‘jewish doctrine takes three forms’ 147
the Baptist, Jesus and Philo, he must have been well aware that other
types of Judaism existed in his day. Hence, rather than interpret the Dead
Sea scrolls through the lens of what Josephus tells us about other groups
(most often, the Essenes), the nature of the community (or communities)
of these distinctive sectarians must be examined in its own right.^61
Many of the scrolls contain biblical texts, hymns, wisdom writings
and other material which could have been used by any branch of Juda-
ism in this period. The scrolls include fragments of every book of the
Hebrew Bible apart from Esther, with multiple copies particularly of the
Pentateuch and Psalms, texts of Bible interpretation (like the Aramaic
Genesis Apocryphon, which smooths out the stories of Genesis) and
liturgical works like the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, depicting angelic
worship, which could have been uplifting for any Jew engaged in devout
prayer:
For the Master. Song of the holocaust of the seventh Sabbath on the six-
teenth of the month. Praise the most high God, O you high among all the
gods of knowledge. Let the holy ones of the ‘gods’ sanctify the King of
glory, who sanctifies by his holiness all his holy ones. O Princes of the
praises of all the ‘gods’, praise the God of majestic praises, for in the splen-
dour of praises is the glory of His kingship. In it are (contained) the praises
of all the ‘gods’ together with the splendour of all [His] king[ship]. Exalt
His exaltation on high, O ‘gods’, above the gods on high, and His glor-
ious divinity above all the highest heights. For He [is the God of gods],
of all the Princes on high, and the King of king[s] of all the eternal
councils ...^62
But alongside remnants of a more general Judaism, the caves also
housed copies of rules which presuppose a sectarian community or
communities, and of distinctive forms of Bible interpretation which
claim that the real meaning of some parts of scripture is related to the
history of this community. How the rest of the scrolls relate to the sect-
arian texts has proved difficult to establish. The scrolls were found in
eleven natural caves scattered in the hills above the settlement at Qum-
ran. Most are parchment, but some are made from papyrus, and one
enigmatic text, which lists hiding places of treasure, is written (for rea-
sons unknown) on copper.
Scientific investigation has confirmed the dating of these objects to
approximately 2,000 years ago, and painstaking scholarship has now
pieced together and deciphered almost all the fragments. But major
problems of interpretation remain in relating the scrolls to each other