Early Jewish Biblical Interpretation
James L. Kugel
Scripture was, by all accounts, a major interest, if not to say an obsession,
among a broad spectrum of Jews in the Second Temple period. People ar-
gued, sometimes violently, about the meaning of this or that verse in the
Torah (Pentateuch), or about the proper way to carry out one or another
of its laws. People alsowrotea great deal about Scripture: numerous com-
positions that have survived from the Second Temple period seek to ex-
plain various scriptural prophecies and songs and stories, and even those
books that are not explicitly exegetical are usually replete with allusions to
Scripture and scriptural interpretation. Moreover, a whole new institution
emerged in this period, the synagogue, a place where people might gather
specifically for the purpose of studying Scripture; indeed, the synagogue
wentontobecomea(onemightevensaythe) major Jewish institution,
both within the land of Israel and in the Diaspora.
But perhaps the most striking evidence of Scripture’s importance
comes from the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of writings found at Qum-
ran, south of Jericho. This library, apparently the possession of a particular
Jewish community that flourished at the end of the Second Temple period,
is itself a most impressive thing, consisting of roughly 800 individual
manuscripts. (It was no doubt still larger at one point: some of its original
contents have certainly been lost to the depredations of nature or human
hands.) The library contained not one or two copies of what was to be-
come our Hebrew Bible, but, for example, thirty-six different manuscripts
of the Psalms, twenty-nine copies of Deuteronomy, and so forth. In all,
these scriptural manuscripts made up a little more than a quarter of the li-
brary’s total contents. But the remaining three-quarters were scarcely less
tied to Scripture: nearly all of these other compositions seek, in one way or151EERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:03:59 PM