Early Judaism- A Comprehensive Overview

The traditional paleographic dating of the manuscripts ranges from

the mid-third centuryb.c.e.to the end of the first centuryc.e., but the

vast majority of the manuscripts date to the first centuryb.c.e.Radiocar-

bon analysis of manuscripts by and large gives date ranges from the late

third centuryb.c.e.to the early second centuryc.e., even though for spe-

cific samples paleographic and radiocarbon datings disagree. No manu-

scripts are internally dated, and the few texts that mention identifiable his-

torical persons refer to figures that lived in the second century and

especially in the first half of the first centuryb.c.e.

The near completion of the publication of all materials in the 1990s

has enabled new approaches to the corpus, by allowing scholars to corre-

late different kinds of subsets within the corpus. For example, one may

contrast collections from different caves, compare “biblical” texts written

in the so-called Qumran scribal practice to other “biblical” texts, or use the

date of the hands of manuscripts in order to trace chronological develop-

ments in the corpus.

Scholarly Categorizations Old and New

Classifications of the different kinds of Dead Sea Scrolls have shifted over

time, as more scrolls became known, and as scholarly concepts, terminol-

ogy, and interpretations changed. Initially, on the basis of the Cave 1 finds,

the scrolls were roughly classified in three categories: (1) biblical or canon-

ical; (2) apocryphal and/or pseudepigraphal; and (3) sectarian or Essene.

This old categorization was partly based on genre and content of texts but

also implied a historical view according to which (with the exception of

Daniel) canonical books preceded apocryphal and pseudepigraphal ones,

which in turn were older than the sectarian texts. At the same time, this

three-part division was thought to reflect the literature of respectively all

Jews, some Jews, and only the Dead Sea Scrolls sect. Gradually, the prob-

lematic categories of apocrypha and pseudepigrapha were subsumed in a

broader general category of “parabiblical texts,” and the initial tripartite

scholarly categorization was in practice limited to two sets of oppositions,

“biblical” versus “nonbiblical,” and “sectarian” versus “nonsectarian,”

which influence scholarship up to the present.

The publication of all the Cave 4 materials and their subsequent anal-

ysis has required a thorough revision of those earlier classifications. The

corpus does not conform to anachronistic assumptions connected to the

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The Dead Sea Scrolls

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