apparently addressed to a leader of Israel, and it outlines the reasons for
the separation of a sectarian group from the majority of the people. The
reasons had to do with issues of calendar and purity, and the scroll shows
that halakic issues (issues of religious law) were vital to the raison d’être of
the sect. The positions taken on these issues typically disagreed with those
associated with the Pharisees in rabbinic literature and agreed with those
of the Sadducees on some points. The scroll showed beyond any doubt
that the kinds of issues debated in the Mishnah and Talmud were of great
concern already in the late Second Temple period (Schiffman in Oppen-
heimer 1999: 205-19), and that in this respect any account of Judaism based
only on the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha would be incomplete.
A third phase in the study of the scrolls began when the entire corpus
became generally available in the early 1990s, and the editorial team was
greatly expanded under the leadership of Emanuel Tov. It is now possible
to get a more balanced view of the entire corpus.
Whatever their relation to “Enochic Judaism,” the scrolls testify to the
pervasive authority and influence of the Mosaic Torah. They provide im-
portant evidence about the development of the biblical text. The majority
of the textual witnesses are close to the Masoretic Text, but there were also
other textual forms in circulation. In some cases it is difficult to decide
whether a given text is a variant form of the biblical text or a deliberate ad-
aptation of it, in the manner of “rewritten bible,” such as we find inJubi-
lees.TheTemple Scrollreinterprets the legal traditions of Leviticus and
Deuteronomy by presenting them in rewritten form as a revelation to Mo-
ses. In this way the writer’s interpretation of the biblical laws is invested
with the authority of the revelation at Sinai. Some scholars have argued
that theTemple Scrollwas intended to replace the Torah as the definitive
law for the end of days (Wacholder 1983; Wise 1990: 184). Others argue that
it presupposes the authority of the biblical text and is intended as a com-
panion piece and guide to its interpretation (Najman 1999). It is, however,
presented as a direct revelation from God, and it does not acknowledge the
more familiar Torah. While it probably presupposes the validity of that To-
rah on some matters, it would seem to supersede it on the issues that it ac-
tually discusses. The scrolls also contain many examples of explicit com-
mentary, most notably in the pesharim, which date from the first century
b.c.e.and are the oldest extant formal biblical commentaries. The com-
mentaries are primarily on prophetic texts, including Psalms, and relate
them to the history of the sect and the “end of days.” Especially interesting
is the so-calledPesher on Genesis(4Q252), which combines a paraphrase of18john j. collinsEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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