Qumranica.com

Final Post

2005-05-11T22:42:00.000+01:00

Classes are now over and we are all gearing up for final exams, so this is the last post on Qumranica and henceforth it is on indefinite hiatus. I will leave the archive up for now and I may (or may not) restart the blog sometime in the future.

I want to thank the students of DI4712, DI4713, and DI5212 for sharing their research with us. I am also grateful to the readers of Qumranica. Thanks for your comments and feedback and I hope you enjoyed the course. This was an interesting experiment on which I will need to reflect. I imagine I will have some comments on it in my paper on blogging which is to be presented in a CARG session in November's SBL meetings in Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, matters pertaining to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran will continue to be covered, along with other aspects of ancient Judaism, over on PaleoJudaica. I hope you will continue to visit there.

Penultimate Post

2005-05-11T10:40:00.000+01:00

A week ago, we of St. Mary's College had our annual School dinner and I have just about recovered from it. There are always entertaining speeches and songs, and this time Matthew Ford, one of the students in the Dead Sea Scrolls course, sang us a work of his own composition about the School. As has been my custom with such things, apart from the first verse I will quote (with his permission) only the verse that pertains to me:

There is a college called St. Mary's Quad,
there studies divines, where great men have trod.
They do lots of talking, and coffee they drink,
You'll pass your exams, with a nod and a wink.

St. Mary's Quad, St. Mary's Quad,
It looks like we've had a few;
We're funny peculiar, and all very bright,
The wonderfully odd St. Mary's Quad.

There was a young scholar of ancient Hebrew,
his name is Doc. Davila, bad grammar won't do.
He studies the Yahad, there no much he misses.
He likes to pronounce 'the Groningen Hypothesis.'

St. Mary's Quad, St. Mary's Quad,
It looks like we've had a few;
We're funny, peculiar, and all very bright,
The wonderfully odd St. Mary's Quad!

Revised Driver Essay

2005-05-07T18:43:00.000+01:00

Daniel Driver has posted the final revision (for the course, that is) of his paper on scriptural interpretation in the Damascus Document. Once again, it's in PDF format.

Summary of Jerusalem Archives Seminar

2005-05-06T16:32:00.000+01:00

Although as far as I know, Golb has not actually persuaded anyone of his theory, it seems fair to say that his work has made a significant contribution to the field of Qumran studies. He seems to have gotten it wrong in two places in particular:

That the Qumran library is not a sectarian collection

The sectarian nature of the library is hard to get around: there are multiple copies of many sectarian texts and their terminology and content show a web of interconnections that argue strongly at least for a broadly cohesive sectarian movement.

That the site of Qumran was a military fortress up to its destruction around 68 C.E.

I can't comment authoritatively on this, but I can say that no archaeologist has been convinced by his arguments and everyone seems to agree that a fortress would not have left its water supply unsecured in the way we find at Qumran. It's true, however, that archaeologist David Stacey has indicated in an informal Internet essay that he thinks that the site was a military garrison into the early first century B.C.E., although before what he would accept as sectarian occupation. But I have yet to see even this argued in a scholarly monograph or peer-review journal.

That said, we also noted quite a few places where he seems to have gotten it right on some important points that have now become mainstream:

The number of scribal hands in the Qumran manuscripts is too many to be explained by local production

Many, perhaps most of the manuscripts must have been imported from outside the group who were living at Qumran (assuming they were sectarians).

There is a surprising lack of autograph copies and "documentary" (i.e., administrative) texts in the Qumran library

Aside from the Copper Scroll, the only administrative text I can think of is 4Q477, in which some named individual are being rebuked, evident in a context associated with the Rabbim, the Many, a term associated with the Yahad. Perhaps also the "List of Netinim" in 4Q340. At one time the collection of administrative texts in DJD 27 was thought to have come from the Qumran library, but it now seems that they are texts from the Bar Kokhba era. Where are all the sectarian administrative texts?

The Copper Scroll is probably a real treasure.

I think pretty much everyone accepts this nowadays.

There are other, more controversial points on which I think he's made a contribution, even though his view remains against the consensus. For example, I rather like his reading of the Community Rule (1QS) as the rule book of a kind of sectarian association made up of men with families and I think it makes marginally more sense than the usual reading of it as a constitution for a celibate Essene quasi-monastic group living at Qumran.

A couple of other interesting points came up. One student raised the possibility that the Qumran watchtower was garrisoned to keep an eye on the area but the water supply was unprotected because the plan was for the garrison to abandon the site if approaching enemies were sighted. The analogy was with ancient garrisons on the British coastline (often surviving now as churches), which were set up with that purpose. We wondered how close an analogy this was, but since none of us controlled either archaeological discipline, we couldn't get very far with the idea.

Finally, and this seems a fitting question with which to close, we asked why nobody ever came back to get the scrolls. Did everyone who knew about the scrolls deposits really die? Even granting the carnage of the Great Revolt, that seems unlikely. Could the scrolls deposits have been genizot, caches of worn manuscripts that were not intended to be used again? Are other explanations possible? As with so many other questions about the Dead Sea Scrolls, we just don't know.

Summary of Enochic-Essene Theory Seminar

2005-05-05T11:27:00.000+01:00

We spent a good deal of this seminar reviewing the basics of Boccaccini's reconstruction of the rise of Essenism and the place of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Essene movement. I will not go through the details here, but you can see an abstract in my online piece "Enochians, Essenes, and Qumran Essenes", which also summarizes some criticisms of Boccaccini's position. And for some theological differences between "Zadokite" and "Enochic" Judaism, see my online paper "Jewish Pseudepigrapha and Christian Apocrypha: (How) Can We Tell Them Apart?". (Scroll down to the section on "The Problem of 'Common Judaism.'")

We also reviewed briefly the basic elements of the "Groningen hypothesis," which are also summarized in my earlier online lecture on the Pesharim.

Abstract of Jerusalem Archives essay

2005-05-04T12:22:00.000+01:00

Here is the abstract for the essay on Norman Golb's theory that the Dead Sea Scrolls are not Essene or sectarian, but rather consist of literary archives from Jerusalem:

This paper focuses on an alternative theory to that of the Qumran - Essene hypothesis of the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Instead it looks to the 'radical' theory of Norman Golb, who does not believe there was any connection between the Essenes and the scrolls. Rather Golb argues the scrolls originated in libraries of Jerusalem and were later hidden in the caves at Qumran for safekeeping during the first revolt. Golb fundamentally uses the archaeological evidence from the site of Qumran to refute the Essene theory, and poses instead a view that Khirbet Qumran was at this time a military fortress. In order to prove his own Jerusalem archives theory, Golb looks to the contents of the manuscripts found, number of scribal hands used, the absence of documentary records and autographs, and the location of where the scrolls were hidden. He concludes that the Essene theory is in part based on the order of the manuscripts' discovery, and thus had they been discovered in the reverse order then other scholars would have inevitably reached the same conclusion as him, of the scrolls originating in Jerusalem libraries. There is then a brief overview of other scholars' responses to and critiques of Golb's argument.

Laura Gibb

Abstract of Boccaccini Essay

2005-05-03T12:28:00.000+01:00

Here is the abstract for the essay on Boccaccini's Enochic-Essene hypothesis:

Gabriele Boccaccini's book Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways Between Qumran and Enochic Judaism is a re-examination of the Essene hypothesis and its validity in accounting for the Dead Sea Scrolls. Considering the Essene hypothesis to be broadly accurate, and fundamental disagreement fruitless, Boccaccini instead addresses the inadequacies of certain aspects. While he accepts the relationship between the scrolls and the ruins, the presence of a Qumran sectarian community and the correspondence between Essene beliefs and the scrolls, Boccaccini argues that ideas about the sect's origins and their religious context must be refined. This paper engages with Boccaccini's theory in order to outline the historical context of the Qumran community and to situate the group known as the "Essenes" in second temple Judaism. The evidence for a movement of "Enochians" will be examined and Boccaccini's proposed schism between Enochic factions will be considered as an explanation for the origins of the Qumran group. Finally, potential problems will be addressed in the light of scholarly objections to Boccaccini's Enochic/Essene hypothesis.

Kathleen Burt

Apologies for Qumranica's blogging hiatus. A cold kept me home and relatively unproductive over the long weekend.

Summary of Essenes Seminar

2005-04-28T15:01:00.000+01:00

Some of the points we discussed in the seminar on the Essene hypothesis included the following.

What does it tell us if we decide that the Qumran sectarians were indeed Essenes? Does it change how we read the Qumran texts? To what degree does it allow us to use the Essene material as background to the Scrolls and to what degree should we avoid harmonizing the classical sources with the Scroll? For an analogy, suppose that 2000 years in our future some history textbooks that tell about the British Labour Party during the 1940s happen to have survived, but not much else about this party. Then suppose a CD or hard drive is recovered that suddenly makes available numerous primary sources for Labor between 1997 and 2005. Would it be obvious that they even came from the same party? There would be some continuities but very many differences. And even if it were granted that they came from the same group, how legitimate (or even useful) would it be to try to harmonize the information about the Labour Party from either end of a half-century span? Likewise, even if we grant that the classical sources and the Scrolls deal with the Essenes (and we are willing to grant this), how much use is it to compare the Scrolls with material about the Essenes written by nonmembers who lived outside Palestine and one of whom was not even Jewish and to try to build up a comprehensive picture of the Essenes by combining and harmonizing our sources?

Although we did find the cumulative case for the Qumran sectarians being Essenes convincing, we also recognized that many of the alleged "parallels" between the two groups were poorly formulated or even vacuous. Parallels, like manuscripts, are weighed, not counted. What second temple Jewish group did not share mutual affection among its members, engage in purificatory ablutions, consider themselves temperate and faithful, practice piety, cherish justice and love and truth, and refrain from stealing? Is it really significant that both the Essenes and the Qumran sectarians forbade spitting in the group? Has anyone checked to see how other Jewish groups treated spitting? Are the British and Americans Essenes because they frown on spitting in public? Both rabbinic Havurot and Hellenistic voluntary societies engaged in common meals. And so on.

The overall reliability of the classical writers also must be evaluated, and here not all the indicators are encouraging. Consider Josephus' account of his experiences with the major Jewish sects, on the basis of which he advances himself as a reliable informant about all of them:

And when I was about sixteen years old, I had a mind to make trim of the several sects that were among us. These sects are three: - The first is that of the Pharisees, the second that Sadducees, and the third that of the Essens, as we have frequently told you; for I thought that by this means I might choose the best, if I were once acquainted with them all; so I contented myself with hard fare, and underwent great difficulties, and went through them all. Nor did I content myself with these trials only; but when I was informed that one, whose name was Banus, lived in the desert, and used no other clothing than grew upon trees, and had no other food than what grew of its own accord, and bathed himself in cold water frequently, both by night and by day, in order to preserve his chastity, I imitated him in those things, and continued with him three years. So when I had accomplished my desires, I returned back to the city, being now nineteen years old, and began to conduct myself according to the rules of the sect of the Pharisees, which is of kin to the sect of the Stoics, as the Greeks call them.

Life 2

It is difficult to escape the impression that Josephus is presenting us with a certain amount of, shall we say, Bullgeschichte. He tells us that between the ages of 16 and 19 he went through the initiation processes of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes (and recall that the Essene initiation alone took a couple of years), plus he spent three years in the wilderness with Banus. Something does not add up, and we must be cautious about taking his claims to firsthand knowledge of these groups at face value.

Note also that it is widely agreed that Josephus and Philo both independently drew upon a third written source. One problem is that, if Josephus had detailed first-hand knowledge of the Essenes, it is not very clear why he used a considerably older source for a good bit of his information. The other problem is that we know nothing about this common source and therefore have no idea how reliable it might have been.

The testimony of Pliny the Elder in Natural History 5.15.73 also presents us with some difficulties. He tells us that the Essenes had been at their site near the Dead Sea for "thousands of ages," which certainly does not apply to the Qumran sectarians, who probably were not there much before the beginning of the first century B.C.E. He also implies that they were still there when he wrote, but later comments show that he was writing after the destruction of Jerusalem. The site of Qumran had been destroyed by that time. Also, incidentally, he neglects ever to say that the Essenes were Jews. The problems are generally explained by supposing that Pliny was using a written source and that he himself was not acquainted with the Essenes and did not know what had happened to them after the time of his source. (He may have been indulging in a little gee-whiz exaggeration about a cool foreign cult as well.) But the point is that if he was writing about Qumran and the sectarians who lived there, we can show that his very short account contains mistakes. How many mistakes does it contain that we can't establish at this distance from the events?

Again, we found the case that Hayley made for an Essene connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls persuasive, but the above observations show us that we must be cautious about how we approach this connection.

Abstract of Essenes Essay

2005-04-27T20:41:00.000+01:00

Here is the abstract of the essay on the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls

This paper sets out to outline the Essene hypothesis. Accounts given by classical sources Josephus, Philo and Pliny will first be examined, giving a starting point for the discussion. From this, connections will then be drawn between the Qumran texts and these accounts. The Dead Sea Scroll texts that are used in the comparison are those that show a distinctive commonality in ideas and terminology: the Manual of Discipline/Community Rule (1QS), Hodayot (1QH^a), the Damascus Document (CD), the War Scroll (1QM) and the Pesharim. Although neither of the accounts given by the classical sources or the Qumran scrolls are close to illustrating the overall lifestyle and beliefs of their respective communitites, the information that is made available through them is helpful at least to formulate theories. Also included in the discussion is a summary of the major finds at the archaeological site of Qumran and their influence on the overall question. Much of what was found by the original excavation team at the ruins points directly to a link between the communities. There are also many problems that arise which must be considered. Varying opinions about the findings at the Qumran ruins, different interpretations of the texts, as well as important theological beliefs of the Qumran community not being mentioned in the classical sources, all are issues that have been raised in opposition to the theory. Issues involving the reliability of the classic authors must also be noted. The study will show that although there are discrepancies within the accounts, as well as continued controversy over the Qumran site, the connections that are shown between the Essenes and the Qumran community are remarkable.

Hayley Gravette

Summary of Seminar on Biblical Interpretation in the Damascus Document

2005-04-26T22:58:00.000+01:00

In the first part of the seminar we discussed the question of the intent of the authors of the sectarian texts, particularly the Damascus Document, as well as the attitude of the authors to authorial intent in scripture. The uses they put scripture to obviously were controlled by values different from ours. Their re-actualization of earlier texts would count as plagiarism to us, yet we find that scripture itself uses earlier scripture in much the same way that the sectarian authors use it.

In what sense did the sectarian authors see authorial intent as important? They seemed to think of the primary author of scripture as God. The Pesher to Habakkuk (col. 7) even says that God made known mysteries of the book of Habakkuk to the Teacher of Righteousness which Habakkuk himself did not know. (Similar sentiments are found in the New Testament in 1 Peter 1:10-12.) Sometimes the prophets are taken to understand their own oracles, but sometimes not. It looks as though the sectarians understood scripture on at least three levels. (1) The simple straightforward level involving basic exegesis; (2) an esoteric sense that had to be specially revealed, as in when the Teacher of Righteousness found eschatological revelations in the oracles of Habakkuk; and (3) not so much a sense as a habit: they knew the scriptures so well that the language of them infused their thought and their writing (and very likely their speech to one another). Even today if you listen when people who have a very conservative ideology of scriptural inspiration have conversations with each other -- especially about religious matters -- their speech tends to be full of biblical wording and phrases, often with attention to the context of the passages alluded to, but often ignoring it at well and just using the scriptural expressions without too much though about what the passages they came from say. Much the same sort of thought pattern seems to be at work frequently in the Qumran texts. The Hebrew echoes biblical language without necessarily trying to give an exegesis of a given passage.

Given that it was unusual to read silently in antiquity, we can presume that the sectarian texts were intended to be read aloud, whether communally or in private study. They also assume a good deal of sophistication in the readers and hearers. They must have been educated people who knew the scriptures cold and could pick up on the subtle allusions that permeate the texts. The basic points of the texts are often straightforward, but the pattern of allusions and literature structures that get us there can be complex.

I hesitate to follow Daniel in calling what he does in this essay "intertextual" study. The term is sometimes used to mean exploring how one text influenced another, as here, but strictly speaking, the main point of intertextuality is that the meaning of a text arises not (or not only) in the text itself, but in the text as a web of other texts. Indeed, all texts are potentially in conversation with all other texts, and their meaning changes as the texts that contribute to the conversation changes. This brings us to the edge of the deep waters of postmodern literary criticism, but perhaps that is a topic for another seminar on another day.

We also discussed Daniel's proposal that the Damascus Document shows a "postbiblical" type of inspiration in which the revelation is presented as the unveiling of the true esoteric meaning of the text rather than as a new oracle in itself. We agreed that this idea has a good bit of traction, although it had to be phrased carefully. Not all of the Qumran nonbiblical texts presented revelations this way. On the one hand, The Temple Scroll, for example, presents its esoteric revelation of the meaning of the Pentateuch as an unmediated revelation from the mouth of God (i.e., in the first-person singular). On the other, there may be biblical texts that come close to the proposed "postbiblical" inspiration. (The reinterpretation of Jeremiah in Daniel chapter 9 comes to mind, although this is also presented as an angelic revelation. That said, we don't know in what context the Teacher of Righteousness experienced his revelations. Can we exclude angelic visitations for him, given how little we know about him?) Generally when biblical prophetic oracles reuse earlier material (such as Ezekiel's reuse of Zephaniah discussed in Daniel's essay), the new product is presented as a new oracle, not an interpretation of an older text. But the case of 1-2 Chronicles, which rewrites some of the Pentateuch and most of Samuel and Kings without presenting itself as a new revelation or oracle, is perhaps more difficult to classify.

NOTE: Due to more technical difficulties we have not yet been able to post the abstract for the other essay for today. I hope we shall be able to do so tomorrow.

UPDATE (27 April): Daniel Driver comments on the seminar.

Essay Abstract: Biblical Interpretation in the Damascus Document

2005-04-25T09:51:00.000+01:00

Biblical Interpretation in the "House of Torah": Scripture in CD 1.1-2.1

My contention is that the Damascus Document -- in particular the admonition, with special attention on 1.1-2.1 -- has a complex relationship to its scriptural tradition, but that while it takes many (and perhaps most) of its interpretive cues from this tradition, its exegesis is inherently post-biblical, and distinctively sectarian. In other words, CD mobilizes scripture to address its present much as the Hebrew Bible does, but its methods depart from that tradition in two ways. In the first section, I demonstrate CD 1.1-2.1's densely allusive composition, and relate this to intertextuality in the Bible -- or in Michael Fishbane's term, inner-biblical exegesis. Next, I characterize CD's hermeneutic, as inspired esoteric interpretation. Finally, I discuss three instances of distinctively sectarian interpretation in CD's admonition.

Daniel R. Driver

In this case I have been scooped by Daniel himself. On his own blog, Figured Out, he not only posted the abstract over the weekend, he also made the entire essay available online in a PDF file.

Summary of Babatha Archive Seminar

2005-04-22T12:18:00.000+01:00

We opened by asking to what degree we can generalize about second-century Jewish women from what we know about Babatha. She herself was from the upper stratum and was well off; she was wealthy and owned property. Therefore, she may give us only limited insight into other and economic and social levels. Nevertheless, the Ketubba (marriage contract) and the divorce papers would have been standard templates for all Jewish women.

We noted that Babatha had family connections with the leaders of the Bar Kokhba revolt, which is usually given as the reason for her ending up in the Cave of the Letters. But she also had property in Ein Gedi, so she may have been motivated to keep close in order to keep an eye on it.

We asked if Salome Komais and Yeshua son of Menahem (pap. Yadin 37) had any kind of official relationship while they were cohabiting before they got married. Such indicators as we have point to the cohabitation being an entirely informal arrangement, but this is debated and we do not have enough information to be entirely sure.

We also discussed briefly how the lots of women in the Qumran texts compared to that of women in the Babatha archive (the latter of which deals with a number of women, not just Babatha). There was less overlap than we would have liked to find in the two corpora, but we did come up with a number of points of comparison.

This was now the third hour of straight seminar on Tuesday and fatigue was setting in for all of us. Seminar summarizing fatigue has also set in for me, so I will conclude this summary here.

Summary of "Women in the Dead Sea Scrolls" Seminar

2005-04-21T13:33:00.000+01:00

We touched on the evidence of the Qumran cemetery first. The very interesting question was raised as to whether the excavated graves were a representative sampling from the site as a whole (albeit a small one)? The general memory during the seminar was the sampling was pretty representative, and a look at relevant maps and such afterward confirms this. See especially the new survey published by Broshi, Eshel, Freund, and Schultz: "New Data on the Cemetery East of Khirbet Qumran," DSD 9.2 (2002): 135-65.

We then moved to the texts and began by discussing the androcentric nature of the Hebrew language. The, if you will, default gender in Hebrew is male and this comes through particularly with plural nouns, adjectives, and verbal forms. Mixed groups of men and women are addressed or referred to using masculine plural grammatical forms. You can have a hundred women and one man, and you would still use the masculine plural forms. Maxine Grossman has explored the implications of this grammatical androcentrism in her work. Suffice to say that this feature sometimes leaves us in the dark as to whether given laws, etc. are being applied to an all-male group or to a group of mixed gender.

We talked briefly about whether it might be possible to discern an evolution over time in the role of women in the sect. Paleography is too blunt a tool to allow us to date the composition of individual works in relation to one another with much confidence, but there are one or two other clues to ponder. For example, women are mentioned in 1QSa (the "Messianic Rule" or "Rule of the Congregation") with a fairly substantial social role. This may be contrasted with the complete lack of explicit mention of them in the Community Rule. It may be that the eschatological community described in 1QSa was seen as having a greater role for women than the current community in 1QS. Such questions are worth asking, although any answers are speculative.

Then we looked at three especially interesting and, typically, especially difficult Scroll passages that deal or may deal with women. In her essay, Lindsey noted that there is an important damaged spot in 1QSa 9-11 which can be read in two ways. Referring to when a man can get married, it can be read either "And he shall not draw [near to] a woman to know her carnally unless he is fully twenty years old when *he* knows good or evil" or "And he shall not draw [near to] a woman to know her carnally unless he is fully twenty years old when *she* knows good or evil." The word in question is a damaged pronominal suffix that can be restored either as a waw ("he") or a he ("she"). The first reading is interested only in the responsibility level of the man, whereas the second addresses the issue for both. I have to say, however, that the first looks more likely to me to be right. The passage flows well if we take it to say that the man is twenty years old and therefore has reached an age of accountability. But I'm not quite sure why his age would be an issue in relation to when his bride has reached the age of accountability.

The second and third passages are in 4Q502, which I have interpreted as a wedding ceremony, following Baillet in DJD 7, but others have taken as a "golden age" ritual (i.e., involving retired persons) or a New Year's rite. For our purposes the overall interpretation does not matter. In two places Baillet found mention of "female elders," women with an official role of elder. I followed him in my commentary, with some reservations. Having continued to think about the passages, I have more reservations still. The Hebrew word for "elder" (ZQN), can mean simply "old man" or it can have an official sense of "elder," entirely according to context. The female form of the word (ZQNH) is only used in the Bible (and, I believe, in the rabbinic literature) to mean "old woman," but at least theoretically it could be used in an official sense as well. Both passages in 4Q502 involve the mention of (masculine plural) ZQNYM followed by the same word, but with the ending broken away. Baillet wanted to fill in the words with the feminine plural (ZQNWT), but the last two letters do not survive on the papyrus.

4Q502 frag. 19.2 probably should be restored as ZQNYM WZQ[NWT], because the word pair appears in a context that lists other male-female pairs (youths and virgins, young men and young women). But the problem is that the context therefore also makes it more likely that the word pair means "old men and old women" rather than "male and female elders." There is no clear reason to give the phrase an official capacity.

4Q502 frag 24.4 does use the words in an official capacity. We are told of an unidentifiable woman (the context is badly broken) that "she stands in a council of ZQNY[M] ZQ[ ..." (The letters of the second word are badly damaged but the readings look reasonably likely. We could restore the last word as ZQ[NWT] and translate as "elder m[en] (and) eld[er women]." But if this is correct, it is odd that there does not seem to be a conjunction waw, "and," between them. Given the broken context, I would not like to rule out the possibility that a full stop was intended after ZQNY[M] and the next word began a new sentence, in which case it too could have been ZQ[NYM], "elder men."

In sum, it is possible that women acted as "elders" in whatever rite 4Q502 described, but this is by no means certain.

Summary of Paul Seminar

2005-04-20T09:38:00.000+01:00

The first question we considered was the degree to which the doctrine of justification by faith in the sectarian scrolls was different from Paul's version of the same doctrine. They agree that humanity is fallible and imperfect and therefore that following the Law is not in itself enough. Salvation comes through faith, but faith for Paul has to be in Jesus and Jesus is the center of his whole system of salvation, whereas no messianic figure in the Scrolls (and as we've seen there are a number of such figures) has any connection with justification by faith. The Scrolls do regard the Law as the will of God which must be followed and which is of great worth in and of itself. I am not a specialist in Paul and don't pretend to understand all the nuances and developments of his views, but it seems pretty clear that Paul regarded the Law as a means to the end of showing sinful humanity their sin so that they would be prepared to take the salvation of Christ when it was offered.

We talked briefly about the relationship of Paul's doctrine of predestination in comparison to the Calvinist doctrine, but none of us knew enough about Calvinism to get very far with the discussion. Then we observed that a difference between the Pauline literature and the Scrolls was that the Pauline literature had been the subject of devotion and study for many centuries and so had been systematized into a theology that may have been foreign to the original nature of the letters and that for our purposes acted as a varnish that needs to be stripped from our exegesis of Paul before we can understand him on his own terms. The situation is rather different from the Scrolls, which became available less than 60 years ago and which do not form a canon that provides theology for a particular religious tradition (even though scholars must be vigilant not to let particular theories about their history settle into a varnish over our exegesis).

We also discussed some specific parallels between Paul and the Scrolls. One of the most interesting is the passage on being "unequally yoked" with unbelievers in 2 Cor 6:14-7:1. This has an especially high density of connections with Qumran sectarian theology, including references to Belial ("Beliar"), the community as Temple of God, the sense that believers should separate themselves from a godless environment, light-darkness dualism, etc. It also is widely agreed to be an interpolation or an errant fragment incorporated into 2 Corinthians (which itself is widely regarded as a collection of Pauline fragments) and not actually by Paul. The parallels to Qumran theology are interesting and it is not impossible that the 2 Cor fragment was written, say, by a convert from that group.

We talked also about how to evaluate what the parallels mean, and I took the opportunity again to hawk my online essay on "The Perils of Parallels" (which I have done more work on over the years and which I do mean to pull together into a proper article one day). Some thoughts I applied today from that piece and subsequent research on it include the following. To evaluate parallels one needs to ask what kind they are: verbal parallels (whether technical terminology [e.g., sons of light, new covenant, works of the Law], direct quotations, etc.) or conceptual parallels (e.g., the community as temple), etc. We need categories to evaluate them as well. A parallel may be a borrowing (in which case one needs to ask who borrowed from whom -- often the answer isn't obvious). It is very difficult to prove direct influence of one text upon another. Usually this requires either direct quotations or a substantial pattern of thematic or conceptual parallels (and in both cases, again, one has to establish the direction of borrowing). In general, patterns of parallels are more important than individual parallels. Indirect influence is also possible: each may borrow independently from a third source (as Matthew and Luke borrow independently from Mark). Likewise, parallels may arise independently from things like scriptural exegesis (both Paul and the sectarians may have independently latched onto the "new covenant" of Jeremiah 31:31-34 for their own purposes). Parallels that are overly general (e.g., light-darkness dualism) run the danger of being vacuous. Finally, it is important to take into account both similarities and differences when evaluating parallels. For example, Timothy Lim has shown that the use of "new covenant" by the sectarians is quite different from Paul's use of the same term. For Paul it is a new dispensation with Christ at its core, whereas for the sectarians the new covenant is a renewed version the old one (Lim, "The Qumran Scrolls and Paul in Historical Context," 141-42).

What then is the relationship of Paul to the Qumran sectarian literature? I would not rule out the possibility that he was acquainted with Qumran sectarians (or "Essenes"). He lived at the right time and seems to have spent time in Palestine when he could have encountered them. But by the same token, I do not see compelling evidence that the parallels between them arise from more than a shared cultural matrix of first-century Judaism.

Abstract on Women in the Dead Sea Scrolls

2005-04-19T09:47:00.000+01:00

Here is the abstract for the essay for today's seminar on women in the Dead Sea Scrolls:

This paper addresses the issue of women in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It does so by taking a primarily-text based approach, believing that it is mainly though the texts themselves that we will discover the people who wrote and used them. Accordingly, the role played by women in the sect is examined through three texts, the Damascus Document, the Rule of the Congregation (1QSa), and a text depicting a Wedding Ceremony (4Q502). In doing this, conclusions have been drawn about how these relate to one anther and to the wider corpus of texts found at Qumran. This essay also examines the impact that excavation of the cemetery at the Qumran site has had on the topic of women, and how this debate has been changed by recent reanalysis of some of the remains from the site. The inconclusive nature of these excavations is highlighted and questions asked as to what we can really learn from them. Finally, the topic of marriage and celibacy is addressed, and the approach of using other sources questioned.

Lyndsey McLean

Paul Abstract

2005-04-19T09:43:00.000+01:00

Here is the abstract for the essay on the Apostle Paul and the Dead Sea Scrolls, the seminar rescheduled for today:

Before the fall of the Jewish Temple in 70 C.E., Judaism was a widespread and diversified religious movement. It is widely accepted that in first century Palestine Judaism was full of sectarian elements, among which were the Essenes, Sadducees and of course, Pharisees. The apostle Paul, who was born around the time of Jesus and died around 65 C.E., helped define Christianity as we know it today. Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls are thought to have been written around the same time as Paul,s letters. This being the case, it is the purpose of this paper to trace the similarities between Paul's writing and theology and that which is espoused in the scrolls. If we accept the Essene hypothesis we can go one step further to venture the possibility that Paul had contact with this sectarian group or if nothing else, was in some way informed by their theology. While there remains no incontrovertible evidence to prove that Paul borrowed ideas or phrases from the scrolls, our analysis will show that the parallels between the two sets of writings are nonetheless striking

Allison Smith

Bar Kokhba-Era Texts Abstract

2005-04-18T14:09:00.000+01:00

Here is the abstract for the essay on the Judean Desert texts from the Bar Kokhba era. The focus of the essay is the Babatha archive.

The discovery of Babatha's archive inside the Cave of Letters by Yigael Yadin and his team of explorers in January of 1961 was a major breakthrough in the study of women's lives during the early second century C.E. Babatha, a wealthy Jewish woman living in the Dead Sea town of Mahoza, kept a meticulous set of records concerning her two late husbands, her son, her property, and the three different lawsuits involving her. Arguably the most important document in the cache was her Ketubba, or marriage contract, which details the obligations of the bridegroom to the bride during this time, and also protects the wife against future monetary concerns. The evidence concerning Babatha's daughter-in-law Shelamzion, whose Ketubba as well as a possible divorce document are included within the archive, further details the legal standing of women in this time. Briefly mentioned is Julia Crispina, possibly the last Jewish princess in Israel before the Bar Kokhba revolt, whose role in the Roman court demonstrates a different side of a woman's status in court. The powers of women and their most pressing concerns are what Babatha's archive reveals, and their continued study will vastly aid scholars in understanding the struggles in the daily lives of these women.

Erica Lehneis

Summary of Seminar on the Temple Scroll

2005-04-15T09:49:00.000+01:00

We looked briefly at Stegemann's argument that the Temple Scroll was unlikely to be a sectarian document on the grounds that there are so few copies (two from Cave 11 and perhaps one from Cave 4). It seems like a foundational document for someone but probably not the people who preserved it for us.

Then we discussed the potential significance of the unusual (I believe unique) presentation of the Temple Scroll in the first person singular with God as speaker. It's not entirely clear what this was supposed to prove, but it certainly seems to be emphasizing the authority of the traditions in the Temple Scroll, notably the Temple described therein, which was radically different from the Temple that actually stood on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Whether this was thought of as legitimizing rejected traditions or adding a layer of tradition over the Pentateuch to make it relevant again (as with Deuteronomy for the Tetrateuch) or something else is open to debate. The Temple of the Temple Scroll is not eschatological. (We know this because in column 29 it seems to be distinguished from a future Temple that God will create at the end time.) Therefore it is probably best to regard the Temple Scroll as a utopian document, one that intended its program for real life, even though there was no real chance of it being implemented.

We talked about several specific points in the essay which we needn't go over here. But one thing we did go over that is worth mentioning, is some of the halakhic detail that is important for Schiffman's and Baumgarten's Sadducean origin hypothesis. First, let me note something important about halakhic texts: the thing that makes them so difficult is that they represent debates about fine details between people who agreed on nearly everything. These people took the details on which they disagreed very seriously indeed, but in order to make any sense of the texts you have to master the much larger areas of agreement that the writers take for granted. As an example of this sort of problem we discussed at length the basic concepts behind the issue of Tevel Yom.

I don't have the energy here to go through all the details. Briefly, in order to produce the ashes of the red heifer (Numbers 19), which is the only means of purifying people from "corpse impurity" (ritual defilement by touching a dead body), a ritually pure priest must slaughter the heifer outside the camp and burn it to ashes. There are a number of situations in the laws Pentateuch in which if one becomes ritually impure, one must go through an immersion ritual and then be considered pure again when the sun goes down. This left a certain ambiguity in the system: what is the state of people between immersion (tevel) and the end of the day (yom) when the sun goes down? Are they still fully defiled (in which case what was the point of the immersion)? Are they now purified (in which case why are they "unclean until evening")? Or are they something in between -- purified for some purposes and still impure for others? According to the Mishnah the Sadducees took the strictest interpretation and considered them still impure for all purposes, but the Pharisees thought their status was in between and they were ritually pure for some purposes, including a priest carrying out the rite of the red heifer.

The interesting thing is that according to the Temple Scroll, the Tevel Yom is considered strictly impure, along the lines of the Sadducean view (see 45.7-12 [sexual intercourse]; 49.19-21 [corpse impurity]; and 51.4-5 [contact with creeping animals]). 4QMMT also has the same view. In a number of other cases (although not unambiguously in all such cases) the Temple Scroll and 4QMMT take positions equivalent to those attributed to the Sadducees in the Mishnah. These include (possibly) the question of whether animal bones are unclean (all agreed that human bones were) and whether impurity could travel upstream when liquid was being poured from a pure vessel into an impure one. This is the basis for the Sadducean origin hypothesis.

UPDATE: I spoke imprecisely above. Schiffman is the one who promotes the Sadducean origin hypothesis. He does so on the basis, in part, of parallels between Sadducean and Qumran halakhah pointed out by Baumgarten, but Baumgarten himself does not promote this theory.

Lecture on the Archaeology of Qumran

2005-04-14T11:21:00.000+01:00

The Baptist Press News reports the following:

Dead Sea Scrolls still kindle archaeological debate, Ortiz says
Apr 13, 2005
By Michael McCormack

MOBILE, Ala. (BP)--The 1948 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls proved to be the greatest archaeological find of the 20th century. But more than 50 years after their discovery, many questions remain as to who wrote them and who actually lived at the Dead Sea community of Qumran where they were discovered.

Steven Ortiz, associate professor of biblical archaeology and director of the Center for Archaeological Research at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, addressed some of these questions, as part of the Gulf Coast Exploreum’s Dead Sea Scrolls lecture series in Mobile, Ala ...

Primarily he surveys the Essene hypothesis, held by Magness and many others, and the "manor house" hypothesis recently defended by Hirschfeld. He also discusses the primitive archaeological techniques available to De Vaux when he excavated Qumran.

Temple Scroll Abstract

2005-04-14T11:12:00.000+01:00

Here the abstract of the essay on the Temple Scroll, the seminar for which was held on Tuesday:

In 1967, Yigael Yadin acquired the Temple scroll, the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scroll is comprised of four parts; plans for a new Temple, purity regulations, a festival calendar, and a Deuteronomic paraphrase of the law of the king. As the first editor of the text, Yadin posed the initial conclusions from the document. He claimed it to be of Essene origin, an item of additional Torah, a sectarian text and dated the Scroll to the second half of the second century BCE. All of these statements have been heavily disputed, revealing much about the people who wrote the Temple Scroll, and the political atmosphere of the Second Temple Period. Unique in its genre, and illuminating in its proclamations, the scroll has been dubbed by scholars, such as Hartmut Stegemann, to be the most important of the preserved Dead Sea Scrolls. This paper aims to detail some of the main issues that have arisen since the Scroll's publication and determine why it is considered so important.

Leon Rogers

Class Update

2005-04-13T20:53:00.000+01:00

Our seminar on the Apostle Paul has been rescheduled for next Tuesday, due to student illness. And due to a computer crash, the abstract for the Temple Scroll essay has not yet reached me. Please bear with us as we cope with these circumstances beyond our control.

High Point Exhibit Ends

2005-04-13T00:07:00.000+01:00

The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at High Point, North Carolina, did very well during its stay:

Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit ends in High Point with heavy attendance

Associated Press

HIGH POINT, N.C. - An exhibit featuring fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls ended its 87-day stay here on Sunday with significant attendance and an economic impact of at least $3.6 million, officials said.

The 54,206 visitors and their "conservative economic impact" on High Point's economy were second only to the twice-a-year International Home Furnishings Market held in High Point, said Charlotte Young, president of High Point Convention & Visitors Bureau.

[...]

Dead Sea Scrolls Wedding Update

2005-04-13T00:06:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Mary Grant and Joseph Bland, who exchanged wedding vows in front of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the exhibit at the Exploreum in Mobile Alabama on Saturday.

Summary of Seminar on Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls

2005-04-12T22:42:00.000+01:00

We were tempted at the beginning of the seminar to consider whether John the Baptist was an Essene, but that's another seminar (which this course has considered in past years and may consider again some day), so we resisted temptation and stuck to Qumran messianism and Jesus.

One slightly tangential question that we talked about for a while was whether the traditions about the priestly Messiah (usually alongside the Davidic Messiah or Messiah of Israel) reflected in some way the social situation of the Qumran sect. 1Q28 (the Messianic Rule or Rule of the Congregation) could be used to make a plausible case along these lines. It pictures the Yahad in the "last days," evidently the eschaton, and describes an assembly in which a priest presides over the meal with precedence even over the Messiah of Israel. Was this the ideological innovation of the priestly-centered sectarians? Maybe.

We moved on then to discuss how the Jesus tradition in the New Testament picks up many of the same "messianic" traditions as those found in the Scrolls. Jesus is the Davidic Messiah and so picks up on the royal tradition. Jesus is celestial high priest in Hebrews. Moreover, the writer of Hebrews seems to be saying that it is Jesus rather than Melchizedek who is celestial high priest. This seems rather an odd thing to make an issue of until one reads 11Q13 (11QMelchizedek) and perhaps the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (see next paragraph) and realizes that Hebrews is reacting something like the ideas found in them. The tradition of the warrior Messiah (and Melchizedek as warrior angel) is also paralleled by Jesus, especially in Revelation 19, where he functions as the divine warrior. We considered whether the Gospels were inverting the warrior tradition indirectly by presenting Jesus as the suffering servant rather than the warrior Messiah, but we could not come up with specific passages in support of this (the closest we came was John 6:14-15, which really isn't quite the same thing). We also found ourselves tempted to take up Jesus as the Danielic and Enochic Son of Man, but we resisted this as well.

We considered the challenge of finding adequate terminology for talking about figures like the Davidic and Aaronic Messiahs, Melchizedek, and the speaker of the Self-Glorification Hymn at Qumran (and also the Son of Man elsewhere. "Messiah doesn't do as a general term, since not all of them are "anointed." Two useful terms that specialists settled on in the 1980s and 1990s are "eschatological redeemer," which applies to such figures who are active at the time of the end, and the still more general "divine mediator figure," which applies to figures who are also active in the past or present. I have a big website devoted to Divine Mediator Figures in the Biblical World, which arose from a course I taught on the subject in 1998, followed by a conference here at St. Andrews on the origins of the worship of Jesus. There I lay out a methodology and typology for talking about such mediator figures (it was later published in expanded form in the conference volume) and apply it in a very preliminary way to the figures of Enoch (also covered in the same article) and Melchizedek. I returned to Melchizedek in my 2001 conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls and my article on him was published in that conference volume. Some of my preliminary thoughts about Jesus and Melchizedek are given in the two Melchizedek links above.

Jesus Abstract

2005-04-11T14:19:00.000+01:00

Here is the abstract for tomorrow's seminar on the origins of the worship of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls:

The Dead Sea Scrolls appear to put forward the evidence for an evolution in messianic thought. In comparison with the Hebrew Bible messianic figures have developed in the way they are eschatological and divine. The hope of a Davidic Messiah moved towards the expectation of a divine warrior to tackle Israel’s enemies. There are parallels with the divine figures described in the scrolls and the way Jesus was understood as divine, particularly the use of titles and alluded Old Testament texts. But there is by no means any direct links and there are also disagreements in thought. But the scrolls may provide an understanding of messianic hope in the 1st Century CE among Jews. As these texts are of the Jesus era they may clarify how Jesus came to worshipped as a divine being.

Charles Goodwin

Better This Than Parachuting ...

2005-04-09T10:16:00.000+01:00

Union Springs couple plan vows before Dead Sea Scrolls

GARRY MITCHELL

Associated Press

MOBILE, Ala. - A Union Springs couple will get married Saturday before the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, inspired by its biblical history and a "spirit-led" awakening.

Retired aerospace worker Phillip B. Bland, 62, said he awoke about 3 a.m. Monday when it "entered my heart" to hold the ceremony at the popular Scrolls exhibit at the Gulf Coast Exploreum in Mobile.

Bland said he got up and called fiancee Mary Boutwell Grant of Eufaula and she agreed with the setting.

[...]

I wonder if they'll use 4Q502 for the ceremony.

Temple Scroll on Display in Germany

2005-04-09T09:57:00.000+01:00

Ha'aretz has an article on the "The New Hebrew. One Hundred Years of Art in Israel" exhibition in Germany:

Tumarkin is not the only one missing from the list
By Dana Gilerman

The German government has so far invested $3 million in the "The New Hebrew. One Hundred Years of Art in Israel," an exhibition to open in Berlin in mid-May. The exhibition will be held at the Martin Gropius-Bau museum, one of Germany's important exhibition sites, as one of the events marking 40 years since the establishment of diplomatic ties between Israel and Germany. Curator Dorit Levita, who lives in Berlin, and Yigal Zalmona, the Israeli Museum's chief curator, are working together on the exhibition.

The exhibition will feature the works of 103 Israeli artists from the early days of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design to the present. Perhaps this is why, even before the opening of the exhibition, criticism of the choice of artists is already being voiced, mainly regarding those who were not included.

"The list is outrageous," says Meir Loushy of the Loushy Gallery in Tel Aviv. "If this were a conceptual exhibition, I would have no problem with it, but this is a subject exhibition that presumes to present 100 years of Israeli art. It is unacceptable that artists such as Erez Israeli and Michal Shamir are represented, while important artists such as Yigal Tumarkin, or Philip Rantzer and Uri Katzenstein, two artists who represented Israel at the Venice Biennale, are not. It is unacceptable that someone who has been living in exile in Germany for 30 years and is unaware of what is happening here, should be curating an exhibition of this scope."

I'm afraid I know nothing about modern Israeli art and I have no idea if the criticisms of the exhibit are fair. But the following bit, far down in the article, caught my eye:

Another unusual object on display will be the Temple Scroll, written, according to archaeologists, by the Essenes, a Jewish sect that lived in the Judean desert over 2,000 years ago. The scroll was found in the Qumran Caves and describes the Temple in Jerusalem.

"The scroll represents a type of utopia," says Levita, "which is why I included it in the exhibition. Ever since the scroll was brought to Israel, after the 1967 Six-Day War, the scroll has provided secular Jews with a kind of legitimization of Israel's hold on that place."

Actually the scroll wasn't exactly "brought to Israel." It was found at Qumran and the antiquities dealer Kando had it hidden in his house in East Jerusalem until Yadin recovered it during the Six-Day War. (Kando was paid $105,000 for it.)

The Temple Scroll (11Q19) is the longest and perhaps the best-preserved of the Dead Sea Scrolls and I was quite surprised to hear that it had been let out of the country, let alone let out for an essentially unrelated exhibition. At first I wondered if it might not just be a facsimile, but according to this press release and this article in ArtDaily.com it's an actual scroll -- given its size, apparently 11Q19. That's quite a coup for the Martin Gropius-Bau museum. The latter article has the following additional information:

The Temple Scroll, selected from among the Qumran scrolls found in caves near the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956, is presented along with other major archaeological finds as an introduction to the exhibition. Serving as a bridge to the Jewish past, this archaeology links Biblical forefathers and modern-day Israelis. The Dead Sea Scrolls and their discovery-an event of global significance at the time-had a major impact on the fashioning of new Israeli culture, giving legitimacy to its identity and generating a sense of continuity from ancient to modern times. A three-meter section of the Temple Scroll is currently undergoing restoration for the exhibition, where it will be shown in Europe for the first time.

Mobile Exhibition Extended

2005-04-09T09:04:00.000+01:00

I've fallen behind on Dead Sea Scrolls news this week. Here's one item:

Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit extended

MOBILE (AP) — The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit will remain in Mobile for an additional two weeks, Gulf Coast officials said, citing great demand. The display, originally set to wrap up April 24, will now close May 8.

[...]

That's worth 40,000 more tickets for the Exploreum.

Guest Lecture Posted

2005-04-07T10:04:00.000+01:00

I am happy to announce that a guest lecture by Dr. Maxine Grossman of the University of Maryland has been posted on the St. Andrews Dead Sea Scrolls Website.

From Text to History:
Some Methodological Observations

This lecture is a summary, with further reflections, of her book Reading for History in the Damascus Document: A Methodological Study. Dr. Grossman is known for her cutting-edge work on postmodern literary criticism of the Dead Sea Scrolls and on the Dead Sea Scrolls in the media. She has recently co-edited a volume of the journal Dead Sea Discoveries devoted to the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Popular Imagination.

From the Mafia to the Dead Sea Scrolls

2005-04-01T00:25:00.000+01:00

Quite a story:

Ex-mobster's life changed by prison

4-1-05

By Bob Burchette Staff Writer
[Greensboro] News & Record

HIGH POINT -- Thom Miller, his dark hair slicked back in a ponytail and his body showing the scars of serious fisticuffs and at least three bullet wounds, could easily be a Sopranos character.

Indeed, he says he was a strong-armed enforcer for the Mafia in Cleveland for several years. "There was never a time when I thought of any of it as being glamorous. It was never like you see in the movies,'' Miller said.

[...]

Miller was once housed with death-row inmates while serving a sentence for stabbing a man in the heart. Today, he is a part of the 10-person team that is putting on the "Dead Sea Scrolls to The Bible in America" exhibit at Providence Place. The exhibit ends April 10. Until then, Miller will be assisting with the exhibit and also ministering at places outside the exhibit hall.

[...]

A Remarkable Number of Errors

2005-03-31T14:44:00.000+01:00

The Outer Banks Sentinel has an article by someone names Lee Adams on "The Dead Sea Scrolls to the Bible in America" exhibition -- an article that has a remarkable number of errors and dubious statements. I seem to find more with each reading, but the ones I've found up to now are noted below, along with one or two other comments.

Leading the crowd was Judas, one of His own friends, followed by officials of the chief priests of the Pharisees and a detachment of Roman soldiers.

That's "officials of the chief priests and of the Pharisees" (John 18:2). The Pharisees did not have chief priests.

The display starts with a clay tablet from around 3000 B.C. On the tablet, Mesopotamian pictography records the sale of nine pigs and references the name of Erech, son of Nimrod, persons mentioned in the Book of Genesis.

The clay tablet doesn't mention an Erech son of Nimrod, who is a strictly biblical legend. I suspect this is a tablet that comes from ancient Uruk -- a city whose name is the origin of biblical Erech.

Curator Joel Lampe tells a group of visitors that piecing together the fragments of the scrolls is like taking a large bowl of different flavors of potato chips, crunching them into tiny bits, throwing them into the air and trying to put them back together and into their proper bags.

This isn't bad and is rather like my analogy involving a thousand jigsaw puzzles. But to make Lampe's version work, you have to add that while your back was turned the dog got into the bowl and ate most of the potato chips.

From about 250 B.C. until 68 A.D., a group of the Jewish community lived at Qumran, devoting their lives to the study and preservation of the ancient scriptures. These Old Testament Scriptures were carefully written in Hebrew, preserved on large scrolls and set up on boards that spanned the cave walls like shelves.

I think someone must have told the author that the group was at Qumran from the middle of the second century B.C. and this became transmogrified into 250 B.C. until A.D. 68 (not 68 A.D.). The standard master narrative places the founding of the group around this time (c. 150 B.C.E.), even though the archaeological evidence at Qumran doesn't point clearly to occupation of the site before about 100 B.C.E.

I think there is some evidence for shelves in Cave 4 but I'm not sure of the details.

The Roman Empire looked upon this group with disdain, for this community was part of a two-fold problem for the Romans. In what is known as the Jewish Rebellion, the Jews refused to conform and adapt to Roman principles. Also, during this time, the Christian Church was growing exponentially due to the works of the Apostles Peter and Paul who carried out the work of Christ after His death on the cross.

We don't know how the Romans regarded this group, although given the attitude of the sectarians toward the Romans (the "Kittim"), I doubt there was any love lost between them. I think what the author is trying to say is that in the first century C.E. Jews were causing the Romans quite a bit of trouble, both through the Jewish Revolt and with the Jesus sect, and so the Romans probably didn't like the sectarians much either. But it's not phrased very clearly and it sounds as though the Maccabean revolt is getting mixed in there too. (The Maccabean revolt of 167-165 B.C.E. was about Jews refusing to conform to Hellenistic customs whereas the Jewish Revolt of 68-70 C.E. was a uprising against Roman occupation which was set off by a particular incident in Caesarea.)

Because of the rebellious beliefs of these two groups, the Romans set out on a mission to kill all believers and destroy all Scriptural evidence.

The Romans put down the Jewish revolt, but this had nothing to do with the Jesus sect, which was another irritation entirely. They did not set out to "kill all believers" but rather to put down the revolt. They did not set out to "destroy all Scriptural evidence." After the revolt the Jewish historian Josephus set himself up in Rome and wrote works on Jewish history with the approval of the Roman authorities.

The Roman army attacked Qumran, killing most of its inhabitants, and went into the caves where they swung their swords above their heads, destroying hundreds of years of ancient works rolled onto scrolls of sheepskin and put into clay pots. The pieces were left scattered about. Like crushed potato chips.

A small group escaped, finding their way to Masada, an old palace of King Herod. There, they continued their work until the Roman army once again surrounded them.

It appears that the Romans did indeed destroy the site. But it is sheer speculation to say that some of the sectarians escaped and went to Masada. This idea is based on the discovery of a copy of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice at Masada and the assumption that it is a sectarian text. If it is, the speculation may be right, but it's quite debatable whether the SOSS is sectarian and, even if it is, it's unlikely that all the sectarians lived at Qumran.

This time it was the 10th Roman Legion, of whom Titus and his successors were given the task of converting or killing these rebels. Not willing to relent, the men of Masada drew their swords, killed their wives and children, then turned the swords on themselves, committing mass suicide in numbers some believe approach 900.

The Romans had no interest in converting anyone to anything. They wanted to put down the revolt.

The story of the mass suicide on Masada is Josephus' version of what happened, but there's debate about how much he's touched it up to make a good story.

The discovery of these lost writings puts years of debate to rest, as no physical evidence had ever been found confirming that Old Testament prophesy was in fact written before the time of Christ. Until the scrolls' discovery, scholars argued that perhaps many of the prophesies of Christ had been written after His life on Earth.

This is bogus. Scholars argued no such thing. Generally these "prophecies" (not prophesies) refer obviously to events contemporary with the prophets in the Hebrew Bible who wrote them. The early followers of Jesus reapplied them in an esoteric or midrashic sense to Jesus (just as the Qumran sectarians reapplied biblical prophecies to their own history), but that's another matter. No scholar has argued that the Hebrew Bible passages the early Christians applied to Jesus were written after the time of Jesus.

The most important cave is considered to be Cave I.

"If it were the only cave found, it would be enough," says Dead Sea Scrolls curator Lee Biondi. He signs a copy of his book "The Dead Sea Scrolls to the Bible in America" - which shares the name of the exhibit - and writes in a reference to Isaiah 40:8 - "The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever." (New International Version)

Cave I is the most important, he says, because it is where the only complete and intact scroll was found: the book of Isaiah. This book contains many of the prophesies foretelling the coming of the Messiah, which are fulfilled by Christ in the New Testament. This brings physical proof that the prophesies were not written after the life of Christ and the writings of the New Testament (The scroll of Isaiah is no longer exhibited because of its fragility).

Well, Mr. Biondi is welcome to his opinion -- if this represents his opinion accurately -- but I disagree. (Mr. Biondi has already e-mailed me to say that the press often have trouble getting their facts straight and asking me to alert him to any problems, which I will do regarding this question). No scholar argues that the book of Isaiah postdates Jesus, so there's no point to all this stuff about the Isaiah scroll. I think most Qumran scholars would agree that Cave 4 is a more valuable hoard than Cave 1. It's true that Cave 1 had a number of pretty much complete scrolls, but some of the scrolls from Cave 4 were nearly that complete (e.g., a Samuel scroll); others are damaged but appear in multiple copies so most of their text can be reconstructed (e.g., the SOSS); extensive fragments of some of the important Cave 1 texts were found in Cave 4 (the Community Rule, the Hodayot) and greater or lesser fragments of many, many other works were found in Cave 4 as well. In any case, we're very luck to have what we do have and I wouldn't want to do without any of it. Cave 1 is not "enough."

Along the wall near the fragments of the scrolls are more sheets of papyrus, all in their own frames and under glass, just like the scrolls. These are part of the Septuagint, meaning 70. These are scripts from the mid 4th century A.D. that 70 translators worked in isolation over several generations to accurately render the Hebrew texts into Greek.

That last bumpy sentence requires some clarification. The manuscripts on display are evidently from the 4th century A.D./C.E. (at least I'll take the author's word for it). There is a legend in the Letter to Aristeas to the effect that 70 translators translated the Pentateuch (not the whole Hebrew Bible) into Greek in the third century B.C.E. Later versions of the legend (follow the link) improve on the story by making the translators work in isolation and nevertheless come up with exactly the same translation in every case. We don't know how long it took to translate just the Pentateuch, but the translation of the whole Hebrew Bible certainly took several generations or more.

The fragments contain portions of the book of Exodus in the Greek language that are not otherwise existent on papyrus.

I'm not sure what this sentence is trying to say. There are no other papyrus fragments of the book of Exodus in Greek? I doubt that that's true, but I don't know offhand.

The Jews had become more conversant in Greek after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century, making a translation from Hebrew necessary.

During the end of the 4th century, Jerome, a leading scholar, was commissioned to translate the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament into Latin.

This is confusing. Alexander the Great lived in the fourth century B.C.E. (B.C.). Jerome lived in the fourth century C.E. (A.D.).

Some of the Septuagint Old Testament could not be found and so, wanting to translate directly from the original and not from a previous translation, Jerome dubbed the books he could not find the 'Apocrypha,' or lost translations.

This is so garbled it's hard to figure out what the writer must have heard from someone. The Apocrypha are books that were not accepted in the Jewish canon, but they were either translated into or composed in Greek, and then later they circulated in Christian circles so that eventually most Christians (not Jerome though) accepted them as part of the Old Testament canon. Much later they were rejected from the Protestant canon. Jerome translated some of these into Latin, either from Greek or from an Aramaic version. There are various explanations of why they are called "Apocrypha" or "hidden" books: they were "hidden" away (or ought to have been) rather than being accepted into the canon, or they are among the esoteric books miraculously reconstructed by Ezra and then hidden according to the legend in the pseudepigraphic work 2 Esdras/4 Ezra 14.

I can't speak for the accuracy of most of the rest of the article, but I wouldn't bet it's any better than what I've already covered. Then there's this:

The King James Bible is the most accurate translation of the English Bible to be printed.

The King James Bible was a remarkable piece of work when it was published nearly four centuries ago. But today we have many more, earlier, and better manuscripts; better methods and tools; and a better understanding of the biblical languages and the ancient biblical cultures. Modern translations are considerably more accurate than the King James version.

This is perhaps the most inaccurate popular article on the Dead Sea Scrolls that I have ever read, which is quite an achievement. The author obviously knows nothing about the subject and never made the effort to get in touch with an actual specialist on the Scrolls. It looks to me as though the author wandered around the exhibition making notes from the information cards on the various bits of the exhibit, talked a little to Mr. Biondi, then went home and threw this piece together. I realize that the Outer Banks Sentinel is a very local paper that probably doesn't have a very large circulation and would not have a religion correspondent. Still, that's not a good excuse for carelessness and certainly not for carelessness on this scale. If small newspapers want to publish online, they're publishing for an international audience and they take on the same responsibility as large ones to treat their subjects accurately.

Peter Flint Interview

2005-03-27T19:15:00.000+01:00

Well-known Qumran scholar Peter Flint is interviewed by the Mobile Register in "Looking for Jesus". He has an interesting cumulative argument for the Jewish background of an important Jesus logion in Q. (Or, for any Q-heretic readers, in Matthew and Luke.)

Two Weeks of Light Blogging

2005-03-25T17:10:00.000Z

Our two-week spring break is about to begin, so there will be no more seminars for a while. When I'm around (I'll be out of town for the first part of next week) I'll keep an eye on the news for Qumran-related stories. If I see any that look interesting, I'll blog on them. If not, I won't. The big event scheduled during the break is the publication of a guest lecture by Dr. Maxine Grossman on her postmodern literary-critical approach to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Look for this in the first few days of April.

Here's a little tidbit on the popular culture front. It appears that the Scrolls are a symbol for a particularly weighty tome. This account in the Times Herald-Record, NY of a local trial of the mayor and other town officials contains this curious exchange:

One time, the defense tried to put the city charter in evidence: "How big is it?" [Judge] Rosenwasser asked. "Is it the Dead Sea Scrolls?"

Best wishes for the holidays.

Summary of Seminar on Qumran Archaeology

2005-03-24T13:43:00.000Z

The archaeology session in my Qumran course is a special challenge and I wrestle with where to put it. There is an argument for placing it near the end of the course, on the theory that most of the literature deals with the archaeology in light of the Dead Sea Scrolls and also the Essenes, so the archaeological data could be put in a better context after the Essene theory had been covered. I have not done so thus far because I think it is worthwhile to try to consider the archaeological evidence strictly on its own terms in the first instance. In practice it is difficult to pull this off, but we do our best.

The "scriptorium" (Locus 30) was an early topic of discussion. There still does not seem to be any widespread agreement among archaeologists about this room. Donceel-Voûte argued that it was a dining room and the tables were reclining couches, but this has not been widely accepted. Other archaeologists (Broshi, Magness) accept that the room was a scriptorium but are not sure how it was actually used as such. The main piece of evidence for this interpretation seems to be the three inkwells, but it is difficult to be sure how exactly to interpret them. This one room does not seem to suffice to explain the production of the Qumran library. The number of scribal hands seems to be very high -- very few scribes seem to be responsible for as many as even two or three Qumran manuscripts. This points in the direction of the scrolls being brought to Qumran (whether to the inhabited buildings or straight to the caves) from outside rather than being produced on-site. This is one reason for thinking that sectarians from around Judea consolidated their libraries in hiding during the war.

We talked briefly about Pliny's reference to the Essenes on the western shore of the Dead Sea. This is a key -- perhaps the key piece of evidence for regarding Qumran as a site where a community of celibate Essenes lived. Nevertheless, there has some debate about whether the term infra in reference to Ein Gedi makes sense in connection with Qumran. Also, Pliny says that the Essenes were still living at Qumran after the war, when Ein Gedi had already been destroyed. The buildings at Qumran seem to have been destroyed by the Romans during the war, c. 68 CE, so it has been argued that Pliny must mean another site. But both these points are disputed and it is widely accepted that Qumran is the site of Pliny's Essenes.

The question was raised whether the ambiguous evidence of the cemetery (in which at least one of the excavated ancient skeletons was female, and perhaps a couple more) could be explained by positing that the community started out allowing its members to marry but then took a stricter stance and banned women entirely. This is an intriguing notion: Josephus does have marrying Essenes and the Damascus Document has marrying sectarians. (And, incidentally, contrary to popular understanding, the Community Rule does not explicitly describe an all-male community.) Pliny is quite firm that his Essene community was always celibate, but then he also says they had been there for countless ages, so his sources were not perfect. Nevertheless, apart from that one certainly female skeleton, we have no positive evidence that the people who lived there started out as a marrying Essene/sectarian group that initially left male and female burials and only became strictly male and celibate later on, so the idea doesn't seem to have much traction.

An interesting question to which I haven't yet been able to find an answer: how do the Donceels fit the Qumran cemetery into their theory that the ruins were of a vacation villa?

Regular readers of my other blog will be aware that I am fond of counterfactual history. The discussion suggested a counterfactual scenario to me that seems like a useful thought experiment. Suppose that the Dead Sea Scrolls had never been discovered in those caves. (Make up whatever reason you like: maybe they were discovered in the Middle Ages and the caves were completely cleaned out.) What would archaeologists make of the site? They would presumably decide that it had been inhabited by Jews some generations on either side of the turn of the era, based on the dating of the ceramics and the Hebrew ostraca, etc. on the site. They would also have deduced that the occupation was brought to an end by violent outside attack, probably by the Romans. They would find some ritual baths (how many exactly is debated). According to Magness, the pottery was produced locally and was unusually plain. There would be the strange cemetery with individual (as opposed to family) graves with an unusual north to south orientation and with a very high ratio of men to women and apparently no children (assuming Zias is right that most of the graves of adult females and all the graves of children are Bedouin). Would these factors be enough to draw attention to Pliny's account of the Essenes and lead archaeologists to propose that Qumran was his Essene settlement even without the evidence of the scrolls? I don't know. What do you think?

Finally, it is interesting to note that some of the archaeologists involved in the more recent excavations do not hold to the theory of Essene occupation of Qumran. Yuval Peleg and Itzhaq Magen think that period 1a was a Hasmonean military fortress and in period 1b and following Qumran was a pottery and honey production factory. See especially this long Jerusalem Post article.

There was more in the seminar, but for the sake of time I think I'm going to leave it there.

Summary of Copper Scroll Seminar

2005-03-23T14:00:00.000Z

This is a summary of the second seminar we held yesterday. I usually post the summaries in the order they happened, but there seems to be a malfunction in my e-mail that is randomly gobbling up e-mails sent to me (including from me), so the draft of the summary of the first seminar which I sent myself from home last night has been lost in the ether.

Early on, an interesting question was asked: if the Copper Scroll (hereafter "CS") treasures were real, why have none been found? It was notes that the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves were only discovered by chance, but this point is outweighed by the fact that the Israelis have been searching the caves and other remote parts of the country for decades to uncover archaeological relics and nothing certainly identifiable with a CS cache has ever been found. A jug of ancient balsam oil has been noted as a possibility, but it's not clear that the CS included this particular item. And for Freund's interpretation of the Cave of the Letters, see below. I suggested that the Romans would not have left any loose ends and if they had a suspicion that any Temple treasures or Essene hoards of treasure had not been recovered, they would have rounded up knowledgeable individuals and subjected them to persuasive interrogation until all the details had been tidied up. Indeed, Josephus reports that the Romans did torture some of the Essenes, but he doesn't say for what purpose.

Another question is worth referring to readers. How do the CS treasures, amounting to something in the range of 4500 talents of precious metals, compare to other ancient accounts of treasure (i.e., tribute to emperors, plunder of temples, etc.)? Granted, the ancients often exaggerated such things, but it would be helpful to know what numbers they actually give us. I vaguely remember, for example, that some of the tribute to kings in the Amarna letters was surprisingly large (and unlikely to be exaggerated). Can anyone point to specific accounts of treasure roughly contemporary with the CS, especially accounts unlikely to be exaggerated?

We discussed how much stock to put into the paleographic dating of the CS to c. 25-75 C.E. My view is that the paleography of the Scrolls is controversial and the paleography of the crude hammered letters in the CS, perhaps chiseled in by an illiterate person or persons, all the more so, so we should take any paleographic dating with a fair bit of caution.

Some problems to do with the cave in which the CS was discovered (Qumran Cave 3) are also important. Pixner's drawing of the cave in his RevQ 11 article shows scroll jars lining the walls, with the ledge on which the CS was put fairly far back in the cave. He says that a later ceiling collapse mostly cut the scroll off from the rest of the cave. The implication was that the CS could not have been placed in the cave after the scroll jars were, since whoever put the CS in the cave would have to have passed and ignored a bunch of potentially treasure-containing jars while hiding the copper treasure map, which hardly seems likely. However, after Pixner's article was published, Patrich published his article on further explorations of the Qumran caves (in Methods of Investigation). His team moved the large boulders in the cave and ascertained that the ceiling collapse that put them there happened thousands of years before the scrolls deposit. This raises a couple of questions.

1. Was Pixner wrong when he said that "a huge part of the ceiling caved in right in front of [the CS], hiding the CS in a sort of a niche and barring all access to it" (p. 327)? Was this a later collapse, or part of the much earlier one that Patrich cleared?

2. Were there in fact far fewer scroll jars than Pixner thought, given that there weren't any under the boulders after all? And given that the cave was full of boulders, might the jars that were there have been easily missed by whoever put the CS in the cave?

In other words, does the physical evidence leave open the possibility, contra Pixner, that the CS may have been deposited long after the other scrolls? If anyone who has been in Cave 3 can answer any of these questions, pleas drop me a note.

Also regarding Cave 3, it is normally (I'm tempted to say always) assumed that the scrolls deposit in it was part of the same sectarian one that left scrolls in most of the other 10 caves. But is this necessarily so? None of the scroll fragments from Cave 3 use explicitly sectarian terminology. There are biblical fragments and nonbiblical Jewish texts in Hebrew and Aramaic, but 3Q4, despite being called an "Isaiah Pesher," does not use the term pesher. A manuscript of Jubilees was left there too, but one was left at Masada as well. Should we or can we rule out that multiple deposits of scrolls were made in the Qumran caves by different groups? Most of the caves contain obviously sectarian texts, but not all. Besides Cave 3, note that Cave 7 had only Greek texts with nothing demonstrably sectarian. In short, maybe the people who left scrolls at Qumran were from different groups and there is no sectarian connection for the CS. Necessity makes strange bedfellows.

Then it was asked if the apparent genuineness of the CS had any implications for any other treasure stories. This seems unlikely, there are a great many ancient treasure stories and no connection with the CS hoard has been shown (at least so far) with any of them. It seems prudent to assume that treasure stories are legends unless there is compelling reason (as there is with the CS) to think otherwise.

Regarding Freund's theory that the Cave of the Letters (which contained important manuscript finds from the Bar Kokhba period which will occupy us later on) should be identified with location 25 of the CS, his book was not available to us, so we had to rely on news reports. One of the most thorough is this transcript of a Nova program. It should be noted that Edward Cook on his blog Ralph the Sacred River has advanced some philological objections to Freund's theory that look on the face of it to render the theory very unlikely. But a final judgment must be reserved until we actually see the book.

Copper Scroll Abstract

2005-03-22T13:46:00.000Z

Here is the abstract for the essay on the Copper Scroll for today's seminar:

The Copper Scroll was found in 1952, but the secrets of 3Q15 remained hidden until its opening in 1955/6, despite the best efforts of K. G. Kuhn. Kuhn had previously announced that the scroll consisted of hidden treasure, and although at first he was ridiculed, the opening of the scroll proved him correct. The scroll consisted of a long and sober list of some sixty-four locations of hidden treasure, which taken at face value mounts to some 58-174 tons of precious metal. It is due to such a copious quantity of metal that Milik has questioned the authenticity of the scroll, suggesting that it depicts Jewish folklore, not real treasure. Others have disagreed, arguing that the nature of the document implies that the treasure was indeed real. Much debate has emerged from this, although questions, including the following, remain unanswered. Is the treasure real? If so, to whom did it belong? Was the scroll hidden by the Qumran community, or someone else? Was it hidden with the leather scrolls, or does its placement at the back of Cave 3 suggest a separate drop? Can we find the treasure?

This paper aims to provide at least some answers to the questions above, discussing in depth the question of whether the scroll depicts a real, or legendary, treasure. Concluding that it is indeed real, I aim to expose the identity of its depositor, prior to suggesting the implications of this scroll upon the current Essene hypothesis.

Anna Evans

Qumran Archaeology Abstract

2005-03-21T13:38:00.000Z

Here is the abstract for the first essay to be discussed in our seminar tomorrow:

The site of Khirbet Qumran, the ruins located near to the caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, has for the last half-century been the source of much debate and disagreement between scholars. In this paper, the main theory regarding Khirbet Qumran shall be considered -- that which interprets the ruins as the site of a sectarian community. It shall be seen that there is a variety of evidence from the ruins to support this theory, which was first proposed by R. de Vaux when he led a series of excavations in the 1950s, and the connections between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the ruins shall also be considered. Among those who support the sectarian theory, it is often suggested that it was in fact a group of Essenes, and the reasons for this connection shall also be discussed. However, it is important to remember that not everyone agrees with these suggestions, and therefore the paper shall turn to the idea of the ruins as being the site of a villa, to see what grounds there are for taking this view. Finally, the cemetery located near the ruins shall be looked at, as the evidence found here can provide important information regarding whichever theory one chooses to support.

Dawn Jessopp

Mobile Exhibition Again

2005-03-20T09:18:00.000Z

The Biloxi Herald has a nice piece on the exhibition of Dead Sea Scrolls in the Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center in Mobile. Here's one detail I don't remember seeing before:

The most controversial fragment is the Aramaic Apocalypse, written late in the first century B.C. The only exhibit document not written in Hebrew, the non-Biblical manuscript has sections much like Daniel in the Hebrew Bible. But it refers to the ''Son of God'' and ''Son of the Most High,'' terms often used for the New Testament's Jesus.

The article also says that a manuscript of a work from the Apocrypha is part of the exibit, but doesn't say which. Presumably it's either Ben Sira or Tobit, but I can't find any information about it at the exhibition's website.

Summary of Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice Seminar

2005-03-18T12:43:00.000Z

We opened with a question about what is not in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (SOSS). Why are there only 13 songs, which are definitively dated in the first quarter of the year? Where are the rest of them? It seems very unlikely that there was originally a year-long cycle and that only the songs for the first quarter survive. It's true that many scrolls in the Qumran library were reduced to undecipherable fragments or obliterated entirely, but how likely is it that nine copies of the songs for the first quarter would survive in the library (not to speak of the copy found at Masada) while every trace of all the manuscripts of the songs for the other three quarters were lost entirely? Not very.

Somewhat later we came back to this issue to discuss a possible solution. The festival of Weeks (Shavuot) comes between the eleventh and twelfth Song in the SOSS. In rabbinic tradition, Shavuot is associated with the revelation of the Torah on Mt. Sinai and is tied especially closely to Ezekiel 1 (his vision of God's throne) and Ps 68:18 (involving the chariots of God). Both passages are influential in these songs in the SOSS. It may be that the life situation of the SOSS involved a buildup to Shavuot (and perhaps the sect's covenant renewal ceremony at about the same time). Thus the work would have been tied to a specific festival and not aimed at the whole annual calendar. For more on this see C. R. A. Morray-Jones's article "The Temple Within" in SBLSP 37 (1998): 1:400-431.

We also touched on some of the same problems with talking about the "Qumran community," "Qumran authorship," and the like which were covered in the immediately preceding seminar on calendrical texts.

We moved from there to the Maskil or "Sage" who is mentioned at the beginning of each of the 13 Songs. Does La-Maskil mean "by the Sage," "for the Sage," dedicated to the Sage," or what? Maskil is the title of an office in the sectarian literature, although it is a more general term meaning "wise person" or the like in the book of Daniel. But in the context of the SOSS, Maskil certainly reads most naturally as the name of an office -- one that involved officiating weekly at the sabbath sacrifice. This is an argument in favor of the SOSS being a sectarian work, but not a decisive one. We know almost nothing about the organization of the Jerusalem Temple and it does not seem safe to assume that there couldn't have been a functionary there with the title Maskil -- a title that the sectarians, with their clear priestly connections later borrowed. Who knows?

We talked also about the problem of parallels between the Scrolls and outside literature, most notably the parallels between the SOSS and the Hekhalot literature and the book of Revelation. It is very interesting to catalogue the similarities, but deciding what they mean is a more difficult task. Clearly the SOSS came before either Revelation or the Hekhalot texts, so in principle the SOSS could be sources of them. But it is equally and perhaps more likely that all three drew independently on themes that existed in common Judaism in antiquity. For more on the methodology of making sense of parallels see my online essay "The Perils of Parallels." (This is a very rough draft and I have a much more developed version in my files to which I want to come back when I find the time, but I hope even this early draft will be of some use.)

I myself lean somewhat in the direction of Rachel's view that the SOSS were not originally sectarian, but I also think that at this point the evidence is equivocal. There is the widespread assumption that the SOSS were composed (or at least used) by the sectarians to give themselves a "virtual experience" of the Jerusalem Temple by bypassing the earthly Temple and projecting themselves into the macrocosmic Temple with (or, with Fletcher-Louis, as) the angels. They did this because of the decisive break between the sectarians and the Jerusalem Temple, which cut off access to the latter by the former.

(If you are not familiar with the terminology, by "macrocosmic Temple," I mean the ancient Jewish [and ancient Israelite and even ancient Near Eastern in general] belief that the physical universe is God's temple, with the earth as his footstool and the angels as his priests).

This virtual-Temple theory is another plausible master narrative, based on the one we looked at in the previous seminar and, like it, in no small part a product of imagination to fill in the enormous blanks in our knowledge. Why must we read the SOSS with this Sitz im Leben? They contain no sectarian polemic and, as we have already seen, the Jerusalem Temple may have used the (later sectarian) solar calendar of the SOSS. I think it may even be possible to read the SOSS as originating in the Jerusalem Temple to be used by the priests there. They too would have wanted to experience cosmic communion (or apotheosis) with the macrocosmic Temple and the SOSS fits their context as well.

If this is their origin, it remains possible, of course, that they could have been reinterpreted by the sectarians in the way indicated above. But this assumes a decisive and permanent break between the sectarians and the Temple which I have already argued did not necessarily happen.

It should be noted (as does Newsom in her article on "'Sectually Explicit' Literature from Qumran") that lack of explicit sectarian polemic does not prove that a Qumran text is not sectarian. If a text, such as the SOSS, were written purely for internal use within the sect, there might not be any reason to express sectarian polemic. Such polemic would only come out in texts aimed at or at least referring to outsiders. So I do not think that a sectarian origin for the SOSS can be ruled out. Indeed, as I have shown in my commentary (Liturgical Works, 89) there is some technical terminology in the SOSS which can reasonably be taken to be sectarian.

Regarding Fletcher-Louis's theory, I think it is plausible that many of the angels in the SOSS are indeed human beings (and here I depart somewhat from my commentary), but I think they are probably just as fully angels as well. From the perspective of the human participants they were experiencing divinization or angelification by engaging in a cultic drama that put them into the heavenly realm. But their taking on the roles of angels to the point of more or less (temporary) complete identification with them did not lessen the theological reality for the participants that actual angels served in the macrocosmic Temple. I hope some of that makes sense.

There is no reason in principle why Fletcher Louis's argument couldn't work whether or not we assume the SOSS to be a sectarian product. As I said above, the Jerusalem priests could have been just as interested as the sectarians in being divinized into the macrocosmic cult. And, as already observed, the SOSS is not a polemical work. In practice, many of his arguments do depend on parallels to sectarian texts and this leads him to argue that the SOSS are sectarian as well. But discussion of his arguments for that are beyond the scope of this post.

Who Sold Them and How Did They Get Them?

2005-03-17T15:39:00.000Z

An article in the Pilot (a local newspaper in North Carolina) has been getting lots of attention lately. It tells the story of how one of the organizers of the From the Dead Sea Scrolls To the Bible In America exhibit, Lee Biondi, bought some Dead Sea Scrolls fragments. Private ownership of Dead Sea Scrolls is extremely unusual and as far as I know, Biondi is the only private owner who has made his ownership public.

Making Scrolls Accessible

By Robert Boyer: Special to The Pilot

It was October 2002. Lee Biondi was in a Swiss hotel room when he received the most scintillating phone call of his life.

The caller’s question was simple, but astounding: Was Biondi interested in buying fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls?

At the time, Biondi was an antiquities dealer. He was in Basel, Switzerland, exhibiting items as part of Cultura, an antiquities and art fair.

He could scarcely believe what he was hearing. Acquiring even one Scroll fragment would be a crowning career achievement.

“This is unheard of, unprecedented,” he said. “No American dealer had ever purchased a Dead Sea Scroll collection.”

[...]

The big question, of course, is who the sellers were and how they got the scroll fragments. It's interesting that Biondi says "Some of them still had Scotch tape on the back." The original editors sometimes put tape on the back as they were piecing the fragments together. Does this mean that these fragments came originally to the Rockefeller Museum and were handled by the original team of editors before someone removed them from the collection? I don't know, but I would sure like to find out.

First noted by Jim West on the g-Megillot list. The list goes on to discuss a fragment that may have belonged to this collection. Jim also notes the article on his Biblical Theology blog.

Blogger Problems

2005-03-17T09:14:00.000Z

Yesterday evening I had intended to write up my notes on the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice seminar. Unfortunately, I had stored the notes in a draft post in this account and the Blogger system was down the entire evening, so I couldn't get at them. I'm too busy today to write up the seminar. I'll try to get to it this evening, but it may be the weekend before it actually gets posted. Sorry.

Summary of Calendrical Texts Seminar

2005-03-16T16:49:00.000Z

The first point that was raised asked what I thought was a rather interesting question. Readers are probably familiar with the passage in 1QpHabakkuk xi which says that the Wicked Priest pursued the Teacher of Righteousness into exile and showed up to confound "them" (evidently the sectarians) and make them stumble. Since early on, scholars have taken this episode to indicate that the Wicked Priest was operating on a different calendar from the sectarians, so that he could move freely on what was to them a holiday that allowed no work. The question was, is there any other way to interpret this passage which doesn't involve assuming two calendars? I am not aware of one in the literature and none of us could think of one off-hand. If readers can point to one, please drop me a note.

Much of the discussion involved not the minutiae of the various calendrical texts, which were well covered in the essay, but connections with the Big Picture, doing what science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon called "asking the next question."

One of these next questions was asking what calendrical system the Temple used originally and whether the system had been changed or was still the same in the time of the Qumran sectarians. The fact is that we just don't know what calendar the Temple used at any time in its history. On the one hand, the rabbinic literature takes it for granted that the Second Temple used the lunisolar calendar. The sectarians seem to have used the solar calendar (see below), and the passage in 1QpHab seems to indicate that the Jerusalem priesthood used a different calendar than the sectarians - reasonably taken to be the lunisolar calendar. But on the other hand, the work of Annie Jaubert argues that the priestly traditions in the Hebrew Bible (such as P, Ezekiel, Ezra-Nehemiah) used the solar calendar (on the grounds that work such as travel is never done in these sources on what would have been the sabbath if they were using the solar calendar). It's a reasonable deduction in that case that the Temple used the solar calendar. One plausible reading of all this evidence is that advocated by Rachel Elior in her recent book The Thee Temples, that the Temple cult originally used the solar calendar but changed to the lunisolar calendar under the Hasmoneans. Something like this seems plausible to me.

Another issue, not so much of next questions as of first principles, was what "master narrative" to use when trying to understand specific issues in Scrolls studies. The traditional master narrative has been that the Teacher of Righteousness, who was slated to be the next high priest, fell out with the Hasmoneans when they usurped the high priesthood and he and his followers retreated to the desert near the Dead Sea and founded a celibate, quasi-monastic "Essene" community there which lasted until the Great Revolt. When the Romans invaded, the Essenes at Qumran hid their library in the nearby caves and then died fighting the Romans or else fled and never returned. This master narrative is in itself plausible and indeed in many ways satisfying, but a good bit of it is an imagintive construct created to connect together our scattered bits of actual evidence. Our perspective changes if we introduce changes into the master narrative, for example, if we assume that the scrolls found at Qumran are actually from many libraries from Judean Essenes hidden together at the time of the war. Or we could assume that the relationship between the Temple and the Essenes was much more complex than as presented in the master narrative. There may have been total estrangement at some times but reasonable amounts of cooperation at others. In favor of the first adjustment is the fact that both the Community Rule and some of the biblical scrolls come in multiple copies with variant texts. In favor of the second adjustment is the fact that some Qumran texts assume that the sectarians (or the readers whoever they were) did offer sacrifices at the Temple. Examples are the Damascus Document and 4Q512/4Q414 (inadvertently referred to in class as 4Q502 - sorry for the slip).

All this means that if we use expressions like "the Qumran community," "Qumran authorship," "at Qumran," etc., we should make explicitly clear what our background assumptions are. Often it is safest to avoid such expressions. (The essay was mostly free of such things, but I used one or two small points as an excuse to raise this issue.)

More "next questions" include, what is the Sitz im Leben of the Mishmarot? Why did someone calculate and copy them? Why did they correlate the solar and lunisolar year? I don't follow the discussion of calendrical issues at Qumran all that closely, but I don't recall ever seeing these questions raised. Are the Mishmarot copies of rotas taken from the Temple before the Hasmoneans? Are they utopian exercises completely divorced from practical reality? Or do they indicate some closer cooperation with Temple authorities than is often imagined? Any ideas out there?

On the question of intercalation (the adding of extra days to the year to make it correspond exactly to the solar year of 365.25 days -- leap-year is an intercalation): lots of effort has gone into systems the sectarians might have used to reconcile the 364-day year of their solar calendar to the actual year. But another possibility is that they didn't reconcile it because they attributed the growing gap between their calendar and the actual year to be the result of human sin. A remarkable passage in the Astronomical Book (1 Enoch 80:2-8) seems to say this:

2 And in the days of the sinners the years shall be shortened,
And their seed shall be tardy on their lands and fields,
And all things on the earth shall alter,
And shall not appear in their time:
And the rain shall be kept back
And the heaven shall withhold (it).
3 And in those times the fruits of the earth shall be backward,
And shall not grow in their time,
And the fruits of the trees shall be withheld in their time.
4 And the moon shall alter her order,
And not appear at her time.
5 [And in those days the sun shall be seen and he shall journey in the evening on the extremity of the great chariot in the west]
And shall shine more brightly than accords with the order of light.
6 And many chiefs of the stars shall transgress the order (prescribed).
And these shall alter their orbits and tasks,
And not appear at the seasons prescribed to them.
7 And the whole order of the stars shall be concealed from the sinners,
And the thoughts of those on the earth shall err concerning them,
[And they shall be altered from all their ways],
Yea, they shall err and take them to be gods.
8 And evil shall be multiplied upon them,
And punishment shall come upon them So as to destroy all.'

(Charles translation)

The Islamic calendar is something of a parallel here. It doesn't attribute the real solar year to human sin, but it is a lunar calendar that is never reconciled to the solar year, so its holy days move around in the solar year.

Finally there is the question of whether the calendrical texts at Qumran imply the following of one single calendar. Here our evidence is somewhat mixed. Jubilees 6:36-38 advocates the solar calendar and rejects any lunar component. But a number of Qumran text reconcile the solar and the lunisolar calendars. The solar calendar is a stable component always to be found, but the attention to the lunisolar calendar needs explanation too.

Dead Sea Discoveries 12.1

2005-03-15T22:18:00.000Z

The journal Dead Sea Discoveries has just published a new issue, now available online (follow the link). This is a special thematic issue devoted to the question of the Dead Sea Scrolls and modern popular culture. It looks very interesting. Here is the table of contents:

Great Scott! the Dead Sea Scrolls, McGill University, and the Canadian Media 6
Jaqueline S. du Toit; Jason Kalman

Inverting Reality: The Dead Sea Scrolls in the Popular Media 24
Lawrence H. Schiffman

The Scrolls in the British Media (1987-2002) 38
George J. Brooke

On the Fringe at the Center: Close Encounters between "Popular Culture" and the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls 52
Ruth Clements

Mystery or History: The Dead Sea Scrolls as Pop Phenomenon 68
Maxine L. Grossman

The Dead Sea Scrolls in Popular Culture: "I can give you no idea of the Contents" 87
Jeffrey H. Mahan

Why the Papers Love the Scrolls 95
Mark Silk

Unfortunately (but understandably), to access the articles themselves you need to have a paid personal or institutional subscription.

Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice Abstract

2005-03-15T11:43:00.000Z

Here is the abstract for the essay for our second seminar to be held later today:

The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (4Q400-4Q405, 11Q17 and Mas1K) raise a number of questions for scholars. This paper sets out to demonstrate the arguments for a non-sectarian view of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice by Carol A. Newsom. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that Crispin Fletcher Louis's definition of the angels within the songs as members of the Qumran community can only be held if one perceives the texts as sectarian documents. I wish to suggest that the Songs themselves are not sectarian but whose influence is reflected within other Qumranic texts such as the Songs of the Sage (4Q510-11) and Berakhot (4Qberakhot a,b,f). Moreover, I will demonstrate how the title 'Maskil' gives us an insight into the worship of the Qumran community. The final section will demonstrate that the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice are part of a religious tradition based on the exegesis of Jewish Merkavah mysticism and Hekhalot literature. A further comparison will relate the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice to the Book of Revelation.

By looking at these issues that are raised when studying the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice one is able to gain an insight into the worship of the community, see how the Songs have utilised the religious tradition of which they were a part and how these arguments strengthen the case for a non-sectarian reading of the texts.

Rachel Scott

The Yahad Today

2005-03-14T12:32:00.000Z

I've just learned that a Yahad exists today in modern Israel. I have the story over at PaleoJudaica.

Calendrical Texts Abstract

2005-03-14T12:30:00.000Z

Here is the abstract for our first seminar tomorrow:

The calendrical texts found at Qumran are diverse in their content, including summaries of the movements of the heavenly bodies (4Q317), details of the priestly duty rotas for the Temple to which they may have expected to return (4Q320-330, elaborations of apocryphal texts involving calendrical issues (4Q208-211), and even horoscopes (4Q186 and 561). This essay aims to detail some of the content and issues relating to these texts and to examine further the issues around the correlation of the various calendars and the observable passing of time, and the problems that the differing calendars may have created and solved during the period. The issue of intercalation for the Qumran community seems to have been dealt with in some respect, but to what extent remains unknown. The text of 4Q319 may have some bearing on this, and will be discussed here. The idea that calendrical issues may also have had some bearing on the origins of any Qumran group that may have left the Jerusalem Temple cult will also be examined to some degree, including perhaps the most famous reference in 1QpHabxi to the pursuit of the Teacher of Righteousness by the Wicked Priest on the Day of Atonement. The conclusions to which the paper can come regarding these complicated issues are few, but the enlightenment gained from the calendrical texts on the ways in which the writers of the texts ‘passed their time’ are great.

Benjamin Taylor

Another Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice Article

2005-03-13T20:47:00.000Z

In a post on the ANE list, Greg Doudna mentions the following article online, downloadable as a PDF document by clicking on the link:

Fletcher-Louis, Crispin, (Oxford University, England), "Ascent to Heaven and the Embodiment of Heaven: A Revisionist Reading of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice." (New title: "Heavenly Ascent and Incarnational Presence A Revisionist Reading of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice.")

It can be found on the Society of Biblical Literature Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism Webpage and was published in the SBL Seminar Papers for 1998. Fletcher-Louis' global theory about the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice will be discussed during our seminar on Tuesday, so I encourage you -- students and outside blog-readers -- to have a look at it.

Calendrical Texts

2005-03-11T20:26:00.000Z

As I noted yesterday, one of next week's seminars will be on the Qumran calendrical texts.

One tidbit in advance: here is a page from the Library of Congress exhibit that deals with one of the Mishmarot texts (4Q321) which give the schedule for the rotation of the priestly courses in the Temple service.

The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice

2005-03-10T20:57:00.000Z

The seminars scheduled for next week deal with the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice and the calendrical texts. Tonight I'll give you a few links that deal with the SOSS.

Here's the entry from the Library of Congress exhibit on the SOSS. It includes a photograph of 4Q403 (click on it for an enlargement), some information on the work, and an excerpt from Newsom's translation.

Here's an abstract of a paper on the SOSS ("The Macrocosmic Temple, Scriptural Exegesis, and the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice") which I presented in my 2001 Dead Sea Scrolls conference. The whole paper was published as an article in Dead Sea Discoveries in 2002. You can access it here, but it requires a paid personal or institutional subscription. Other relevant papers from that conferences included my "Melchizedek, the 'Youth,' and Jesus: the Dead Sea Scrolls and Messianism, Christology, and Mysticism" (abstract); Ra'anan Abusch, "Seven-fold Praise in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice and the Hekhalot Literature: Literary Context and Historical Continuity in Early Hebrew Hymnic Poetry" (abstract); and Alexander Golitzin, "Recovering the Glory of Adam: Selected Themes from the Dead Sea Scrolls Present in the Macarian Homilies and Other Christian Ascetic Writings of Fourth-Century Syro-Mesopotamia" (abstract). All three were published in the conference volume.

My book Liturgical Works (Eerdmans Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls 6; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000) has a long chapter on the SOSS. You can read part of it in the Amazon excerpt, although it doesn't work very well with a dial-up connection. The entry on the Eerdmans website works better and also has an excerpt on the SOSS.

NOTE: Blogger has been suffering numerous server errors recently, which has led to annoyances such as stuttered posts and posting lost during publishing. It also makes it very hard sometimes to correct typos. Apologies in advance for any problems.

Summary of 4QMMT Seminar

2005-03-09T10:18:00.000Z

We started by discussing the implications of the copyright ruling in the Qimron-Shanks case. The general sense of the class was sympathy with the result on the grounds that a scholar should be rewarded for his or her contribution as long as other scholars remain free to interact with the reconstructed text and offer improvements on the reconstruction. But follow the link for a different view!

We moved to the hypothesis that the Qumran sectarians were Sadducees and the question arose whether and to what degree it was compatible or mutually exclusive with the Essene hypothesis. The classical formulation of the Essene hypothesis has the break with Jerusalem happening over priestly issues. Often the theory is accepted that the Teacher of Righteousness was the man who by rights was next in line to become high priest, but he lost his place when the Hasmoneans (who were priests, but not of the high-priestly family) took over the high priesthood. Despite being widely held, this theory is very speculative. Nevertheless, if it be accepted, it seems compatible with Schiffman's view that the sectarians were a branch of Sadducees (i.e., Zadokite priests). Schiffman seems to think this is possible when he says "The dominant Essene hypothesis, if it is to be maintained at all, requires radical reorientation." (Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls, 89).

This led to the broader question of in what sense the Qumran sectarians could have been Sadducees, based on the evidence about the latter in the New Testament and Josephus. If the Sadducees disbelieved in angels, the afterlife, or determinism (i.e., fate), how can they be reconciled with the Qumran sectarians, who believed in all three? If I understand him correctly, Schiffman postulates a breakaway group from the Hellenized Zadokite priests in Jerusalem, which group produced 4QMMT and the Temple Scroll (which are compatible with the picture of the Sadducees we get from Josephus and the NT) and then developed along a sectarian, eschatological-apocalyptic trajectory that took up beliefs in angels, afterlife, radical dualism, and apocalyptic determinism, while keep the basic Zadokite/Sadducean halakhic interpretations, which differed recognizably from the halakhah of the Pharisees. This group in due course produced the sectarian literature we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Schiffman also says "I am not claiming that the Dead Sea sect as we know it is Sadducean, only that its origin and the roots of its halakhic tradition lie in the Sadducean Zadokite priesthood" (Reclaiming, 89 - and see the discussion in general on pp. 88-89). I am not sure how helpful it is to invoke the term "Sadducees" in this discussion, given the baggage associated with them in the Greek sources. It might be clearer just to say "Zadokite priests." But in any case, Schiffman's nuance here needs to be kept in mind.

Next we discussed the three scenarios that have been proposed to explain the origins of 4QMMT. The one proposed by the original editors in DJD 10 and still widely accepted today is that it is a letter from early in the history of the sect by sectarian leaders (the "we"; perhaps the Teacher of Righteousness and his group) to a political leader and potential ally and his group (the "you"; perhaps the Wicked Priest, not yet wicked, and his followers) in opposition to people following a rival halakhah (the "they"; perhaps the Pharisees). It is thus an important contemporary source for the schism that led to the founding of the sect.

The second, argued by Steven Fraade, is that 4QMMT is a treatise intended for internal consumption -- aimed at members of the sect and used for paranesis (instruction). (These two possibilities are not entirely mutually exclusive: a copy of a letter by the founders to outsiders could have been kept by the sectarians and used for instruction by later generations. This is what happened to the Pauline epistles, although in their case it was probably the recipients rather than the senders who preserved the letters.)

The third is that 4QMMT is a historicizing document written long after the founding of the sect but saying what the authors thought the founders would have said (either to outsiders or to their followers) had they gotten around to writing it down. In other words it is fictional, almost pseudepigraphic (although technically it makes no explicit claims about its own authorship). It thus would be somewhat analogous to the pseudo-Pauline literature in the New Testament. It would also give us no reliable or at least contemporary information about the founding of the sect. Maxine Grossman has given the most extensive treatment of this possibility.

It is not easy to choose between these. For my part, I find the content of 4QMMT difficult to reconcile with the first scenario. If it were a real letter by a particular person to particular people and about the views of particular other people, I would expect some names and other personal details to come up. The utterly impersonal nature of the work gives it a homiletic and communal air that makes me think scenarios 2 or 3 are more likely.

One intriguing point raised in the discussion was the fact that no answer to the letter (if letter it was) has been preserved in the Qumran library. If 4QMMT is a letter of the founders preserved as an historical relic, it seems likely that any reply would have been preserved with it. (Or is it? No replies to Paul's letters survive either.) If the recipients didn't reply, is this because they didn't think it was important enough to reply to? Or, contrawise, did they take it as a significant challenge, but one best ignored rather than being given further legitimacy by a reply? Or is 4QMMT a treatise for internal consumption to which no reply was expected?

Likewise, why are there so many copies (6) and why are they all in Cave 4, unlike the Community Rule, the Damascus Document, and the War Scroll, all of which are found in multiple caves? Here we come to matters that are very uncertain. The one sure datum about the origins of the Qumran library is that the scrolls were found in the eleven caves near the Wadi Qumran. Any attempt to explain how they got there involves quite a lot of speculation. One possibility, the one often taken for granted as obviously correct, is that Pliny's celibate, quasi-monastic community of Essenes lived in the nearby buildings and they hid their library in the caves (some of which perhaps were already used for scroll storage) in advance of the conflict with the Romans. Another possibility is that various sectarian communities throughout Judea consolidated their personal and communal (synagogal?) libraries and hid them together in these caves during the war. That option would explain much better the multiple recensions of the Community Rule and some of the scriptural books in the Qumran library. These two explanations are not mutually exclusive and the truth may involve elements of both. We just don't know.

4QMMT Abstract

2005-03-08T13:53:00.000Z

Here is the abstract for today's essay on 4QMMT:

4QMMT is a Halakhic letter, and the Composite Text has been put together by Elisha Qimron. There has been much controversy over the "ownership" of this text, a case that has been brought to court in Israel, giving Qimron copyright. I will focus on this case and the main controversies in the first part of my paper.

The contents of 4QMMT, as we have it in the Composite Text, are comprised of three main sections; a calendar, a list of the halakhah, or rules of the community, and a concluding exhortation. Within my second section I will discuss three views of the genre of 4QMMT, and the implications this has for the way we view the letter, and with whom we identify the "we", "you" and "they" parties mentioned in the letter.

I will end the paper by discussing two other issues brought up by scholars; firstly, whether the scriptures of the writers of 4QMMT corresponded to the Hebrew Bible as we now have it, in its three sections, and secondly, how the problem of having a calendar on only one of the six copies of 4QMMT can be solved.

Kelda Hunter

Change of Plan and 4QMMT

2005-03-07T09:07:00.000Z

The student who was set to do the Temple Scroll essay has been ill, so that topic will have to be covered later in the course. This means that our only topic this week will be 4QMMT. Here are a few relevant websites:

The Library of Congress DSS exhibit has a page with a nice photo of 4QMMT^c (4Q396) (click on the photo in this link to see the whole thing) as well as a brief introduction and a translation of some of the text.

Again from Taylor University College and Seminary, Canada, for REL 365: The Dead Sea Scrolls, we have An Introduction to the Miqsat Ma’ase ha-Torah (4QMMT) by Angela J. Lalk.

And on the Orion website, we have a paper by Qumran scholar Charlotte Hempel: "The Laws of the Damascus Document and 4QMMT."

Hodayot Images

2005-03-04T15:30:00.000Z

For color images of three columns of the Hodayot (1QH^a), see this page at the Orion website. And this link at the Eikon image database (Yale Divinity School) leads to four black-and-white images of the Hodayot in the process of conservation from the Millar Burrows slide collection. The fourth, farther down on the page, shows 1QH^a before it was unrolled. There are other Scroll images on that page as well. In all cases above, clicking on the small image leads to a large version.

More on the Hodayot

2005-03-03T20:31:00.000Z

A few Internet items on the Hodayot:

First, an article by Ken Penner (moderator of the Megillot list) in the electronic Journal of Biblical Studies:

"Realized or Future Salvation in the Hodayot"

Under "Dead Sea Scrolls Papers, for Religious Studies 225 University of Pennsylvania" (one of Robert Kraft's courses) we find:

"A Close Reading of the Hodayot and a Theory of their Authorship" by Jacob D. Jaffe

And from Taylor University College and Seminary, Canada, for REL 365: The Dead Sea Scrolls, we find:

An Introduction to the Thanksgiving Hymns (Hodayot)(1QH, 1Q35, 4Q427-32) by Sue Kellett & Colin Montgomery

Summary of Hodayot Seminar

2005-03-02T17:37:00.000Z

Much of the seminar discussion was about details of the complete essay and need not detain us here. Instead, I will concentrate on some interesting themes that arose in the conversation.

One early question was in what sense the Hodayot and the sectarian Scrolls in general teach "predestination." One suggestion was that, in contrast to the predestination of salvation in the Calvinistic tradition, Qumran predestination was about determinism in human lives in general. I don't know much about Calvinism, so I can't comment on that. But the key statement of sectarian determinism in the Scrolls, the Treatise on the Two Spirits in the Community Rule, seems to me to teach a general determinism, but with predestined salvation and damnation built into it. I'm less sure about the theology of the Hodayot, and the deterministic passages in col. 9 do seem to me to be more general. (All this is my considered off-the-cuff opinion as I type hurriedly in the late afternoon while fighting a cold, after a day with four hours of meetings.)

Incidentally, in this part of the discussion I emphasized the importance of appealing to specific primary references when discussing a thematic issue.

We spent some time on the issue of genre, noting the two basic genres generally agreed to be found in 1QH^a:

Thanksgiving songs of the individual ("teacher" hymns)
Hymnic songs of confession ("community" hymns)

We touched on the question of whether the Hodayot were used for private devotion or in public liturgy, or some one and some the other. Rather than trying to answer the question, we talked more about how liturgical texts might look different from devotional texts (e.g., the use of 1st person plural forms, imperative calls to praise, instructions for ritual use, antiphonal responses, mention of accompanying instruments, etc.)

We noted the relevance of the Cave 4 Hodayot manuscripts for our understanding of 1QH^a. The latter recension also appears in the early manuscript 4QH^b and some evidence for source collections incorporated into this larger collection may be found in 4QH^a, 4QH^c, and 4QH^c

We also discussed the importance of asking very basic questions of the primary text of ancient works like the Hodayot, such as: Why were the Hodayot written? What were the objectives of the author(s) and did they differ from the objectives of the editor of 1QH^a? What were the main points they wanted to get across? What themes do they stress over and over? Who was the intended audience?

As for the proposed authorship by the Teacher of Righteousness, we noted that Sukenik apparently was the first to suggest this. He would already know about the Teacher of Righteousness from the Damascus Document manuscript from the Cairo Geniza, with more information about the Teacher coming from 1Qpesher Habakkuk, which he also would have seen. It certainly would have been tempting at that point to read the Hodayot alongside these texts, with the author's voice identified with the Teacher, and there are some striking points of comparison between 1QPHab and 1QH^a which could be taken in that direction.

Nevertheless, the situation may well be more complicated. It was pointed out that even though some of the biblical Psalms actually have titles apparently attributing them to David, the consensus among Psalms scholars is that most or all of these are secondary and do not really indicate Davidic authorship. The Hodayot, by contrast, have no titles at all to the individual compositions. (It's difficult to tell how normal the lack of titles is for Jewish hymns of this period. The obvious point of comparison is the Psalms of Solomon, but their evidence is equivocal. The Greek version does have titles, but the Syriac version doesn't. Does this mean there were titles in the putative original Hebrew? Were these kept by the Greek translator and deleted by the Syriac translator, or are they a secondary addition in the Greek version?

In any case, there is no explicit claim that the Hodayot are by the Teacher of Righteousness - he is never mentioned in any of the 1QH or 4QH manuscripts. We may (or may not) infer from their content that he was the author, but how can we be sure that the hymns were not written much later than his time by someone writing on his behalf or under his prophetic inspiration or to evoke his memory or the like? (Cf. the Pastoral Epistles in the NT.)

As for the article by Douglas, it's perhaps helpful to summarize his two main arguments. The first is stylistic: unique stylistic peculiarities establish that much of cols. 10-17 share the same style and therefore come from the same author. Second, this author was the Teacher of Righteousness: the situation of the Teacher as presented in the pesharim is comparable to the situation of the author of this Hodayot unit; specifically both correspond closely to Victor Turner's anthropological model of social conflict.

I share Matthew's skepticism of this conclusion. A few observations:

A group or a school can share a style - a distinctive style does not necessarily point to a single author. The parade example is the style of the Deuteronomistic School, which is distinctive and which shows up in various places in the documents in the Hebrew Bible.
Our sample of Hebrew poetry from this period is small.
The supposed sample of this one author's work is very small.

On the anthropological model:
Turner's work is not very recent and I would feel more comfortable if Douglas had cited some more recent literature that critiqued it.
Douglas has to accept an extremely literalistic reading of some very arcane poetry in the Hodayot to reach his conclusions.
We know nothing about the opponents' view of the situation or how they would have described it.

Finally, there is the question of how reliable a source we should take the Pesharim to be for information on the Teacher of Righteousness. The pesharim often base their supposed historical descriptions very closely on the wording of scriptural passages, which should make us nervous. Judging by the usually accepted paleographic dates, the pesharim may well have been written long after the Hodayot. Indeed, the possibility has been raised by both Philip Davies and George Brooke that 1QpHab is actually dependent on the Hodayot. Note that 1QpHab 11.2-8 has some connection with 1QH^a 12.7-12. Is this because they describe memories of the same event or because one is based on the other? If the latter, it seems a good bet that the Hodayot are the older of the two and the source of the pesher, in which case most of the supposed historical evidence for the activities of the Teacher of Righteousness evaporates.

Abstract: The Hodayot

2005-03-01T13:28:00.000Z

This is the abstract for the seminar paper for this afternoon:

The Hodayot, found in Caves 1 and 4, have remained under scrutiny since 1QH^a was first published in 1955. Many have sought to use these hymns as a viewing glass into the worship of the life of the Qumran community. However much that is assumed about the Hodayot is uncertain. This paper aims to unearth some of these assumptions and foundational ambiguities. Part I focuses upon authorship (often ascribed to the "Teacher of Righteousness"), and the ambiguous nature of the whole discussion. Both the nature of the text as poetic liturgy and of the content leaves no certainty of authorship. Moreover the Teacher of Righteousness is a more evasive figure than sometime portrayed. In particular the recent new data presented by Michael C. Douglas ("The Teacher Hymn Hypothesis Revisited," DSD 6 (1999): 239-66) are assessed. Douglas attempts to build up a block of material around a "signature phrase," which may be ascribes to an author (namely the Teacher of Righteousness). However, it will be argued that in this Douglas provides an argument for literary unity, not authorship. The assessment of Douglas's argument is crucial to acknowledge the limited information possessed at present. In this case, I believe, the scholarly position is in affirming the uncertainty of authorship. Part II moves to examine other possible means of understanding the hymns. This takes the form of studying the Hodayot as sectarian, theological and liturgical. In this, the more certain suppositions of literary genre and theology are affirmed to provide possible insights into the social situation. Meanwhile less certain suppositions of specific social situation and sectarian nature of the texts are presented as ambiguous. These questions are essential in understanding how much about the Qumran community can be know, and how much cannot. Through our study of the Hodayot we conclude that although much has been hypothesised, ambiguities remain and must be recognised.

Matthew J. Ford

After the seminar - probably sometime tomorrow - I'll post a summary of our discussion.

Cultural Icon Watch

2005-03-01T09:53:00.000Z

The Dead Sea Scrolls are the archetypal chance manuscript find:

Life of Blues legend Dixie in his own words

Feb 28 2005

By David Prentice, Liverpool Echo

TOMORROW is the 25th anniversary of Dixie Dean's death.

[...]

'Dixie Dean Uncut - The Greatest Story Ever Told', is a new book launched tomorrow, containing the most in-depth, meticulous interview Dean ever gave.

First published in the summer of 1970, the original transcript of the interviews was believed to have been lost forever.

[...]

Then former Echo Sports Editor Ken Rogers, now the Executive Editor of Trinity Sports Media, was researching the Echo archives fora book project last year, when he discovered the original manuscript - perfectly preserved.

"It was like finding the dead sea scrolls," he enthused.

[...]

Cultural Icon Watch

2005-02-28T09:27:00.000Z

A column by Jack McLean in the Glasgow Herald uses the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Rosetta Stone as examples of robust ancient technology:

Friday
Talking of being dead, my computer has finally died. It was, for a computer, very elderly. There is something called a hard-drive or some such jargon which might be saved so that I can get the seven years of material on it but this might not be possible. There may be millions of words lost. New technology isn't a patch on the old one is it? I mean what with the Rosetta Stone and the Dead Sea Scrolls, well, computers are rubbish really.

Adjustments

2005-02-25T17:06:00.000Z

We have lost one student since my last reckoning here, so we now have a total of 15. That means that one topic has to be dropped. With regret, I've settled on this being the Groningen hypothesis. Maybe another year for that one. I have updated the course web page accordingly. Next Tuesday we'll have our first seminar discussion - on the Hodayot/Hymns Scroll.

More on the Charlotte Exhibit

2005-02-25T13:57:00.000Z

There's more on the upcoming Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit in Charlotte here and here. The slogan "Thou shalt be inspired" doesn't do much for me, but evidently some people like it.

Pesharim Lecture

2005-02-24T17:22:00.000Z

As promised, the Pesharim lecture is now posted on the course website.

Charlotte Exhibit, 2006

2005-02-23T20:30:00.000Z

A Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition is planned for Charlotte, North Carolina, to open in February of 2006. The Charlotte Observer (free registration required) has the exclusive story:

Dead Sea Scrolls coming to Charlotte

Discovery Place to display fragments of historic texts next year

KEN GARFIELD
Religion Editor

Some of history's most sacred objects are coming to Charlotte.

Discovery Place on Thursday is expected to unveil early plans for an exhibit featuring portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls -- fragments that date back to Jesus' time and contain some of the earliest surviving copies of Old Testament books.

When portions of the scrolls go on display for at least three months starting Feb. 17, 2006, the science and technology museum on North Tryon Street uptown anticipates at least 200,000 visitors. By comparison, an exhibit on flight drew 129,500 during a similar three-month period in 2003.

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Lecture Delay

2005-02-23T20:21:00.000Z

A family emergency has kept me away from the office all day and the Pesharim lecture is on my computer there. I'll aim to post it tomorrow. Apologies for the delay.

War Rule Lecture

2005-02-22T16:36:00.000Z

This afternoon I lectured on the War Rule and the Pesharim. I've just posted the War Rule lecture on the course website. I'll let you digest it today and will post the Pesharim lecture tomorrow.

Mobile Exhibit Update

2005-02-21T11:36:00.000Z

The Mobile exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center has been so successful that the press is starting to ask "How does the Exploreum top this?" All museums should have such problems.

Altman and Crowder in the Toronto Star

2005-02-19T17:05:00.000Z

On the ANE and Megillot (not yet archived) lists, Stephen Goranson notes that Neil Altman, assisted by reporter David Crowder, has an article on the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Toronto Star. Altman is "a Philadelphia-based writer who has specialized in writing about the Dead Sea Scrolls" (note that it doesn't say he specialized in the Scrolls themselves). For quite a few years he and Crowder have been promoting the daft idea that the Scrolls are medieval, a notion that has long since been shown on multiple converging grounds to be preposterous.

This piece ("Who wrote Dead Sea scrolls?") mixes their notion with a discussion of legitimate debates among archaeologists and Qumran scholars over the nature of the Qumran site and possible connections with the Essenes. I discussed another of Altman and Crowder's articles over at PaleoJudaica here and here and don't have much to add. I will say that this is yet another demonstration of the willful and harmful ignorance of the mainstream media about Qumran studies, biblical studies, and pretty much every scientific and academic discipline. The Toronto Star could easily have gotten a real archaeologist or specialist in the Scrolls to discuss the recent excavations and their implications. But they would rather get people like Altman and Crowder to promote their views, which - despite their misrepresentation of Jim VanderKam (see the second PaleoJudaica post) - no specialist takes seriously. This is a pity, because the media has been steadily eroding its own credibility for a long time, and the advent of blogs has accelerated this process since now people who are experts on subjects treated in bad articles like this one can respond in public.

Congratulations to Peter Flint!

2005-02-18T10:50:00.000Z

Many congratulations to Professor Peter Flint of Trinity Western University in Canada. He has been awarded a first-tier Canadian Research Chair in Dead Sea Scrolls Studies with an associated grant of $1.4 million. This is a great honor to him and to the field of Qumran studies. Well done Peter!

Dead Sea Scrolls Scholar celebrates $1.4 million dollar grant with local community

Monday, January 24, 2005

Langley, B.C.— Deemed the greatest manuscript find of the 20th century, the Dead Sea Scrolls embody mystery, drama and intrigue that continue to pique public interest.

Now endearingly referred to as “Mr. Dead Sea Scrolls,” Dr. Peter Flint—world-renowned author, professor, and award-winning researcher—will give his inaugural lecture as the Canadian Research Chair in Dead Sea Scrolls Studies at Trinity Western University on Thursday, February 3, 2005. Beginning at 7:30 p.m., the event is open to the public free of charge.

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TWU now joins UBC and McMaster in representing Canada's three Chairs in the area of religious studies; however, TWU's is the first and only tier one appointment in the field. Tier one Research Chairs are granted $200,000 per year in research funds for seven years (tier two receive $100,000 for five)—and are reserved for professors acknowledged as international leaders in their field.

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(From Trinity Western University News and Events via Bible and Interpretation News)

Tov Lectures at the Exploreum

2005-02-18T09:13:00.000Z

The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit in Mobile is hosting a lecture series over the coming three months. Emanuel Tov was the first speaker.

Dead Sea Scrolls a hot lecture topic (Biloxi Sun-Herald)

By KAT BERGERON

THE SUN HERALD

As "Dead Sea Scrolls: An Exhibition of Biblical Proportions" continues through a fourth week of record-breaking attendance at the Gulf Coast Exploreum, the accompanying lecture series launched this week brought to Mobile the man who made the scrolls more accessible.

Emanuel Tov, editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project and a Hebrew University professor, launched the lecture series on Tuesday by explaining the original efforts of scholars to piece together thousands of scroll fragments. For several decades, other scholars complained of lack of access to the historic documents.

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High Point DSS Exhibit Held Over

2005-02-17T09:41:00.000Z

The From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Bible in America exhibition is extending its run in High Point, North Carolina:

Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit extends High Point stay

2-17-05

By Bob Burchette, Staff Writer
[Greensboro] News & Record

HIGH POINT -- Held over! With record-breaking attendance, "The Dead Sea Scrolls to the Bible in America" exhibit will be staying at Providence Place in High Point through April 10.

"This is by far the best-attended exhibit we've had in the nine cities where we've had the exhibit," co-curator Joel Lampe said.

The High Point exhibit was originally set for Jan. 17 through Feb. 27, but the run was almost immediately extended through Easter on March 27.

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PaleoJudaica readers will recall that this is the exibit associated with the antiquities dealers who are selling columns cut from a 300- to 400-year-old damaged Torah manuscript and pages from early printings of important English Bibles.

DSS Course Update

2005-02-16T14:56:00.000Z

We now have 16 students registered for the course. North American readers may not find this impressive, but let me assure you that for a British honours seminar it's quite a large number and should make for a very rich course. We will have a seminar on one student paper in the fourth week; thereafter we will cover two each week, except for the ninth week, when we will cover three. I've just added the sixteenth topic to the list on the main course page - the Groningen Hypothesis. Much of the bibliography for this topic is found in the pesharim section of the bibliography page, although other items are scattered throughout the latter. In addition I've filled in the entry for calendrical texts. The bibliography is now basically complete, although I will probably add a few more items as I find time.

Summary of Harlow Lecture

2005-02-16T09:32:00.000Z

Professor Daniel Harlow of Calvin College lectured on the Dead Sea Scrolls at Central Michigan University yesterday. Central Michigan Life gives a summary:

Dead Sea Scrolls offer insight into Judaism

By Ryan Loftis
Central Michigan Life

February 16, 2005

Daniel Harlow, Calvin College associate professor of religion, spoke Tuesday evening at the Charles V. Park Library Auditorium about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls offer proof Christians did not invent the term “Son of God,” visiting speaker Daniel Harlow said Tuesday.

“The text offers pre-Christian Jewish use of the term ‘Son of God,’” Harlow said. “Son of God is not a title for Jesus that Christians invented.”

A well-known expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Harlow gave a public lecture in the Charles V. Park Library Auditorium. His appearance was co-sponsored by the philosophy and religion department and the College of Humanities and Social and Behavioral Sciences.

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Unfortunately, the following howler made it into the article:

About 100,000 scroll manuscripts varying in size were discovered intact. While only a dozen are readable, Harlow said they created a better understanding of the Jewish faith.

I think what Harlow actually said was that about 100,000 scroll fragments of varying sizes were found at Qumran, whereas only about a dozen manuscripts survived as reasonably intact scrolls.

Lecture for Second Week

2005-02-15T16:05:00.000Z

This week's lecture, "The Damascus Document and the Community Rule," has now been posted to the course website.

Cultural Icon Watch

2005-02-15T09:41:00.000Z

Too late for this year, but here's a suggested Valentine's Day present from the Atmore Advance in Alabama:

Edith Beans, owner of the Beans Store, suggests that your sweetheart might be happy with a hot relaxing bath on Valentine's Day.

"We have a lot of bath and body products including Ahava - a bath and body product that's popular because it comes from the Dead Sea where the Dead Sea Scrolls are from," Beans said. "We also have Valentine baskets, candy, cards and gourmet apples."

Thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit in Mobile, sales of Ahava are probably brisk. I'm not sure what Ahava is made of, but out of curiosity a couple of years ago I bought some Dead Sea mud soap. It was basically soap made with mud, which isn't all that attractive a product if you ask me.

DSS Exhibition in Mobile

2005-02-14T09:42:00.000Z

I've been tracking the From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Bible in America museum exhibition for some time over at PaleoJudaica (most recently here). Here's another article on its stay at the Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center in Mobile, Alabama. So far more than 20,000 people have visted since 20 January (2100 last Saturday), with 70,000 tickets sold.

Who Will Blog the Bloggers?

2005-02-14T09:36:00.000Z

Daniel Driver (not to be confused with S. R. Driver or G. R. Driver and, as far as I know, no relation) is one of the students in my Dead Sea Scrolls course and he has a blog too. He comments on the course here and here. So it looks like you'll be able to get a student perspective as well this semester.

Welcome Daniel. Assimilation to the Blogosphere is harmless to the biological organism and provides an interface with numerous other assimilated minds.

Cultural Icon Watch

2005-02-13T08:32:00.000Z

Over at PaleoJudaica I note a couple of items this morning which invoke the Dead Sea Scrolls as a cultural icon.

The DSS Website of the West Semitic Research Project

2005-02-11T13:58:00.000Z

The West Semitic Research Project, run by Professor Bruce Zuckerman at USC, has a nice educational site on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It contains a brief introduction on the discovery of the Scrolls and a basic bibliography for beginners. It also has selections from a number of texts and excellent photographs to go with each.

One of the points I made in my lecture on Tuesday was that although when people think of the Dead Sea "Scrolls" they tend to think of reasonably complete "scrolls" like this column from 4QTestimonia (4Q175), in fact such well-preserved columns, let alone well-preserved scrolls, are rare. Consider that 1QWords of Moses (1Q22) is thought of as a reasonably well preserved text worth using as an educational showpiece! And consider also that DJD 33 is devoted entirely to 41 photographic plates comprising close to 2900 "unclassified and unidentified" fragments from Cave 4, the vast majority of which bear only a few damaged letters and no readable words.

The much-maligned original team of scholars who reassembled the fragments into manuscripts - insofar as that is possible at all - deserve more credit than they often get. Those manuscripts everyone uses didn't just emerge from those shoe boxes in the form we have them now. The original team spent ten years painstakingly putting the pieces together, using content, script, leather quality and color, and the like as clues. What a dreary and thankless task! If any of them had been inclined to make a copyright issue of the use of their work, I wonder if the rest of us might not be in a little trouble.

Halakhah in the Dead Sea Scrolls?

2005-02-10T12:25:00.000Z

The g-Megillot list is currently discussing whether the term halakhah should be applied to the legal traditions in the DSS. The discussion starts with this message by Stephen Goranson and proceeds from there. Both sides make legitimate points. On the one hand, the word halakhah applies to rabbinic legal traditions on civil, criminal, and religious matters and based on scriptural exegesis, and thus to use it for the Dead Sea Scrolls is an anachronism. And the Scrolls themselves may even polemicize against the term as used by the Pharisees. On the other, the Scrolls are full of such legal traditions based on scriptural exegesis and there isn't another convenient shorthand term for these traditions.

Somewhat similar, perhaps, is the question of using "midrash" for the scriptural exegesis in the Qumran biblical commentaries. The word is an anachronism, but rabbinic midrash does share some of the assumptions and techniques of the Scrolls. In this case I would avoid using "midrash" for the Scrolls, because they give us their own word, pesher, for their commentary technique.

That said, I do tend to refer to halakhah in the Scrolls (see, e.g., the bibliography for 4QMMT). I am by no means alone in this. The ambivalence about the term among Qumranologists is reflected in the Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, where if you look up "Halakhic Works" (p. 328) you will be referred to the article on "Legal Works" (pp. 479-80) in which Larry Schiffman refers to one of the texts as "Halakhah A," following Joseph Baumgarten. Schiffman also applies the term halakhah to 4QMMT in his article on the same (pp. 558-60) and Yaakov Elman has a section on "The Qumran Halakhah" in his "Mishnah and Tosefta" article (pp. 569-74). Schiffman also defends this terminology in his article "The Dead Sea Scrolls and Rabbinic Halakhah" in The Dead Sea Scrolls as Background to Postbiblical Judaism and Early Christianity (ed. Davila), 3-24, esp. p. 5.

It would be nice if we had a good word that applied to the Qumran legal traditions alone, but until then I think a lot of people will continue to say halahkah. As long as we make clear what we mean by it, I don't think this is harmful.

This Wikipedia article on halakhah looks pretty good, although one always has to be cautious with Wikipedia.

Links

2005-02-09T10:08:00.000Z

I should comment briefly on the links section to the right.

You already know about the PaleoJudaica blog and the St. Andrews DSS Website.

The Orion Center is a research center devoted to the study of the Scrolls, which was opened at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem about ten years ago. The Center supports research on the Scrolls at the Hebrew University, sponsors lectures and conferences, and maintains the marvelous Orion Center Website, the most important resource for the Dead Sea Scrolls on the Internet. Note especially the symposia page and the bibliography page. The latter is updated weekly. There's lots more, so it's worth having a good look around.

The g-Megillot list is a moderated discussion list on the Dead Sea Scrolls, administered by Ken Penner, a doctoral student at McMaster University in Ontario. ("Megillot," incidentally, is the Hebrew word for "scrolls.") The list not terribly active, but when there is discussion it's generally worth reading. I encourage you to subscribe if you haven't already.

The other links link leads to the page of links for PaleoJudaica. You'll find much material relevant to the Scrolls, but also lots of things dealing more generally with ancient Judaism, the Hebrew Bible, early Christianity, biblical and related languages, and the ancient Near East. There are links to websites, online texts, journals, news sites, blogs, selected PaleoJudaica posts, some of my own articles and papers, etc.

There are countless other useful websites on the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of which I will mention in the weeks to come.

Also, some of you may be wondering about the photograph. It's from a fragment of 4QGenesis-Exodus^a containing Exod 4:26-5:1 on the right side and Exod 6:4-11 on the left. I took the picture myself back when I was editing the manuscript. You can find the publication of the fragment in DJD 12, pp. 23 and 25-26 (frag. 25 on plate III).

First Lecture

2005-02-08T17:19:00.000Z

My introductory lecture on the Dead Sea Scrolls has now been posted to the St. Andrews Dead Sea Scrolls website.

Welcome

2005-02-08T09:30:00.000Z

Welcome to Qumranica, a blog associated with an honours (i.e. upper division) undergraduate course on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I teach at the University of St. Andrews in St. Andrews, Scotland. The first meeting of the course is today. Please have a look at the "About Qumranica" link (also above and to the right) for detailed information about the course and the blog.

I shall be posting a summary of the opening lecture later today on the St. Andrews Dead Sea Scrolls website and will link to it here. The provisional schedule for the course is already posted on that website and will be updated as the semester progresses. I aim to update the blog at least once a day during weekdays (not excluding weekends if something interesting should happen to come up), so please come back often. And have a look as well at PaleoJudaica.com, my blog on ancient Judaism and its literary and historical context.

We now have at least 14 students signed up for the course, which I believe is a record since I started teaching it. The schedule and bibliography is being updated accordingly. This should be a very rich and interesting semester.