Search Results

This chapter examines literature discovered at Qumran and related literature, including the Temple Scroll, with an eye toward describing more fully the anti-temple polemics articulated. It identifies sources making the following claims about the Jerusalem temple: that it is ritually defiled, morally defiled, ritually inadequate, and structurally insufficient. It also reconsiders the sources that ostensibly “spiritualize” the temple, arguing instead that these sources are rooted in beliefs concerning the temple’s importance and efficacy. Sectarian Jews emulated the temple’s rituals and priests in part because they looked forward to the temple being under their own control.

The radical separation between the world of the living and the realm of the dead is not universal through the Hebrew Bible. The distinctions weaken in the later stages of biblical literature. There is a blurring of the realms in Isaiah 52-3, wherein the prophet describes the figure of the Suffering Servant. Far from being cut off from God after his death, the servant is divinely rewarded. Similarly, the book of Daniel forecasts a reward of eternal life for the righteous: ‘many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life’ (12:2); Daniel identifies these righteous ones with Isaiah's Suffering Servant and goes so far as to assign heavenly status to them. Finally, the Dead Sea Scrolls show a figure who identifies himself with the Suffering Servant and at the same time claims superiority over the angels. This chapter traces the development of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, Daniel, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and examines the figure's distinctive combination of suffering and divine exaltation.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are one of the most important archaeological finds ever made. They are usually understood to have been hidden away quickly ahead of a Roman advance in 68 ce. However, the archaeological evidence testifying to the method of their containment in jars in caves indicates that they were carefully wrapped up in quality scroll wrappers and placed in sealed jars, with bitumen plugs, and this would have taken a long time to do. In addition, the remaining Dead Sea Scrolls are a tiny remainder of an original vast cache of manuscripts placed in caves. The scrolls make better sense if they are seen as purposeful burials, the final resting places of multiple genizahs — collections of old or heterodox scrolls. They were buried by the Essenes in order to preserve them till the End, in order to show reverence for the name of God or other holy references they contained. The reasons why some Essenes were living beside the Dead Sea must have something to do with the processes they needed to bury sacred scrolls in the caves along the north-western coast.

Most archeologists believe that the ruins at Khirbet Qumran were used by a communal sect during the first century BCE and CE, which was part of the Essene movement described by Josephus and Philo. About a quarter of the scrolls found nearby are of books that are now part of our (Hebrew) Bible. There were also copies of several other books, such as Enoch and Jubilees, that were regarded as authoritative, though they are not included in today’s Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish Bibles. Variations in these texts show that standard versions of these books had not yet been determined.

This chapter focuses on those Second Temple authors who continue to develop notions of community holiness that are tied to sexual behavior. These trajectories continue along the lines of ascribed, achieved, and supererogatory holiness (or in this case purity) discussed in the first chapter. Those who assume Israel’s ascribed, God-given holiness (Ezra, Jubilees, Tobit, 4QMMT), focus on endogamy as the only means to protect their community holiness, which would be profaned through intermarriage. Some of the sectarian authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls focus their attention on holiness achieved (Community Rule, Damascus Document, Messianic Rule)—that is, how they redefine the boundaries of Holy Israel—through their idiosyncratic biblical interpretive traditions. Other Dead Sea Scrolls (War Scroll, Temple Scroll) assume neither an ascribed nor an achieved holiness for Israel, but rather focus on those activities that protect God’s holy presence in their midst.

This chapter looks at how the biblical laws of marriage, divorce, and sexual relations were interpreted during the Second Temple (or intertestamental) period, with reference to the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the followers of Jesus. It shows that there is considerable fluidity between literary genres that are nowadays regarded as distinct and that the early chapters of Genesis were often crucial to legal interpretation. Despite fundamental differences between the Qumran community and the New Testament writers, the laws of marriage, divorce, and remarriage were important to both groups as a means of championing a particular attitude towards Moses, the purposes of God, and the eschaton (the end of the present age). The chapter argues that interpretations of biblical law (including on the question of divorce and remarriage) helped to define the identity of both religious groups, particularly in relation to their opponents.

This final chapter sums up the argument of this book and considers the whole picture of the context of the Dead Sea Scrolls within the world of Second Temple Judaism, which is important as then the Scrolls can be properly situated as cultural artefacts within their own time. It is important, this conclusion states, to define the Essenes accurately because of the confusion as to whether the Scrolls can be attributed to them. The conclusion ends by stating that this book has been just the beginning of other lines of enquiry.

Through a case study of psalms, this chapter shows how the Bible sets the agenda for the study of early Jewish literature, and how removing biblical lenses reveals a new picture of the literary imagination. Conventional wisdom has it that the book of Psalms was the most popular book among the Dead Sea Scrolls and enjoyed great authority in early Judaism. But this is a mirage: the material and literary evidence suggests there is no such thing as the “book of Psalms” in early Judaism. Instead, diverse manuscripts preserve psalmic texts, in various genres, orders, and numbers, revealing practices of collection that cannot always be placed on a linear timeline of “the making of the Bible.” The psalms are not conceptualized as a “book” before the New Testament and rabbinic texts. Instead, they are imagined as an open genre, a heavenly archive only partially reflected in the extant texts. New metaphors suggested by theoretical work in book history—including efforts to describe the unbound textual world of the digital—can help reconceptualize a literary landscape not organized around books, but imagined in terms of overlapping clusters, mosaics of fragments, and expanding archives.

The earliest apocalypses, in the books of Enoch and Daniel, appeal to a source of revelation that is independent of the Mosaic Torah. The sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls, however, combine a fundamental emphasis on the Torah with a claim of higher revelation, which guides the proper interpretation of the Torah. Similarly the apocalypses of the late first century CE, 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, revere the Torah, but supplement it with apocalyptic visions.

This is the second of five chapters on the Old Testament and the reader, and presents an analysis of the Bible in Qumran (the site occupied by the early Jewish monastic community who lived near the shores of the Dead Sea) and early Judaism. The first part gives an account of the rediscovery of Midrash—a term initially borrowed from rabbinic literature, where it denotes the specifically rabbinic tradition of Bible exegesis—the commentary created in dialogue with the scared Scripture in early Judaism. The rediscovery of Midrash was prompted in particular by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1947–1956), and the finding of the Codex Neofiti 1 in the Vatican library in 1953; these and other examples of Midrash have given rise to numerous monographs and articles over the last thirty years of the twentieth century. The second part discusses the use of the Scripture and the Dead Sea sect of Qumran, and the third analyses the use of Scripture among other Jewish rabbinical groups in late antiquity. The last two sections look at the Scripture in the Alexandrian schools and among the early Christians, and at the emergence of Judaism and Christianity as ‘Religions of the Book’.

Research to bridge the gap between the Bible and the established halakhah of the Rabbis as found in the rabbinic literature has been conducted. But this research, hampered primarily by the lack of reliable, authentic sources, proved to be disappointing and was abandoned. However, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, primary material from the period of the Second Temple was made available. Recognition of the centrality of the law to the life and consciousness of the Qumran sectarians came with the publication of the Temple Scroll in 1977. Since that time, a goodly number of halakhic compositions have been published. However, despite all this, a comprehensive reassessment of these findings with respect to the original project, that is, the history and development of halakhah, is lacking. In this regard this study presents two models which can be used to describe the relationship between Qumranic and rabbinic literature. The first model can be termed “developmental,” whereas the other model is termed as “reflective.” This chapter surveys briefly the principal criteria for ascribing a specific legal issue to one of these models.

The ideological role of language came to the fore in the Hellenistic world as language became essential for defining Hellenistic culture and citizenship. Hellenism elevated language ideology, and as a result, it encouraged the emergence of Hebrew as a language of Jewish cultural and religious identity. With the end of the Persian administration, came the end of scribal training in Aramaic. Hebrew schools and writing emerged, and Hellenism even encouraged the establishment of Hebrew schools in Jerusalem. Although Paleo-Hebrew script gave way to Aramaic in everyday use, it reemerged as a national script on seals and coins, reflecting the ideological role that Hebrew would play in Jewish religion, politics, and identity. Qumran Hebrew preserves our best example of the ideologically charged role that Hebrew came to play during this period.

This chapter examines the intellectual climate that gave rise to a creative scientific environment in the Dead Sea Scrolls community called Yahad. It first considers the antecedents of the Yahad's scientific outlook within larger movements of Judaism of the Hellenistic period, including the Enochic literature and the apocalyptic-sapiential Aramaic texts from a cave. It then outlines some of the prerequisites for the development of science as they are represented in the early Jewish tradition, along with the myths about the birth of knowledge found in the apocalyptic literature and in the literature of the Yahad. It also presents a case study from the integration of astrological and astronomical themes in Yahad literature and concludes with a discussion of the epistemological infrastructure that triggered the commitment of the Yahad to science.

The intellectual inheritance of the Qumran texts has suggested numerous hypotheses since their discovery. Some scholars pretended to find a relationship with Christian groups, others shed light on the links with Jewish groups. This chapter deals with a new approach to the transmission of the Qumran texts. Three levels of transmission are considered: (1) the “narrow” transmission of the Qumran manuscripts; (2) a “broader” definition of the transmission concerns the Qumran texts; it means the Essene compositions with some interrogations for several documents excavated in Qumran caves; (3) and the “broadest” definition of Qumran manuscripts and of their transmission needs to consider not only the Essene compositions but also the Scriptural manuscripts and the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha—that is, the whole preserved Qumran texts.

It is often taken for granted that a ‘Bible’ existed at an early period. For a long time, it was also assumed that the Hebrew Bible we know today was the only authentic witness to the Hebrew Scriptural tradition. Other witnesses like the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint were secondary, derivative of the real. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the middle of the twentieth century changed all of our assumptions: we now know that the Jewish Scriptures were characterized by diversity until much later, the second century CE. Before then, there was both diversity in the forms of books that later became canonical and in the actual works considered authoritative Scripture.