The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (5 page)

To begin with, the Qumran Scrolls and the other Judaean Desert finds have created a new discipline: ancient, i.e. pre-medieval, Hebrew
codicology.
We now possess concrete evidence that scribes carefully prepared the leather or papyrus on which they were to write, often ruling them, with vegetable ink, kept in ink-wells. Paragraphs and larger unit openings were indicated by symbols in the margins. Longer compositions were written on scrolls, on one side of the sheets only, some of them numbered, which were subsequently sewn together. Papyrus documents were often reused, with a different text inscribed on the verso. Short works such as letters were recorded on small pieces of writing material: leather, papyrus, wood or potsherd. By contrast, no book or codex, with pages covered with script on both sides and bound together, has come to light at Qumran, or in any other Judaean Desert site.

The Qumran finds have also substantially altered our views concerning the
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 divergences 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. It should be noted, however, that none of these variations affects the scriptural message itself. 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.
³⁸

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. From the texts available in 1988, I collected over fifty examples of Bible citations which were used as proof in doctrinal expositions, thus indicating that they were thought to possess special religious or doctrinal importance.
³⁹

On the other hand, the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11 contains seven apocryphal poems, including chapter L1 of the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira, not annexed to, but interspersed among, the canonical hymns. This may be explained as a liturgical phenomenon, a collection of songs chanted during worship; but it may, and in my view probably does, mean that at Qumran the concept ‘Bible' was still hazy, and the ‘canon' open-ended, which would account for the remarkable freedom in the treatment of the text of Scripture by a community whose life was nevertheless wholly centred on the Bible.

There are two Apocrypha attested at Qumran. 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.

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.
⁴⁰
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.
⁴¹

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 as the kings of Yavan (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). Names familiar from Jewish or Graeco-Roman history appear here and there. The Nahum Commentary alludes to Antiochus, and to another Syrian Greek king, Demetrius (most likely Demetrius III at the beginning of the first century BCE). Very fragmentary historical calendars from Cave 4 contain the phrase ‘Aemilius killed', meaning no doubt Aemilius Scaurus, governor of Syria at the time of Pompey's conquest of Jerusalem in 63. They mention also Jewish rulers of the Maccabaean—Hasmonaean era (second-first centuries BCE), Shelamzion or Salome-Alexandra, widow and successor of Alexander Jannaeus (76-67 BCE); Hyrcanus and John (Yohanan), either John Hyrcanus I (135/4-104 BCE) or more likely II (63-40 BCE),
⁴²
and King Jonathan, Alexander Jannaeus or, in my opinion, more likely Jonathan Maccabaeus (161-143/2 BCE).
⁴³
In one respect, despite the absence of detail, the evidence is telling: all these characters belong to the second or the first half of the first century BCE. So also do most of the coins discovered at Qumran.

The mainstream hypothesis, built on archaeology and literary analysis, sketches the history of the Scrolls Community (or
Essene
sect) as follows.
⁴⁴
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. ii, 42-44; vii, 13-17). Sectarian (Essene) history itself originated in a clash between the Wicked Priest or Priests (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
⁴⁵
and to a massacre of the Essenes by the Romans
⁴⁶
- 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.

A variation on this theme, called the Groningen hypothesis, postulates a whole series of six Wicked Priests, and identifies the Community not with the main Essene sect but with one of its splinter groups.
⁴⁷
The Zealot theory, elaborated in the 1950s in Oxford by Sir Godfrey Driver and Cecil Roth,
⁴⁸
is hard to reconcile with the totality of the available evidence, as most of the Qumran documents predate the Zealot period.

More recently Norman Golb of Chicago has launched a forceful attack on the common opinion. His objections, reiterated in a series of papers,
⁴⁹
culminated in 1995 in a hefty tome.
⁵⁰
The target of his criticism is the provenance of the scrolls found at Qumran. According to him, the manuscripts originated in a Jerusalem library (or libraries), the contents of which were concealed in desert caves when the capital was besieged between 67 and 70 CE. The chief corollary of the hypothesis is that the Essenes had nothing to do either with the Qumran settlement - a fortress in Golb's opinion
⁵¹
- or with the manuscripts.

The early assumption of Scroll scholars that every non-biblical Dead Sea text was an Essene writing
⁵²
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.
⁵³
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?
⁵⁴

Since Qumran 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.
⁵⁵
This trend was continued with loud media support by J. M. Allegro's speculation about the role of
ammanita muscaria,
a hallucinogenic fungus, in the genesis of the Christian Church.
⁵⁶
It reached its climax with Barbara Thiering's discovery that John the Baptist was the Teacher of Righteousness and the married, divorced and remarried Jesus, father of four children, the Wicked Priest.
⁵⁷
As for Robert Eisenman, he ignores Jesus, and casts instead his brother, James, in the role of the Teacher of Righteousness, with Paul playing the Wicked Priest.
⁵⁸
In my opinion all these theories fail the basic credibility test: they do not spring from, but are foisted on, the texts.
⁵⁹

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
⁶⁰
need not detain us any longer.

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 (cf. Acts ii, 44-5), would suggest a direct causal connection. If so, it is likely that the young and inexperienced church modelled itself on the by then 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,
⁶¹
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.
⁶²