Early Judaism- A Comprehensive Overview

texts that discuss the membership of the movement of the “renewed cov-

enant,” exegetical works that apply scriptural prophecies to the contempo-

rary history and future of the group, eschatological works dealing with the

final war, and religious calendrical texts based on a 364-day calendar.

Because of the content of so-called sectarian texts, especially theRule

of the Community,scholars in the 1950s framed the Qumran-Essene hy-

pothesis of the provenance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which at the end of that

decade had become the paradigm of scrolls scholarship. The scrolls were

assumed to be the remnants of the library of an Essene, or Essene-like, sec-

tarian community that dwelt at Qumran, composed and copied texts, and

hid their manuscripts in various caves before the Romans conquered the

sitein68c.e.At present there are many different modifications of this par-

adigm. Most importantly, there is a broad recognition that not all the com-

positions and scrolls can be attributed to this one “sectarian” group, and

that many texts may have been composed or written somewhere else, be-

fore they were brought to Qumran. Some archaeologists even deny that

Qumran would have been a religious center and therefore assume that all

the scrolls were brought from elsewhere. The following survey offers an

overview of the corpus, a description of the texts and their contribution to

our knowledge of Judaism in the Second Temple period, and critical re-

flections on the nature of the corpus.

The Contours of the Corpus

Although generally the Dead Sea Scrolls are discussed as one corpus, they

comprise the inscribed material from eleven different caves in the vicinity

of the ruins of Qumran. The finds in the caves share many commonalities

but also differ in important respects. Largely or partially intact scrolls have

been found only in Caves 1 and 11. The completely preserved Cave 3Copper

Scrollstands out because of its material, contents, and language. Cave 4,

which yielded more than 15,000 fragments that can be assigned to at least

700 different manuscripts, surrendered far more manuscripts than all

other caves together. In Cave 7 only fragments of Greek texts were found,

and Cave 6 produced a relatively large number of papyrus texts. According

to the current paleographical dating, the texts from Caves 1 and 4 are on

average considerably older than those from Caves 2, 3, 5, 6, and 11. Caves 9

(one shred of papyrus with a few letters) and 10 (a shard of pottery with

two letters) can be ignored in this overview.

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The Dead Sea Scrolls

EERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:04:03 PM