Early Judaism- A Comprehensive Overview

Jewish Law

Qumran sectarian law was characterized by a clear distinction between the

“revealed law” — that is, the written Torah — and the “hidden law” de-

rived by sectarian exegesis and known only to the sectarians. This concept

is clearly different from the rabbinic concept of a dual Torah, which in-

cludes a written law and an oral law. Further, the sectarian view makes no

attempt to trace its second Torah to divine revelation at Sinai, seeing it

rather as something that emerged with divine inspiration from the life of

the sect and its leadership. At the same time, the sectarian system and the

Pharisaic-rabbinic dual Torah both provide for a supplement to the funda-

mental written Torah, solving in slightly different ways the difficult prob-

lem of applying the written Torah to the life of the community. Further,

both groups share the notion that the second Torah was divinely inspired.

True, theTemple Scrollseems to be based on a very different approach; it

assumes that only one Torah was revealed at Sinai, and it enshrines the au-

thor’s interpretations in his law. Such a one-Torah system is at serious vari-

ance with that of the rabbis, but the revealed/hidden approach more

broadly typical of the Qumran texts seems to share some of their funda-

mental concepts.

As is well known, tannaitic literature contains two kinds of halakic

texts: collections of apodictic laws arranged by subject matter (mishnah)

and those organized according to Scripture (midrash). The Qumran legal

materials display both of these options in a “proto-rabbinic” mode. Laws

such as those pertaining to the Sabbath, to courts and testimony, and to

forbidden sexual unions often appear as a series of apodictic laws orga-

nized by subject and titled accordingly. These collections parallel in form

the mishnaic tractates and even have similar titles. Further, texts like the

Temple Scrolland certain fragments of legal texts indicate that some au-

thors chose to express their legal views in the context of Scripture. There is

one essential difference, though. Whereas in rabbinic literature midrashic

exegesis maintains a strict distinction between the words of the Bible and

the words of the rabbinic explanations, theTemple Scrollfreely rewrites the

biblical text in accord with sectarian assumptions. Such an approach

would have been anathema to the rabbis. A further difference involves the

very apodictic statements preserved in Qumran texts. Whereas in rabbinic

literature such statements are composed in mishnaic Hebrew, and there-

fore are linguistically distanced from the biblical texts upon which they

might depend, many Qumran apodictic laws make use of the language of

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lawrence h. schiffman

EERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:04:19 PM