The Dead Sea Scrolls for a New Millennium

The Dead Sea Scrolls for a New Millennium

Phillip R. Callaway

Copyright © 2011 Phillip R. Callaway. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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isbn 13: 978-1-60899-660-5

eisbn 13: 978-1-62189-337-0

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Callaway, Phillip R.

The Dead Sea scrolls for a new millennium / Phillip R. Callaway.

xii + 226 p. ; 23 cm—Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 13: 978-1-60899-660-5

1. Dead Sea scrolls. 2. Dead Sea scrolls—History. 3. Qumran community—History. I. Title.

BM487 C3 2011

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Scriptural quotations are from the Oxford Annotated Bible/Revised Standard Version © 1962.

Pitts Theology Library, Emory University for use of images from their Digital Image Archives © 2011

Paleography of the Scrolls, Treasure Locations of the Copper Scroll, and Temple Scroll’s Courts are from Philip R. Davies, George J. Brooke, and Phillip R. Callaway, The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls. London: Thames & Hudson ©2002

Map of Israel in New Testament Times is from http://www.bible.history.com/maps/palestine_nt_times.html © 2011

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Abbreviations

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Editing the Scrolls

Chapter 3: The World of the Scrolls

Chapter 4: The Caves, the Scrolls, and the Site Khirbet Qumran

Chapter 5: The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Chapter 6: The Pseudepigrapha, the Apocrypha, and the Scrolls

Chapter 7: The Community Scrolls

Chapter 8: The Scrolls and Jewish History

Chapter 9: Epilogue

Bibliography

Notes

To Azusa

Preface

Studying the Dead Sea Scrolls is a fascinating way to spend one’s life. Along the way you are permitted to share what you have learned with others who care about the Scrolls. You are constantly asking yourself what they meant in the past and what they might mean for the future. My fortune has been to have been introduced to the Scrolls by John H. Hayes in his class on the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. It was amazing to discover that so much ancient Jewish literature had not been part of the canon I knew. Hayes also introduced me to Josephus’ Antiquities , War , and Life . With Hartmut Stegemann at the Qumranforschungsstelle in Marburg and Göttingen, Germany I first read Yadin’s Hebrew transcription of the Temple Scroll , the Aramaic fragments of Enoch, got a taste of Some of the Works of the Law , and realized that reconstructing history is a very human enterprise just as is the reconstruction of partial scrolls. In Philip R. Davies, a stimulating conversationalist, I found a scholar of similar curiosity and a willingness to question the status quo in Dead Sea Scrolls studies.

When I study the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (DJD), I understand how much I have learned from and admire the editors of each volume in that incredible scholarly series. No doubt, I have also profited from all the preliminary editions that I have read in the journals and several editions of scrolls outside DJD. No doubt, I have also been influenced by numerous authors who have written on the Scrolls.

Above all, studying the Dead Sea Scrolls has shown me that I, too, am one of those clearing a path in wilderness, which is mentioned in Isaiah and the Rule of the Community (1QS). I too have spent a goodly portion of my life reading and re-reading the ancient manuscripts trying to get to know their authors, editors, and scribes, attempting to understand why they would think such a thing and decide to write it down. The first part of my personal journey with the Scrolls focused on the 364-day calendar as a central reason for the emergence of the Qumran community. In the next stage of my adventure I asked quite seriously whether one can reconstruct a history of the Qumran community based on the language of the so-called historical Scrolls. I did this because I wanted to study history and not theology. The Dead Sea Scrolls are certainly historical, but preserve little material for writing a history of the Qumran community within the broader context of Second Temple Judaism. In the last twenty years I began to feel that the Scrolls represent the library or personal collections of people like Ben Sira and his grandfather. In short, I realized that the Scrolls are not the vestiges of an insignificant hyper-orthodox group that rejected everything about their traditions. In fact, just the opposite seems to be the case. The Dead Sea Scrolls represent the largest collection of Jewish literature in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek that existed in the Second Temple period and, for that matter, in the First Temple period. It is a very traditional collection compared with the historical writings of Josephus and the philosophical tomes of Philo. Nevertheless, it has its own emphases and surprises.

As supplemental or comparative reading to The Dead Sea Scrolls for a New Millennium, I would also like to recommend James C. VanderKam’s The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (2010), Lawrence H. Schiffman’s Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls (1994), Hartmut Stegemann’s The Library of Qumran (1998), Martin Abegg, Jr., Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich’s, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible (1999), and Geza Vermes’, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (1997).

English quotations from the Jewish Bible come from my copy of the Oxford Annotated Bible/Revised Standard Version (1962). English quotations of the non-biblical Scrolls derive from Geza Vermes’ translation, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (1997). English quotations of readings from the biblical manuscripts depend greatly on the translation of Abegg, Flint, and Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible (1999).

Abbreviations

Ant. Josephus, Antiquities of the Judeans

b. Babylonian Talmud (Babli)

BA Biblical Archaeologist

BAR Biblical Archaeology Review

BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research

Bib Biblica

BR Bible Review

col. column

DSD Dead Sea Discoveries

frag. fragment

IEJ Israel Exploration Journal

JBLSup Journal of Biblical Literature Supplement

JJS Journal of Jewish Studies

JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplements

l. line

LXX Septuagint

m. Mishnah

MT Masoretic text

NTS New Testament Studies

PJBR The Polish Journal for Biblical Research

QC The Qumran Chronicle

RB Revue Biblique

RQ Revue de Qumran

Sam Samaritan Pentateuch

STDJ Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah

VTSup Vetus Testamentum Supplement

War Josephus, Judean War

Temple Scroll Courts

Copyright © Thames and Hudson. Used with permission.

Treasure Locations of the Copper Scroll

Copyright © Thames and Hudson. Used with permission.

one

Introduction

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the search for other scrolls, the attempts to sell and acquire the scrolls, and the ensuing fireworks among scholars about proprietorship could be transformed into a script for an exhilarating action movie. Numerous times the exotic, mysterious, and controversial scrolls from the Qumran caves have been featured in cable television documentaries. Even at the grocery store, the front page of a gossip magazine prints a headline saying that a Dead Sea Scroll predicted the birth of the messiah or the end of the world.

At some time in 1946–47 three young bedouin were herding their flocks of goats or sheep near the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, known in the area as the Salt Sea along the cliffs in the Judaean wilderness. According to one story, a boy named Muhammed ed-Dib (‘the Wolf’) cast a stone into a cave and heard something break. He entered finding several large jars. He left, but he returned with a friend or two. They looked into the ten jars discovering in one of them three bundles, two of which were wrapped in linen. Back in the camp they opened one of the linen bundles and unraveled leather inscribed in a language they did not know. Eventually, they brought their bundles to an antiquities dealer called Kando (Khalil Iskander Shahin) in Bethlehem. A middle man named George Isaiah transported the written materials to a Syrian monastery called St. Mark’s in Jerusalem. Furtive trips to the cave resulted in the discovery of a total of seven scrolls. It seems likely that the Syrian Metropolitan Yeshua Samuel himself was involved in this treasure hunt. The Metropolitan paid £24 (about $100 at the time) for four of the scrolls—later identified as an Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa), a Manual of Discipline (here the Rule of the Community, 1QS), a Commentary on Habakkuk (1QpHab), and a Commentary on Genesis, now known as the Genesis Apocryphon (1QGenApoc). This is, of course, a simplified version of what happened and the people involved.

When Professor Eleazar Sukenik of the Hebrew University was contacted, he traveled to Bethlehem in November 1947 where he saw and purchased the other three scrolls—a scroll of Thanksgiving Hymns (1QH), a War Scroll (here the Rule of War, 1QM), and an Isaiah Scroll (1QIsab). He recognized the writing as Hebrew and had some appreciation for their antiquity and value from his study of first century tomb inscriptions.

The Metropolitan also contacted the famous American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) located in what was then Jordanian Jerusalem. A researcher named John Trever photographed the scrolls and turning to his own paleographical charts realized that these scrolls were undoubtedly ancient. They shared their opinions with William F. Albright, a renowned archaeologist and epigrapher in Baltimore, Maryland. Albright placed them in the time of Judas Maccabeus and wrote: . . . the greatest MS [manuscript] discovery of modern times!¹ On April 12, 1948 The Times (London) announced this discovery of ancient scrolls which, according to the press release from ASOR, had belonged to a monastic order like the ancient Essenes. Two weeks later the New York Times reported on Sukenik’s scrolls.

Albright wrote that these scrolls would revolutionize intertestamental studies, and . . . soon antiquate all present handbooks on the background of the New Testament and on the textual criticism and interpretation of the Old Testament.² What a claim to make based on two scrolls of Isaiah and five other scrolls, one of which reminded Millar Burrows at Yale University of the Discipline of the Methodist Church, two commentaries on biblical books, a hymnal, and a sort of war manual. In 1954 the Metropolitan Samuel took his four scrolls to the United States where he advertized them in the Wall Street Journal. The State of Israel purchased them for $250,000 dollars, becoming the sole proprietors of the seven scrolls from Cave 1.

As scholars began archaeological work at the site Khirbet Qumran, about 1 km southeast of Cave 1, another ten caves were found. During the next decade the remains of about 850 manuscripts written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek were discovered. In fact, Cave 4 proved to hold the mother lode, nearly 10,000 fragments from 500 ancient manuscripts. Albright was correct in dubbing the first seven manuscripts as revolutionary, but Caves 4 and 11 revealed that those seven were only a portion of the nearly one thousand manuscripts from all the caves. The Dead Sea Scrolls have become the literary basis or the prism through which we now try to understand ancient Judaism, the parent of rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and other sectors of ancient Judaism of which we knew little to nothing before the discovery of the Scrolls.

Other Early Scrolls Discoveries

In search of the original text of the Bible the Christian scholar Origen (185–284 CE) collected and studied Hebrew and Greek manuscripts known during his time.³ Around 230–238 CE the Christian scholar Origen began a project he hoped would encourage dialogue between Christians and Jews. He decided to collect and present known Hebrew and Greek texts of the Jewish Bible. From left to right he included the Hebrew text current during his day, a translation of the same text into Greek characters, followed by the Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachus, the LXX, and Theodotion for some works of the Bible. Origen also used incomplete versions of the Quinta, the Sexta, and the Septima. His synoptic Bible seems to have existed in several different versions. He used a system of symbols to indicate additions and omissions in the Hebrew and Greek text when compared with the standard texts of his day.

In his Hexapla, a work in six parts, Origen reproduced the most important of those manuscripts. The sixth version of the Psalms in his Hexapla reportedly came from a jar found near Jericho, a city 12 km (7.5 miles) north of the Qumran caves.

Although Origen believed that the original LXX text was closest to the Hebrew text he knew (similar to the Masoretic Text), many of its readings were felt to be even older. Evidence from the biblical manuscripts at Qumran make clear that many Hebrew and Greek readings that may have been older continued to circulate even after the destruction of the Jerusalem and its temple in 70 CE.

It is estimated that Origen’s Hexapla ran at least to five hundred pages in fifteen volumes. The most valuable manuscripts of his Hexapla are Codex Sarravanius (G), Coislianus (M), which includes the Pentateuch and some of the historical books, and the Chi’zi manuscripts 86 and 88, which preserve the prophets.

Origen’s collection of ancient manuscripts and his textual notations about comparative readings was actually a harbinger of what one would eventual discover among the Dead Sea Scrolls. These scrolls leave no room for anyone to doubt that hundreds, if not thousands, of ancient readings in biblical works had their own intrinsic value for posterity. The scrolls even go beyond that in showing that the production of many other writings, some of which might easily have been viewed as scriptural, were customarily copied, read, and studied in the Hasmonean and Herodian periods.

The Christian church historian, Eusebius, also mentioned the Psalms text from Jericho that had been discovered during the reign of the Roman emperor Caracalla (211–217 CE). At some time before 805 CE, Timotheus I (727–819), the Nestorian patriarch of Seleucia, told the Mar or Metropolitan Sergius that trustworthy Jewish converts to Christianity reported that Jews from Jerusalem had discovered (and most likely retrieved) manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible and other texts in a chamber in the rocks. According to this story, more than two hundred psalms of David were among those manuscripts.

Almost exactly a half a century before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University uncovered a huge collection of medieval manuscripts in a synagogue in Cairo, Egypt. There is a famous photograph in which Professor Schechter is immortalized sitting hunched over a table covered with leaves of manuscripts reading.⁴ Around him are scattered crates full of the loose leaves of medieval Jewish writings. The one most relevant to the Dead Sea Scrolls Schechter originally dubbed Fragments of a Zadokite Work. Later it was called the Damascus Document (CD). Numerous fragments of this work were found in some of Qumran’s Caves 4–6, indicating that the heritage of this medieval work clearly lay in the distant Jewish past. Schechter discerned a manuscript A and a manuscript B. Part of the work constitutes a sermon explaining what God had done and still plans to do with his people. It speaks of a new covenant in the land of Damascus. Experts have long argued whether the reference to Damascus should be taken literally. There has been no doubt, however, that the reference to the new covenant suggests that the old covenant had not been successful and needed improvement or replacement.

The other part of this work is a legal codex of sorts preserving laws apparently for those who lived the traditional married life with a spouse and children and other laws for those who seem to have lived in single-gendered groups, presumably men. The Damascus Document comes from a group that advocated a most rigorous interpretation of the Law of Moses. The individual laws mentioned include swearing oaths (compare Matt 5:37); vows and free-will offerings; leprosy and other contagions; sexual intercourse; the Gentiles; the Sabbath; and monthly support for orphans, widows, and victims of war. In several places words like the Priests, the Levites, and the Zadokites are given special interpretations. Serpents are identified as kings of the peoples, and Greece is referred to in particular, indicating that this ancient writing belonged originally to a Hellenistic context. A teacher, a liar, and the future messiah of Aaron and Israel, and a book of jubilees and weeks are also mentioned. Most scholars take this to mean the famous Book of Jubilees, an important pseudepigraphical work from intertestamental times. Most readers today would be struck by the rather extensive Sabbath laws. The Damascus Document and related fragments from the Qumran caves will be discussed later.

Some Perspective

The Dead Sea Scrolls constitute the oldest and most expansive collection of ancient Jewish literature found to date. Palaeographers, physicists, and archaeologists have dated the Scrolls roughly from 300 BCE to 70 CE. It has been estimated that about 850 manuscripts survived, although in damaged form, in the Qumran caves. In addition to the 200 or so biblical manuscripts that have been easily identified before they were known from later codices, about 650 other manuscripts came from non-biblical works. Because of the Scrolls’ discoveries, scholars now know much more about the broad array of Jewish religious thinking in the pre-Christian era than ever before. These Scrolls are causing everyone to rethink what we knew about Judaism before the fall of the temple in 70 CE.

Scholars usually speak of manuscripts even when they are referring to one or more fragments that look like they were penned in the same style by a single individual writing about the same topic. Sometimes it may not be clear to the modern reader that scholars have had to reassemble fragments in order to make complete sense of an ancient manuscript. Often such a fragment may consist of a few words, verses, or partial verses. Excluding the great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa), the rest of the Jewish Bible from the Qumran caves is highly fragmentary. One hardly ever finds more than contiguous portions of two partial columns. The Temple Scroll is a rare example of a non-biblical scroll that is very close to being complete. If one compares the surviving incomplete portions of Genesis through Malachi, roughly 300 (27%) of the Bible’s 1,100 chapters did not survive in the Qumran caves. On the positive side, nearer 75% did.

If one compares the literary remains from the sites Masada, Nahal Hever/Seiyal, and Murabba’at with the Dead Sea Scrolls, one gains an illustrative perspective from antiquity.⁵ At Masada archaeologists found portions of Genesis, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Ezekiel, Jubilees, Ben Sira, an apocryphal Joshua, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, and a text presumed to have been of Samaritan origin. The few texts from Masada look like the Qumran collection, but on a much more limited scale. Nahal Hever/Seiyal yield parts of Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, and Zechariah, all of which belong to the Minor Prophets. At Murabba’at parts of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and phylacteries were found. Even when taken together, these sites contribute only portions of 23 literary works compared with the 850 or so manuscripts from the Qumran caves. The Qumran collection differs chiefly by including literally hundreds of non-biblical and community-oriented texts of which no one had heard before the first discoveries in 1947. The surviving scrolls have now been published. Most of the professional controversies among scholars have been laid to rest, even if every interpretive problem about the Scrolls has not been resolved. In the new millennium one will value the Scrolls from newer and fresher perspectives.

Observations on the Scrolls

Now that the Dead Sea Scrolls are fully published it is possible to make both general and specific observations about the entire collection.

1. Parts of all the writings of the traditional Hebrew Bible are represented.

2. The Bible manuscripts reflect different degrees of conformity to the Masoretic Hebrew text, the Samaritan text, and the Hebrew that apparently underlay the Greek translation.

3. Some of these manuscripts are tightly connected with the known books of the Jewish Bible, but their specific details seem to be rather independent.

4. Greek manuscripts of the Pentateuch were also found, indicating that its owners used Greek scriptures.

5. Writings that previously had only been known in later Christian canonical lists now seem to be Jewish in origin.

6. Many other new pseudepigrapha by or about scriptural personalities show that hagiography had become an accepted component of Second Temple religious literature.

7. Many new liturgical pieces, prayers, and hymns appear, often having some connection to daily worship.

8. Many phylacteries and mezuzot reflect both traditional and flexible attitudes toward prayer texts.

9. Affiliated with these texts, several writings were discovered that advocate or assume the liturgical use of a 364-day divine year opposed to a 354-day calendar.

10. Some works underscore the division of world time into jubilees and weeks.

11. A handful of writings is concerned with astronomy, astrology, and meteorology.

12. Numerous writings reveal an enhanced interest in the role of angels both in heaven and on earth.

13. Many writings reflect ancient contemporary interpretation of words and phrases in the Jewish Bible. Sometimes legal texts are read together or against each other. At other times a biblical narrative has been embellished to emphasize the piety of the ancients, to prove that even they were able to obey God’s law, or to show that a certain historical event occurred on specific dates in a 364-day year. In other works, such as the thematic and running commentaries, the words of a text are viewed as prophetic but additionally as having a special eschatological meaning for the near future.

14. A few fragments refer by name to known people and events of the first century BCE and perhaps the first century CE.

15. One major work is a long list of treasures hidden especially to the east and north of Jerusalem.

16. Some manuscripts were penned in paleo-Hebrew, therefore giving the impression of antiquity and credibility to these works.

17. A few works were composed in a Hebrew closer to the language of the Mishnah than to the language of the late books of the Jewish Bible.

18. Several writings reflect the communal and theological interests of at least two ancient Jewish groups that were somehow related and their memberships.

The Scrolls reveal what Second Temple Judaism had become after the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Many of the same interests are there, but to a greater degree. Interpretations of divine law and prophetic pronouncements were taken seriously. Private religious associations were formed that in some cases demanded devotion to the study of the classics. These groups must have maintained allegiance to the Jerusalem temple to varying degrees, but they also emphasized that study of the ancients and prayer with the proper intention held as much value as a bloody sacrifice at the temple. Such private associations led inevitably to innovations and reforms. The Scrolls provide a broader literary backdrop against which one can