Early Judaism- A Comprehensive Overview

The Nature and Significance of the Corpus

Apart from specific organizational expressions, the rule scrolls attest to

communal ritual, disagreements about calendrical matters, legal rulings

with regard to everyday practices, a cosmological and ethical dualistic

worldview, apocalyptic or eschatological expectations, and views on Scrip-

ture and authority. Many other texts in the corpus reflect the same or simi-

lar interests or views, sometimes expressed in identical formulations. For

example, the introduction of 1QS is directly connected to 1QM since both

oppose the “sons of light” to the “sons of darkness.” Or, with hindsight,

now that we know all the Cave 4 calendrical texts, it is easy to recognize

how both theDamascus Documentand theHymn of the Maskilat the end

of theRule of the Communityput forth a 364-day calendar, a point which is

made even more explicit by the inclusion of the}Ototin one of theRule of

the Communitymanuscripts. A third example — in various compositions,

including the two rules — is the attribution to themakkîlof laws, hymns,

and instructions, which probably indicates that this sage was to recite or

teach them. In other cases, connections between texts consist of multiple

shared locutions, such as those between theApocryphon of Jeremiahand

theDamascus Document.

Such connections illustrate that many works in the corpus are inter-

linked and should be related to a current in early Judaism that comprised

the movements described in theDamascus Documentand theRule of the

Community,and probably also to the circles responsible forJubileesand

theTemple Scroll.It is a challenge for scholarship to unravel the precise re-

lationships among different texts and groups. However, the different ver-

sions of both theDamascus Documentand theRule of the Community,and

the likelihood of different layers in those works, show that within this cur-

rent the different movements and their compositions were in flux and that

they changed and influenced one another. Likewise, manuscripts of other

compositions may have been edited or revised in order to appropriate

them, or to adjust them to the interests of specific copyists or movements,

a phenomenon which can be seen, for example, in the Cave 4 versions of

theAramaic Levi Document.

There is no evidence that before their deposit in the caves all the

manuscripts of the corpus were together as a single collection. Nor can one

know, for that matter, whether all those manuscripts that were together at

a certain time in the same place were actively read and studied or were

merely deposited. Even the status of Cave4—asalibrary,repository, tem-

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eibert tigchelaar

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