Early Judaism- A Comprehensive Overview

term “biblical.” This realization has provoked discussions of whether texts

like theReworked Pentateuchmanuscripts are biblical, or whetherJubilees

or theTemple Scrollhad scriptural status for the group that collected the

scrolls. Also, consideration of the corpus as a whole challenges the view

that all the hitherto-unknown texts were written by only one group and

suggests that they originated in different movements at different times.

The result is that the sharp contrasts between the two sets of oppositions,

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

broken down; scholars now allow for different degrees of authoritativeness

of scriptures and varying kinds of sectarianism. From a practical view, a

classification with two sets of oppositions also has limited value, since

most newly published manuscripts should have been assigned to the cate-

gories “nonbiblical” and “nonsectarian.” The large increase in known ma-

terials does, however, enable one to classify the materials differently, ac-

cording to literary form, content, or function of compositions. Such new

classifications of the material can be found in the translations of García

Martínez and Vermes, and in a more elaborate form in Lange’s overview in

DJD 39. In Lange’s classification of the nonbiblical texts, which has been

adopted by theDead Sea Scrolls Reader,we find categories such as

“parabiblical,” “exegetical,” “concerned with religious law,” “calendrical,”

“poetical,” “liturgical,” “sapiential,” “historical,” “apocalyptic,” “eschato-

logical,” and more.

The Texts and Early Judaism

The present survey does not aim at a strict categorization of the manu-

scripts but rather discusses the corpus and the most important texts the-

matically. It aspires to relate the materials to present scholarly discussion

and to clarify what they contribute to the knowledge of early Judaism.

Authoritative Scriptures and the Formation of the Bible

In general the term “biblical” is used, anachronistically, but for practical

reasons, for those scrolls which contained the text, or part of the text, of

one or more compositions that would later be included in the Tanak. Alto-

gether, the corpus contains more than two hundred Hebrew and Aramaic

“biblical” manuscripts,” five manuscripts with Greek translations of

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eibert tigchelaar

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