The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (4 page)

After John Strugnell's withdrawal, the very capable Emanuel Tov, Professor of Biblical Studies at the Hebrew University, was appointed chief editor, the first Jew and the first Israeli to head the Qumran publication project. He began his activities auspiciously by redistributing the unpublished texts among freshly recruited collaborators. The new editorial team, of which I became a member in 1991, consists of some sixty scholars compared to the original seven! Unfortunately, Tov did not feel free to cancel the ‘secrecy rule', introduced and strictly enforced by de Vaux and his successors, prohibiting access to unpublished texts to all but a few chosen editors. However, the protective dam erected around the fragments by the international team collapsed in the autumn of 1991 under the growing pressure of public opinion, mobilized in particular by Hershel Shanks, in the columns of the widely read
Biblical Archaeology Review
(
BAR
). The first landmark event leading towards full freedom was the publication in early September by
BAR's
parent body, the Biblical Archaeology Society, of seventeen Cave 4 manuscripts reconstructed with the help of a computer by Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin Abegg
²¹
from the Preliminary Concordance, alluded to earlier, which was privately issued in twenty-five copies (in theory only for the use of the official editors) by John Strugnell in 1988.
²²
Later in the same month out of the blue came the announcement by William A. Moffett that the Huntington Library of San Marino, California, a renowned research institution, would bring to an end the forty-year-old closed shop by opening its complete photographic archive of the Qumran Scrolls to all qualified scholars.
²³

The IAA and the official editors attempted to resist but, by the end of October, under pressure from the Knesset, Israel's parliament, they were all forced to recognize that the battle was lost and all restrictions had to be lifted. Almost at once, the Scroll photograph archives at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies and at the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center at Claremont, previously legally compelled to restrict access only to persons approved by Jerusalem, were also thrown open to all competent research scholars. Moreover, in November 1991 the Biblical Archaeology Society published a two-volume photographic edition of the bulk of the Qumran fragments compiled by Robert Eisenman and James Robinson.
²⁴
How the two Californian professors obtained the material remains unclear. This new policy has had an essentially beneficial effect on Qumran studies. Since vested interests are no longer protected, the rate of publication has noticeably accelerated and from 1992 learned periodicals have been flooded with short or not so short papers by scholars claiming fresh insights. Free competition has expedited the official edition itself. The first Cave 4 volume of biblical texts, announced as imminent by Father Benoit in 1983, actually appeared
-pace
the 1992 date on the cover page—on 4 March 1993.
²⁵
Scholarship and the general public were to become the beneficiaries of the new era of liberty. Only the procrastinators and the selfish stood to lose. By 1996, thanks to the highly efficient stewardship of the editor-in-chief, Emanuel Tov, four further volumes have been published and another four are in the pipeline. Compared with the output of the previous regime, this is an admirable change indeed. At the time of the revision of this book, thirty-six out of the thirty-nine volumes of
Discoveries in the JudaeanDesert
(DJD) have appeared, twenty-eight of them since the watershed year of the Scrolls ‘revolution' in 1991.

Between 1947 and 1956, the eleven Qumran caves yielded a dozen scrolls written on leather and one embossed on copper. To these we have to add fragments on papyrus or leather, the precise number of which is unknown but probably in the order of six figures. About 800 original documents are fully or partly represented. The Cave 4 list alone contains 575titles,
²⁶
though it seems that some twenty documents (4Q342-61) probably originating from non-Qumran Judaean desert locations were mistakenly catalogued as 4Q material. Most scrolls are written in Hebrew, a smaller portion in Aramaic and only a few attest the ancient Greek or Septuagint version of the Bible.
²⁷

Among the texts previously known, all the books of the Hebrew Scriptures are extant at least in fragments save Esther, the absence of which may be purely accidental.
²⁸
Even Daniel, the most recent work to enter the Palestinian canon in the mid-second century BCE, is attested to by eight manuscripts.
²⁹
There are also remains of Aramaic and Greek scriptural translations.

Furthermore, the caves have yielded some of the Apocrypha, i.e. religious works missing from the Hebrew Scriptures but included in the Septuagint, the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews. Caves 4 and 11 revealed the Book of Tobit in Aramaic and in Hebrew, Psalm cli, described in the Greek version as a ‘supernumerary' psalm, and the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus in Hebrew. Part of the latter, chapters xxxixxliv, has also survived at Masada, and hence cannot be later than 73/4 CE, the date when the stronghold was captured by the Romans, and two medieval manuscripts, discovered in the storeroom (
genizah
) of a synagogue in Cairo in 1896, have preserved about two thirds of the Greek version.

A third category of religious books, the Pseudepigrapha, though very popular in some Jewish circles, failed to attain canonical rank either in Palestine or in the Diaspora. Some of them, previously known in Greek, Latin or Syriac translations, have turned up in their original Hebrew (e.g. the Book of Jubilees) or Aramaic (e.g. the Book of Enoch). A good many further compositions pertaining to this class have also come to light, such as fictional accounts relating among others to Joseph, Amram, Moses, Joshua or Jeremiah, as well as apocryphal psalms, five of which have survived also in Syriac translation, others being revealed for the first time at Qumran.

The sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls, thought to have been composed or revised by the Qumran Community, constitute, with one exception,
³⁰
a complete novelty. This literature comprises rule books, Bible interpretation of various kinds, religious poetry, Wisdom compositions in prose and in verse, sectarian calendars and liturgical texts, one of them purporting to echo the angelic worship in the heavenly temple. To these are to be added several ‘horoscopes' or, more precisely, documents of astrological physiognomy, a literary genre based on the belief that the temper, physical features and fate of an individual depend on the configuration of the heavens at the time of the person's birth, and a text
(brontologion)
predicting prodigies if thunder is heard on certain days, with the moon passing through given signs of the Zodiac. Finally, the Copper Scroll alludes in cryptic language to sixty-four caches of precious metals and scrolls, including another copy of this same inventory written without riddles.

After a first few gaffes committed before the excavation of the site, the palaeographical, archaeological and literary-historical study of the evidence produced a general consensus among scholars concerning
(a)
the age,
(b)
the provenance and (c) the significance of the discoveries. Holders of fringe opinions have recently tended to explain this consensus as tyrannically imposed from above by Roland de Vaux and his henchmen. The truth, however, is that the
opinio communis
has resulted from a natural evolutionary process - from arguments which others found persuasive even when advanced by single individuals often unconnected with the international team - and not from an almighty establishment forcing an official view down the throats of weaklings.

Palaeography was the first method employed to establish the age of the texts. Despite the paucity of comparative material, experts independently arrived at dates ranging between the second century BCE and the first century CE. By the 1960s, in addition to the Qumran texts, they could make use also of manuscripts from Masada (first century CE), as well as from the Murabba‘at and other Judaean desert caves yielding first- and second-century CE Jewish writings. A rather too rigid, but useful, comprehensive system was quickly devised by F. M. Cross.
³¹
While admittedly controversial if unsupported either by actual dates in the manuscripts themselves (a phenomenon, alas, unknown at Qumran) or by external criteria, these palaeographical conclusions were to receive a twofold boost from archaeology and radiocarbon dating. The archaeological thesis, based
inter alia
on the study of pottery and coins, was formulated by R. de Vaux (cf. note 5 on p. 4). He assigned the occupation of Qumran to the period between the second half of the second century BCE and the first war between Jews and Romans (66-70 CE).

Radiocarbon tests were first applied to the cloth wrapping of one of the scrolls as early as 1951. The date suggested was 33 CE, but one had to reckon with a 10 per cent margin of error each way.
³²
However, with the improved techniques of the 1990s, eight Qumran manuscripts were subjected to Accelerator Mass Spectrometry or AM S. Six of them were found to be definitely pre-Christian, and only two straddled over the first century BCE/first century CE dividing line.
³³
Most importantly, with a single exception - the Testament of Qahat being shown to be about 300 years earlier than expected - the radiocarbon dates confirm in substance those proposed by the palaeographers. Unfortunately, the manuscripts tested in 1990 did not include historically sensitive texts. But in 1994 the IAA invited the Arizona AMS Laboratory at the University of Arizona, Tucson to analyse eighteen texts and two linen fragments. Thirteen of the manuscripts came definitely from Qumran and one of these had already been carbon-dated in Zurich. Three texts were ‘date-bearing'. The general conclusion is as follows: ‘Measurements on samples of known ages are in good agreement with those known ages. Ages determined from
¹⁴
C measurements on the remainder of the Dead Sea Scroll samples are in reasonable agreement with paleographic estimates of such ages, in the case where those estimates are available.'
³⁴
On the whole, the results of this second radiocarbon analysis are somewhat disappointing in that, while the dates arrived at accommodate the palaeographic proposals, the margin of error is considerably greater than that appearing in the 1990 Zurich tests. Nevertheless, Arizona has scored on one highly significant point: the Habakkuk Commentary, chief source of the history of the Qumran sect, is definitely put in the pre-Christian era between 120 and 5 BCE. In consequence, fringe scholars who see in this writing allusions to events described in the New Testament will find they have a problem on their hands. In sum, the general scholarly view today places the Qumran Scrolls roughly between 200 BCE and 70 CE, with a small portion of the texts possibly stretching back to the third century BCE, and the bulk of the extant material dating to the first century BCE, i.e. late Hasmonaean or early Herodian in the jargon of the palaeographers.

With negligible exceptions, scholarly opinion recognized already in the 1950s that the Scrolls found in the caves and the nearby ruined settlement were related. To take the obvious example, Cave 4 with its 575 (or perhaps 555) documents lies literally within a stone's throw from the buildings. At the same time, the Essene identity of the ancient inhabitants of Qumran gained general acceptance. Today the Essene theory is questioned by some, but usually for unsound reasons. They adopt a simplistic attitude in comparing the two sets of evidence, namely the classical sources (Philo, Josephus and Pliny the Elder) and Qumran, and any disagreement or contradiction between them is hailed as final proof against the Essene thesis. Yet, if its intricacies are handled with sophistication, it is still the best hypothesis today.
³⁵
Indeed, it accounts best for such striking peculiarities as common ownership of property and the lack of reference to women in the Community Rule, the probable coexistence of celibate and married sectaries (in accordance with Flavius Josephus' account of two kinds of Essenes), and the remarkable coincidence between the geographical setting of Qumran and Pliny the Elder's description of an Essene establishment near the Dead Sea between Jericho and Engedi. I admit of course that the Scrolls and the archaeological data surrounding them do not always fully agree with the Greek and Latin notices, and that both the Qumran and the classical accounts need to be interpreted and adjusted, bearing in mind that the Scrolls represent the views of initiates against those of more or less complete outsiders.
³⁶
But since none of the competing theories associating the Qumran group with Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, or Jewish-Christians can withstand critical scrutiny, I remain unrepentant in upholding my statement formulated in 1977 as still valid today: ‘The final verdict must ... be that of the proposed solutions the Essene theory is relatively the soundest. It is even safe to say that it possesses a high degree of intrinsic probability.'
³⁷

The uniqueness of the Qumran discovery was due to the fact that with the possible exception of the Nash papyrus referred to earlier (p. 3), no Jewish text in Hebrew or Aramaic written on perishable material could previously be traced to the pre-Christian period. Before 1947, the oldest Hebrew text of the whole of Isaiah was the Ben Asher codex from Cairo dated to 895 CE, as against the complete Isaiah Scroll from Cave I, which is about a millennium older. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, save the Hebrew Ben Sira and the Aramaic fragments of the Testament of Levi from the Cairo Genizah, had survived only in translation. The sectarian writings found in the caves, apart from the already mentioned Damascus Document (p. II), count as a total novelty.