porary place of concealment, or perhaps even a genizah — is unclear. And
we do not know the precise historical events that led to their deposit in dif-
ferent caves near Qumran. But from the contents of the manuscripts, we
may conclude that the corpus is not a random reflection of all kinds of
available Jewish texts of the time but representative of a specific current in
early Judaism.
Two vital perspectives are constitutive of the corpus. First, the cor-
pus as a whole — fromJubileesand theTemple Scrollto the pesharim, le-
gal texts, and Moses apocrypha — attests to a variety of strategies for in-
terpreting Scripture, ranging from reworking and various degrees of
rewriting, to expansion with new scriptures, exegesis, and commentary.
Some texts in the corpus imply, others indicate explicitly, that the correct
interpretation of Scripture is attained by exegesis, which may be con-
firmed by divine revelation of those things that hitherto had been hid-
den (i.e., not included in the Scriptures). The authority of interpreted
Scripture may also go beyond the traditional “rewritten Scripture” texts
and hold true for hymns and prayers like theHodayot.For the study of
the corpus, this perspective demands a more sophisticated approach in
differentiating between the Scriptures and other writings, between reve-
lation and interpretation.
Second, by and large the corpus represents a legal interpretive tradi-
tion that can be related to bothJubileesand theTemple Scroll(notwith-
standing differences between those two works). The most decisive element
is the 364-day calendar as the basis for the religious festival calendar, which
is either stated explicitly or implied in a variety of texts of the corpus (e.g.,
Jubilees, Temple Scroll, David’s Compositionsin the Cave 11Psalms Scroll,
Commentary on Genesis A, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice,as well as a vari-
ety of calendrical texts). It is moot to what extent this 364-day festival cal-
endar was actually designed on the basis of scriptural exegesis, or was
practiced in some form in pre-Seleucid times. In both cases, the adherence
to a 364-day calendar, as opposed to the one observed in the Temple, links
the different circles and movements represented in the corpus.
From this perspective, and with the limited undisputed historical data
we have, it makes most sense to study the corpus primarily as the product
of a specific early Jewish current consisting of different interlinked groups
and movements with a common interpretative approach to Scripture and
a shared legal tradition.225
The Dead Sea ScrollsEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:04:04 PM