CE had not permitted religious writings of that epoch to go down to posterity unless they conformed fully to their ideas, and although some of these texts were preserved by Christians (viz. the Apocrypha and many of the Pseudepigrapha), the fact that they had served as a vehicle for Church apologetics caused their textual reliability to be suspect.
But the Scrolls are unaffected by either Christian or Rabbinic censorship, and now that their evidence is complete, historians will be thoroughly acquainted, not with just another aspect of Jewish beliefs or customs, but with the whole organization, teaching and aspirations of a religious community flourishing during the last centuries of the Second Temple. The Scrolls have understandably awakened intense interest in the academic world, but why have they appealed so strongly to the imagination of the non-specialist? Affecting the whole of our outlook, it has necessarily included the domain of religious thought and behaviour, and with it, in the Western world, the whole subject of Judaeo-Christian culture and spirituality. A search is being made for the original meaning of issues with which we have become almost too familiar and which with the passing of the centuries have tended to become choked with inessentials, and it has led not only to a renewed preoccupation with the primitive but fully developed expression of these issues in the Scriptures, but also to a desire for knowledge and understanding of their prehistory.
Yet at the same time, the common ground from which they all sprang, and their affinities and borrowings, show themselves more clearly than ever before. It is no exaggeration to state that none of these religious movements can properly be understood independently of the others. The brittle structure of its stiff and exclusive brotherhood was unable to withstand the national catastrophe which struck Palestinian Judaism in 70 CE. And although the Teacher of Righteousness clearly sensed the deeper obligations implicit in the Mosaic Law, he was without the genius of Jesus the Jew who succeeded in uncovering the essence of religion as an existential relationship between human and human and human and God.
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VanderKam, James C. & Flint, Peter. The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scroll; New York: Harper San Francisco 2002
VanderKam, James C. The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994
Vermes, G. Dead Sea Scrolls, Forty Years On; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987
Vermes, Geza, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, London: Penguin, 1998
Webliography
The Archaeological Site OF Qumran and the Personality of Roland De Vaux http://www.biblicaltheology.com/Research/TrstenskyF01
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[2] ARC Leaney. From Judean Caves, p.27,Religious Education Press, 1961.
[3] Ilani, Ofri, "Scholar: The Essenes, Dead Sea Scroll 'authors,' never existed", Ha'aretz, 13 March 2009.
[4] Abegg, Jr., Martin, Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The Oldest Known Bible Translated for the First Time into English, San Francisco: Harper, 2002.
[6] VanderKam, James C. The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994. p 9
[8] VanderKam, James C. The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. p 10
[9] Vermes, Geza, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, London: Penguin, 1998
[10] Grossman, Maxine. Rediscovering the Dead Sea Scrolls, Pgs 66–67
[11] The Archaeological Site OF Qumran and the Personality of Roland De Vaux http://www.biblicaltheology.com/Research/TrstenskyF01.pdf.
[12] Eisenman, Robert H. James, the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls. 1st American ed. New York: Viking, 1997.
[13] Rengstorf, Karl Heinrich. Hirbet Qumran und die Bibliothek vom Toten Meer. Translated by J. R. Wilkie. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960.
[14] Hirschfeld, Yizhar, Qumran in Context: Reassessing the Archaeological Evidence, Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004.
[15] Magen, Yizhak, and Yuval Peleg, The Qumran Excavations 1993–2004: Preliminary Report, JSP 6 (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2007)
[16] Schiffman, Lawrence H., Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: their True Meaning for Judaism and Christianity, Anchor Bible Reference Library (Doubleday) 1995.
[17] Schiffman, Lawrence H., Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: their True Meaning for Judaism and Christianity, Anchor Bible Reference Library (Doubleday) 1995.
[18] Doudna, G. "Carbon-14 Dating", in Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Schiffman, Lawrence, Tov, Emanuel, & VanderKam, James, eds., Vol.1 (Oxford: 2000)
[19] VanderKam, James C. & Flint, Peter. The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scroll; New York: Harper San Francisco (2002) p. 32.
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[29] James VanderKam; Peter Flint (10 July 2005). The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity. Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 180
[30] Abegg, Jr., Martin, Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The Oldest Known Bible Translated for the First Time into English, (contains the biblical portion of the scrolls) San Francisco: Harper, 2002
[31] Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise. The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, London and New York, 1992.
[32] Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise. The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, London and New York, 1992.
[33] Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Minneapolis-Assen/Maastricht, 1992.
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[35] Edward M. Cook, Solving the Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls: New Light on the Bible, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994.
[36] J. T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4, Oxford, 1976.
[37] E. Schürer, G. Vermes, F. Millar and M. Goodman, The History of the Jewish People in the Age ofJesusChrist, III, Edinburgh, 1986, 250-68.4
[38] John Strugnell, ‘Pseudepigrapha at Qumran’, in Archaeology and History in the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Lawrence H. Schiffman (Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, Supplement, Series 8, Sheffield, 1990, 221).
[39] Abegg, Jr. Martin, James E. Bowley, Edward M. Cook, Emanuel Tov. The Dead Sea Scrolls Concordance, Volume 1; Brill Publishing 2003.
[40] S. Talmon in F. M. Cross and S. Talmon, Qumran and the Origin of the Biblical Text, Cambridge, Mass., 1975, p380.
[41] Vermes, G.,Dead Sea Scrolls, Forty Years On (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987)
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