Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah

The Hellenistic period was a pivotal moment in the history of the Jewish priesthood. The waning days of the Persian empire coincided with the continued ascendance of the high priest and Jerusalem temple as powerful political, cultural, and religious institutions in Judea. The Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran, only recently published in full, testify to the existence of a flourishing but previously unknown Jewish literary tradition dating from the end of Persian rule to the rise of the Hasmoneans. Throughout this book, Robert Jones analyzes how Israel’s priestly institutions are represented in these writings, and he demonstrates that they are essential for understanding the Jewish priesthood at this crucial stage in its history.

Now available in Open Access thanks to the support of the University of Helsinki.

In this volume, Hanna Vanonen offers a fresh view to the Milhamah and Sefer ha-Milhamah manuscripts by producing a thorough close-reading analysis of them, paying attention not only to their contents but also to manuscripts as material artifacts. Vanonen demonstrates that studying the stability and instability of the War traditions does more justice to the complex material than a traditional chronological literary-critical model. In addition, Vanonen argues that at least liturgical use and study purposes may have created needs for producing different manuscripts that were simultaneously important.

"V. has provided a solid and well documented study of all significant fragments of the War Texts from Cave 4 and 11...her careful observation of the material facts is a fresh and important contribution to the understanding of the various purposes, audiences, and uses of these manuscripts." Jean Duhaime, Montreal, Theologische Literaturzeitung 149 (2024) 1/2

The eighteen studies in this volume in honor of Moshe Bernstein on the occasion of his 70th birthday mostly engage with Jewish scriptural interpretation, the principal theme of Bernstein’s own research career as expressed in his collected essays, Reading and Re-Reading Scripture at Qumran (Brill, 2013).
The essays develop a variety of aspects of scriptural interpretation. Although many of them are chiefly concerned with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the significant contribution of the volume as a whole is the way that even those studies are associated with others that consider the broader context of Jewish scriptural interpretation in late antiquity. As a result, a wider frame of reference for scriptural interpretation impinges upon how scripture was read and re-read in the scrolls from Qumran.

In Turning Proverbs towards Torah, Elisa Uusimäki offers the first monograph on the early Jewish wisdom text 4Q525 from Qumran. Following the reconstruction of the fragmentary manuscript, Uusimäki analyses the text with a focus on the reception and renewal of the Proverbs tradition and the ways in which 4Q525 illustrates aspects of Jewish pedagogy in the late Second Temple period. She argues that the author was inspired by Proverbs 1-9 but sought to demonstrate that true wisdom is found in the concept of torah. He also weaved dualistic elements and eschatological ideas into the wisdom frame. The author's intention, Uusimäki argues, is to form the audience spiritually, encouraging it to trust in divine protection and blessings that are bestowed upon the pious.

Many types of tradition and interpretation found in later Jewish and Christian writings trace their origins to the Second Temple period, but their transmission and transformation followed different paths within the two religious communities. For example, while Christians often translated and transmitted discrete Second Temple texts, rabbinic Judaism generally preserved earlier traditions integrated into new literary frameworks. In both cases, ancient traditions were often transformed to serve new purposes but continued to bear witness to their ancient roots. Later compositions may even provide the key to clarifying obscurities in earlier texts. The contributions in this volume explore the dynamics by which earlier texts and traditions were transmitted and transformed in these later bodies of literature and their attendant cultural contexts.

The Hebrew of the Late Second Temple Period is directly attested in the Scrolls from Qumran and other manuscripts discovered in the Judaean Desert. Indirectly, it is also found in some manuscripts copied in later times, which still preserve linguistic elements of the Hebrew from the period in which the texts were authored. Often referred to as the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls or Qumran Hebrew, and positioned chronologically between Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew, its nature remains disputed. Some essays in this volume deal with linguistic and philological problems of this Late Second Temple Period Hebrew. Other papers discuss the nature and linguistic profile of the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This book is the English translation of the new edition of the Copper Scroll of Qumran Cave 3 (3Q15). The restoration of the three sheets of copper by the Mécénat of the French Electric Company (EDF) in the 1990s made an improved decipherment possible. The physical restoration of the complete scroll is published in the two large volumes of the French edition accompanied by many photographs and drawings, which the reader will find to be sufficient. Le Rouleau de cuivre de la Grotte 3 de Qumrân (3Q15). Expertise - Restauration - Épigraphie. Volume I - Texte, Volume II - Planches (2006). The English translation of the new edition of the engraved text will favor easier access to the new results for a wider public.

The Cave 4 Apocryphon of Jeremiah C from Qumran survives in several copies, and presents significant links between the prophet Jeremiah, the scriptural book of Jeremiah, and the collectors of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Because the prophet is only occasionally named in the Scrolls, and there are only a few clear instances where the book is cited, Jeremiah appears to have had a limited impact on the imagination of the Qumranites. However, through a careful appraisal of the Apocryphon manuscripts, and a reconsideration of Jeremiah's influence in the Dead Sea Scrolls via his reputational authority, this study shows that clusters of traditions were tied to Jeremiah’s prophetic and priestly distinction, with an emphasis on matters of leadership and empire.

Women in the Bible, Qumran and Early Rabbinic Literature: Their Status and Roles portrays the tension between the unity of husband and wife and their different legal and social status from a wide range of perspectives, as deduced from the texts of the three corpora. The volume discusses the related topics of divorce, polygamy, woman’s obligations to fulfill precepts, membership in the community, genealogy and attitudes toward sex, such as rejection of asceticism. Women in the Bible, Qumran and Early Rabbinic Literature begins with an objective interpretation of the biblical narratives of the Creation and the Fall, the intellectual basis of Jewish attitudes toward women, and then analyzes the divergent interpretations of Qumran and the Rabbis, the grounds of their distinct doctrines and halakhot.

Psalms or Psalter? This study creates a new, solid foundation for discussions on the psalm manuscripts found in the Judean Desert. A variety of explanatory models, statistics and synthetic hypotheses have already been produced in the course of numerous analyses and interpretations. However, the disparate and fragmentary character of the manuscripts has barely received any attention since the main focus has mostly been on discussions of the content. For the first time, the entire preserved fragment material of the psalm manuscripts from the Judean Desert is here being presented and edited as a whole. In this way, it can be defined and analyzed in future studies.
New ways of exploring the contents will particularly result with regard to the best preserved psalm roll, 11QPs a.

Psalmen oder Psalter? Die vorliegende Studie schafft eine neue, tragfähigere Basis für die Auseinandersetzung um die Psalmenhandschriften aus der Wüste Juda. Im Rahmen zahlreicher Analysen und Interpretationen wurden schon vielfältige Erklärungsmodelle, Statistiken und Gesamthypothesen zu den Psalmenhandschriften geliefert. Da das Hauptaugenmerk der meisten Untersuchungen bislang auf der inhaltlichen Auseinandersetzung lag, wurde der disparate und fragmentarische Charakter der Manuskripte kaum berücksichtigt.
Erstmals wird nun das gesamte erhaltene Fragmentenmaterial der Psalmenhandschriften aus der Wüste Juda umfassend dargestellt und aufbereitet. Auf diese Weise lässt es sich definieren und für weitere Untersuchungen auswerten.
Gerade in Hinsicht auf die besterhaltene Psalmenrolle 11QPs a ergeben sich so ganz neue Wege zur Erschließung der Handschrift.    

The relationships between Pauline literature and the Dead Sea scrolls have fascinated specialists ever since the latter were first discovered. Now that all the Qumran scrolls have been published, it is possible to see more clearly the amplitude and impact of this corpus on first century Judaism. This book offers some syntheses of the results obtained in the last decades, and also opens up new perspectives, by highlighting similarities and indicating possible relationships between these various writings within Mediterranean Judaism. In addition, the authors wish to show how certain traditions spread, evolve and are reconfigured in ancient Judaism as they meet new religious, cultural and social challenges.

The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the book of Ben Sira can be properly understood only in the light of all contemporary Second Temple period sources. With this in mind, 20 experts from Israel, Europe, and the United States convened in Jerusalem in December 2008. These proceedings of the Twelfth Orion Symposium and Fifth International Symposium on the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Ben Sira examine the Hebrew of the Second Temple period as reflected primarily in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the book of Ben Sira, Late Biblical Hebrew, and Mishnaic Hebrew. Additional contemporaneous sources—inscriptions, Greek and Latin transcriptions, and the Samaritan oral and reading traditions of the Pentateuch—are also noted.

In Reading and Re-reading Scripture at Qumran, Moshe J. Bernstein gathers more than three decades of his work on diverse aspects of biblical interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The essays range from broad surveys of the genres of biblical interpretation in these texts to more narrowly focused studies and close readings of specific documents. Volume I focuses on the book of Genesis, with a substantial portion being dedicated to studies of the Genesis Apocryphon and Commentary on Genesis A. Volume II contains several historical and programmatic essays, with specific studies focusing on legal material in the DSS and the pesharim. Under the former rubric, the documents known as 4QReworked Pentateuch, 4QOrdinancesa, 4QMMT, and the Temple Scroll are discussed.

2007 marked the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls. The 11th International Orion Symposium (January, 2007), “New Approaches to the Study of Biblical Interpretation in the Second Temple Period and in Early Christianity,” provided a measure of the ways in which the discovery of the scrolls has altered the paradigms for textual and historical studies in the intervening six decades. The papers in this volume address such issues as the connections and distinctions between Jewish interpretation within the Land of Israel and outside of it; between Jewish and Christian exegesis in earlier and later periods; between biblical interpretation in literature and in art; between interpretation and the formation of the biblical canon.

‘Identity’ and ‘sectarianism’, two crucial and frequently used concepts in Qumran studies, are here problematized, appraised, and redefined. Two social-scientific theories inform the investigation of the serakhim (rule documents) and pesharim (commentaries). The sociology of sectarianism is presented in retrospect in order to identify appropriate methodological tools for speaking about sectarianism in the ancient context, and for comparing sectarian stances in the serakhim. Furthermore, a social-psychological perspective into identity is introduced for the first time for appreciating the dynamic and context-dependent nature of a person’s social identity. The final chapter takes a fresh approach to the study of the pesharim, arguing for the need to read each Pesher as a whole. It analyses the prototypical ‘teacher’ and brings forward new interpretations of this captivating and cloudy figure.

In Patterns of Daily Prayer in Second Temple Period Judaism, Jeremy Penner seeks to uncover the historical and social processes that underlie the origins and development of Jewish daily prayer practices, particularly the establishment of set times for daily prayer. Since daily prayer lacks explicit biblical warrant, this book seeks to explain how this custom was legitimized as divinely inspired. The importance of daily prayer was understood and experienced within a range of literary and social contexts, and thus different exegetical and etiological strategies develop at this time to legitimize its practice. In some cases daily prayer was coordinated with, and made analogous to, daily cultic sacrifice, in other cases, daily prayer was legitimized by identifying the origins of the practice in sacred scripture. Lastly, in some contexts daily prayer was coordinated with the cycles of celestial bodies in the heavens.

The function of the participle within the Hebrew tense system has considerably changed between biblical and postbiblical Hebrew. This investigation studies the participle in the Hebrew manuscripts from the Judaean Desert, its formation, its usage, and its meaning, compared with those in other Hebrew traditions and dialects, especially the language of the Hebrew Bible. The biblical Hebrew tense system continues to be used in the Scrolls, while there is a clear difference between the tense system of the Scrolls and that of mishnaic Hebrew. This fact allows us to draw conclusions in the field of language studies; but it also provides us with a piece of the puzzle in our understanding of the sociology and religion of the Qumran community.

Die Funktion des Partizips innerhalb des hebräischen Tempussystems wandelte sich erheblich zwischen biblischem und nach-biblischem Hebräisch. Diese Studie untersucht das Partizip in den hebräischen Handschriften aus der judäischen Wüste, seine Bildung, seine Verwendung und seine Bedeutung, im Vergleich mit anderen hebräischen Traditionen und Dialekten, vor allem der Sprache der hebräischen Bibel. Das biblisch-hebräische Tempussystem findet seine Fortsetzung in diesen Handschriften, während es einen klaren Unterschied zwischen deren Tempussystem und dem des mischnischen Hebräisch gibt. Diese Tatsache erlaubt Rückschlüsse im Bereich der Sprachwissenschaft, sie liefert aber auch einen Mosaikstein in unserem Verständnis von Gesellschaft und Religion der Qumran-Gemeinschaft.

Recent Dead Sea Scrolls research pays much attention to the question which texts were seen as scriptures, in which forms scriptures as well as scriptural traditions were transmitted, how the scrolls can illuminate the gradual move from authoritative scriptural texts to canon, and which different kinds of scriptural interpretation are attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls. This volume contains twelve essays read at the seventh meeting of the International Organization for Qumran Studies that address these questions either broadly, or in relation to specific texts.

The volume consists of 27 surveys of research into the Dead Sea Scrolls in the past 60 years, written by 26 authors. An innovation of the volume is that it covers Qumran scholarship in separate countries: the USA, Canada, Israel, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Italy and the Eastern bloc. Each essay also carries a detailed bibliography for the respective country. Biographies of all the major scholars active in the field are briefly given as well. This book thereby exhaustively surveys past and present Qumran research, outlining its particular development in various circumstances and national contexts. For the first time, perspectives and information not recorded in any other publication are highlighted.

Some literary expressions in the Dead Sea Scrolls led scholars to allege that their authors professed a dualistic and deterministic worldview of Zoroastrian origin and that the omission of Moses and Sinai from the Enoch writings evinces that a segment in Jewish society marginalized the Torah, adopting Enoch’s prophecies as its ethical guideline. This study challenges these allegations as utterly conflicting with essential biblical doctrines and the unequivocal beliefs and expectations of Qumran’s Torah-centered society, arguing that scholars’ allegations are erroneously based on interpreting ancient texts with a modern mindset and influenced by the interpreter’s personal cultural background. The study interprets the relevant texts in a manner compatible with the presumed doctrines of ancient Jewish authors and readers.

The last major volume of articles devoted to the topic of prayer and poetry in the Dead Sea Scrolls comprised a collection of articles presented at a conference in the year 2000 (Liturgical Perspectives: Prayer and Poetry in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls). This collection reflects the state of research in the field broadly and on specific prayers and poetic texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls; it also offers new insights into topics on which Eileen Schuller has written extensively.

Over the past sixty years, several studies have demonstrated that the Dead Sea Scrolls sect was one of numerous voluntary associations that flourished in the Hellenistic-Roman age. Yet the origins of organizational and regulatory patterns that the sect shared with other associations have not been adequately explained. Drawing upon sociological studies of modern associations, this book argues that most ancient groups appropriated patterns from the state. Comparison of the Rule Scrolls with Greco-Roman constitutional literature, as well as philosophical, rabbinic, and early Christian texts, shows that the sect's appropriation helped articulate an "alternative civic ideology" by which members identified themselves as subjects of a commonwealth alternative and superior to that of the status quo. Like other associations with alternative civic ideology, the Covenanters studied constitution and law with the intention of reform, anticipating governance of restored Israel at the End of Days.

For some years a project has been under way to carry out a thoroughgoing revision of volume V in the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (of Jordan). The team of scholars responsible for the new edition - including many who have written monographs or extensive studies on the respective manuscripts for which they have now assumed responsibility - was invited by the Department of Biblical Exegesis of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen to meet in Copenhagen in June 2009. The conference offered the opportunity for the presentation of some working papers on topics that were of particular concern to the individual contributors to the revision. The present volume represents the ongoing work on the edition, and reflects the development in approaches and viewpoints since the texts were first published (1968) as well as important aspects of the present Qumran scholarship.

This volume contains the proceedings of the international conference held at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in July 2008 in honor of the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. As indicated by its title “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Contemporary Culture,” the aim of the conference was to move beyond the strict confines of conventional scholarship and to explore new avenues of research, including the examination of the place of the findings from the Judean Desert in contemporary culture. The book is divided into five main sections: (1) the Identity and History of the Community; (2) the Qumran “Library”: Origins, Use, and Nature (2a. Biblical Texts; 2b. Biblical Interpretation; 2c. Sectarian and Non-Sectarian Literature; 2d. Sectarian vis-à-vis Rabbinic Halakha); (3) Christianity in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls; (4) Gender at Qumran; and (5) New Perspectives (5a. Methodological Approaches; 5b. Educational Approaches).

The Qumran discoveries have demonstrated that much of the earliest interpretation of Hebrew Scripture was accomplished through rewriting: production of revised editions of biblical books, or composition of new works drawing heavily upon Scripture for their organization and content. This study advances our understanding of the nature and purpose of such rewriting of Scripture by examining the compositional methods and interpretive goals of the five Reworked Pentateuch manuscripts from Qumran Cave 4 (4Q158, 364–367). This analysis, along with a comparison of the 4QReworked Pentateuch manuscripts to the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Temple Scroll, provides a clearer picture of how early Jewish communities read, transmitted, and transformed their sacred textual traditions.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the March 7, 2008 Ranieri Colloquium on Ancient Studies at New York University, dedicated to "The Dead Sea Scrolls at 60: The Scholarly Contributions of NYU Faculty and Alumni." These studies offer a sampling of the extensive research conducted by three generations of NYU faculty, students, and alumni, in a range of domains pertaining to the scrolls and documents discovered in the Judean Desert since 1947, including Hebrew language, religious thought, and law.

The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls represent roughly 13% of the Qumran library and correspond to a wide range of genres and topics. This book consists of the proceedings of a conference on the Aramaic scrolls from Qumran which took place in Aix-en-Provence in 2008. It includes both the papers themselves and a transcription of the discussions. The 22 papers tackle linguistic, exegetical and historical questions, focusing in particular on: the relation of the Aramaic texts to what we know as the Hebrew Bible; their literary genres; the question of their sectarian or non-sectarian provenance; the character of the corpus, and specifically its relevance to the development of apocalypticism and messianism in the Jewish tradition.

This volume presents the proceedings of an international conference of the same title held at the University of Birmingham in 2007. The contributors are drawn from the ranks of leading international specialists in the field writing alongside promising younger scholars. The volume includes studies on the contribution of the Scrolls to Second Temple Jewish history, the archaeological context, the role of the temple and its priesthood, as well as treatments on selected texts and issues. These proceedings offer a timely and up to date assessment of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the material remains unearthed at Qumran in their wider context and not infrequently challenge prevailing lines of interpretation.

Helen Jacobus has won the Sean Dever Memorial Prize with her contribution to this volume. Commenting on the Dever prize, Professor Carol Meyers of Duke University, North Carolina, said: “The judges thought highly of Helen’s meticulous scholarship and careful presentation of the data in her discussion of the zodiac and its role in Jewish calendars.”

How were Jewish texts produced and transmitted in late antiquity? What role did scribal practices play in the shaping of both scriptural and interpretive traditions, which are—as the Scrolls show so decisively—intimately intertwined? How were texts assembled from a variety of earlier sources, both oral and written? Why were they often attributed to pseudonymous authors from the remote past such as Moses and David? How did the composers of these texts understand the enterprise in which they were engaged? This volume furthers current debates about Qumran Scribal Practice and the transmission of traditions in Jewish Antiquity. It is published with the conviction that the transmission of traditions and the details of scribal practices—so often treated separately—should be considered in conversation with each other.

This volume contains a selection of the papers presented at the sixth meeting of the International Organization for Qumran Studies, held in 2007 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on the topic “Qumran Cave 1 Revisited: Reconsidering the Cave 1 Texts Sixty Years after Their Discovery.” While the opening paper assesses theories about the character of Qumran Cave 1 in relation to the other Qumran caves, all other papers discuss texts from Cave 1, in particular six of the seven large scrolls found there in 1947: the two Isaiah scrolls, the Rule of the Community, the War Scroll, the Thanksgivings Scroll, and the Genesis Apocryphon. Many papers revisit those texts in light of the corresponding versions found in Cave 4.

This volume presents new perspectives on the ancient texts discovered at Qumran. The essays offer fresh insights into particular texts and genres, by applying methods and constructs drawn from other disciplines to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and by exploring new as well as long-standing issues raised by these works. The topics and approaches engaged include group identity, memory, ritual theory, sectarian sociology, philosophy of education, liturgical anthropology, Jewish law, history of religion, and mysticism. The articles in this volume were originally presented at the Tenth Annual International Orion Symposium sponsored in 2005 by the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Departing from scholarship dedicated to the socio-historical realities of priesthood at Qumran, this book explores, in two parts, the most pervasive literary representations of priesthood in the Dead Sea Scrolls as a reflection of the religious worldview of the Qumran community and broader segments of Second Temple society. Part one compares depictions of otherworldly priesthood in non-sectarian and sectarian documents. Part two examines the historical and traditional roots of portrayals of messianic/eschatological priesthood. The study reveals a fresh understanding of the integral role of priestly imagery in the tension-filled eschatological identity of the Qumran community. It concludes with a consideration of the relationship of the evidence treated to the phenomenon of democratization of priestly holinesses in rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

Much of the previous sixty years (1949-2009) have been devoted to the cleaning of the Dead Sea scrolls, their piecing together and their translation. The present volume is a scientific study of the various archaeological relics that have been found in the three units at Qumran: The settlement, the caves with the scrolls and the cemetery. With the aid of neutron activation of Qumran's pottery we established its human relations with neighboring sites, by radio carbon dating we placed the relics in their time frame, by DNA we study the provenance of the animal hides that served the scribes as parchment. The ink is studied for examining the degradation processes that started when the scrolls were written, 2000-2300 years ago.

Since a fuller range of Qumran sectarian and not clearly sectarian texts and recensions has recently become available to us, its implications for the comparative study of eschatological, apocalyptic and messianic ideas in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the New Testament need to be explored anew. This book situates eschatological ideas in Qumran literature between biblical tradition and developments in late Second Temple Judaism and examines how the Qumran evidence on eschatology, resurrection, apocalypticism, and messianism illuminates Palestinian Jewish settings of emerging Christianity. The present study challenges previous dichotomies between realized and futuristic eschatology, wisdom and apocalypticism and provides many new insights into intra-Jewish dimensions to eschatological ideas in Palestinian Judaism and in the early Jesus-movement.

In spite of the amount of literature on the relationship between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament, no consensus among the scholars has emerged as yet on how to explain both the similarities and the differences among the two corpora of religious writings. This volume contains a revised form of the contributions to an “experts meeting” held at the Catholic University of Leuven on December 2007 dedicated to explore the relationship among the two corpora and to understand both the commonalities and the differences between the two corpora from the perspective of the common ground from which both corpora have developed: the Hebrew Bible.

Structured by four important themes, the book discusses various aspects pertaining to the interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The first theme is comprised by a number of essays that deal with different aspects of textual interpretation of particular Qumran writings. The second theme centers on the question of historical referentiality. How can the purported referentiality of particular Qumran writings be used in order to reconstruct an underlying historical reality? The third theme includes essays that pertain to different dimensions concerning the methodology of interpretation. The fourth theme focuses on problems relating to the textual reconstruction of specific Qumran texts. In the final section of the book, the perspective is widened to other writings outside the more specific Qumran context.

The 13 papers comprising this volume represent the fruits of the first Orion Center Symposium devoted to the comparison of the Dead Sea and early Christian texts. The authors reject the older paradigm which configured the similarities between Qumran and early Christian literature as evidence of “influence” from one upon the other. They raise fresh methodological possibilities by asking how insights from each of these two corpora illuminate the other, and by considering them as parallel evidence for broader currents of Second Temple Judaism. Topics addressed include specific exegetical and legal comparisons; prophecy, demonology, and messianism; the development of canon and the rise of commentary; and possible connections between the Gospel of John and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The so-called Genesis Apocryphon (1Q20) from Qumran Cave 1 has suffered from decades of neglect, due in large part to its poor state of preservation. As part of a resurgent scholarly interest in the Apocryphon, and its prominent position among the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, this volume presents a fresh transcription, translation, and exstenive textual notes drawing on close study of the original manuscript, all available photographs, and previous publications. In addition, a detailed analysis of columns 13-15 and their relation to the oft-cited parallel in the Book of Jubilees reveals a number of ways in which the two works differ, thereby highlighting several distinctive features of the Genesis Apocryphon. The result is a reliable text edition and a fuller understanding of the message conveyed by this fragmentary but fascinating retelling of Genesis.

This book focuses on the third section of one of the most important documents from the Qumran library, the epilogue of 4QMMT. It re-evaluates the textual basis for this section, and analyses how the epilogue functions as a part of the larger document. In addition to addressing the structure and genre of 4QMMT, this volume analyzes the use of Scripture in the epilogue in order to illuminate the theological agenda of the document's author/redactor. Although this book’s primary focus is on the epilogue, the results of this investigation shed light on 4QMMT as a whole.

Unique in its genre and content, the War Scroll (1QM) presents a vision of an impending eschatological war. Although originally interpreted as being the product of a single author from the Qumran Sect, the composition's inconsistencies quickly led to the view that it is in fact an eclectic document with an elaborate compositional history. Yet all such theories were formulated prior to the publication of War Scroll-like texts from Caves 4 and 11. A careful re-examination of the War Scroll suggests instead that what began as a primitive and cohesive composition from the Hellenistic period about a two-stage conquest of the world was eventually updated in order to fit the new historical realities faced by the sectarians under Roman rule.

Since the discovery of the Cave 4 versions of The Community Rule (Serekh ha-Yaḥad or S), scholars have been perplexed about its complex textual history. This important charter material for the Dead Sea Scrolls’ authors appears in alternate versions—ones with contradictory legal prescriptions and opposing self-references—but exhibits no clear order of chronological development. Benefitting from the entire Qumran library now available to us, this book offers a new, broader model for reading S that better accounts for the long and diverse history behind the text. The resulting paradigm challenges the Qumrancentric lens through which many read the “sectarian texts” and offers a fresh way of thinking about sectarian community formation among the authors of the Scrolls.

Rather than being an isolated, primitive body of knowledge the Jewish calendar tradition of 364 days constituted an integral part of the astronomical science of the ancient world. This tradition—attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the Pseudepigrapha—stands out as a coherent, novel synthesis, representing the Jewish authors’ apocalyptic worldview. The calendar is studied here both “from within”—analyzing its textual manifestations —and “from without”—via a comparison with ancient Mesopotamian astronomy. This analysis reveals that the calendrical realm constituted a significant case of inter-cultural borrowing, pertinent to similar such cases in ancient literature. Special attention is given to the “Book of Astronomy” (1 Enoch 72-82) and a variety of calendrical and liturgical texts from Qumran.

Already before its publication, it was clear that the Temple Scroll represented a major contribution to the history of Jewish law in Late Antiquity. The present volume brings together the author’s studies on this important scroll. He has sought to uncover the hermeneutics of the Zadokite/Sadducean legal system and to compare and contrast it with other texts of its own type as well as with those in rabbinic literature preserving the Pharisaic-rabbinic approach.

Scholars have long questioned the conceptual background for the priestly Christology of the Epistle to the Hebrews, with suggestions including Gnosticism, the thought of Philo of Alexandria, common themes in early Christian theology and exegesis, and the creativity of the author of Hebrews himself. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls prompted waves of enthusiasm for understanding Hebrews in that context, both in terms of the Qumran sect’s priestly messianism and understanding of Melchizedek, but claims often were excessive and the approach was discredited. The present study reevaluates the priestly Christology of Hebrews and the presentations of the messianic priest and Melchizedek in the Qumran texts, arguing that the latter do indeed provide the closest parallels to Hebrews’ thought.

The Orion Center Bibliography of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature (2000–2006) is the fifth official Scrolls bibliography, following volumes covering the periods 1948-1957 (W. S. LaSor), 1958-1969 (B. Jongeling), 1970-1995 (F. García Martínez and D. W. Parry), and 1995-2000 (A. Pinnick).
The interdisciplinary cast of the Bibliography reflects the current emphasis in Scrolls scholarship on integrating the knowledge gained from the Qumran corpus into the larger picture of Second Temple Judaism. The volume contains over 4100 entries, including approximately 850 reviews; source, subject, and language indices facilitate its use by scholars and students within and outside the field. This work is based on the On-Line Bibliography maintained by the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jerusalem.

This volume contains 15 contributions presented at a symposium on the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls & Ben Sira, held in Strasbourg on May 29 and 30, 2006. The papers address linguistic and philological issues. They seek to relate the Hebrew texts of the Hellenistic period to earlier and later traditions. Among the authors are some of the most eminent Hebraists of our period as well as some younger scholars. The papers throw new light on the interpretation of the Qumran Scrolls, of the Apocrypha and of the Hebrew Bible.

This volume contains 15 of the papers read at the Fifth Meeting of the IOQS, celebrated in Groningen 27-28 July, 2004. The meeting focused on the identity formation of the group or groups represented in the Scrolls, explored issues of self-definition of Jewish groups in relation to, or in reaction towards other groups within Judaism (“sectarian” identity, inner-Jewish discourses and polemics), and inquired into the development of Jewish identity vis-à-vis other non-Jewish persons, groups or peoples as reflected in the Scrolls.

This book represents the first comprehensive study on the concept of ritual purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls since the full publication of the legal material from Qumran. Utilizing an independent approach to the relevant documents from Qumran, this study discusses the primary and secondary literature on the five major categories of impurity in the scrolls (i.e., diseases, clean/unclean animals, corpses, bodily discharges, and sexual misdeeds). This examination is supported by a comparison between the scrolls’ purity legislations and their biblical counterparts. The book culminates with a comparison between the purity rulings in the scrolls and a diachronic reading of the explicit agreements and disagreements found therein. The result is a far more comprehensive and nuanced interpretation than has been previously offered.

The discovery of the Babatha archive provided scholars with unique opportunities for reconstructing the life of Jews in second-century Arabia. Although legal issues and especially the question of the relationship between Roman and local law have received attention in a number of publications, this study presents the first complete overview of the legal situation as presented in the Babatha as well as the Salome Komaise archive, using references to law in the documents' texts as the key element for understanding what law is applicable to these documents. By distinguishing between two levels in the papyri, of substantive and of formal law, a new understanding is reached of the part both Roman and local law played in legal reality.

This study deals with physiognomic and astrological texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls that represent one of the earliest examples of ancient Jewish science. For the first time the Hebrew physiognomic-astrological list 4Q186 (4QZodiacal Physiognomy) and the Aramaic physiognomic list 4Q561 (4QPhysiognomy ar) are comprehensively studied in relation to both physiognomic and astrological writings from Babylonian and Greco-Roman traditions. New reconstructions and interpretations of these learned lists are offered that result in a fresh view of their sense, function, and status within both the Qumran community and Second Temple Judaism at large, showing that Jewish culture in Palestine participated in the cultural exchange of learned knowledge between Babylonian and Greco-Roman cultures.

This book is a comprehensive treatment of prophecy and revelation in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It begins by analyzing the re-presentation of the classical prophets and their revelatory experience in an attempt to identify how prophecy and revelation was reconceptualized in the Dead Sea Scrolls in dialogue and in contrast with received biblical models. This work then examines the direct evidence in the Dead Sea Scrolls regarding ongoing prophetic activity at Qumran and in related segments of Second Temple Judaism. This study argues that the Dead Sea Scrolls bear witness to a transformed prophetic tradition active at Qumran and in Second Temple Judaism. Topics treated include the relationship of prophecy to scriptural interpretation, wisdom, and law, and eschatological prophecy.

Qumranica Minora I: Qumran Origins and Apocalypticism brings together the author’s much discussed articles on the so-called “Groningen Hypothesis” (an hypothesis about the origins of the Qumran Community in relation to the parent Essene movement and Palestinian apocalyptic movements), as well as a selection of his most important essays on Early Jewish and Qumran apocalypticism. The third part of the book consists of surveys of the history of research on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The volume includes English translations of essays that were originally written in Spanish and French.

Qumranica Minora II: Thematic Studies on the Dead Sea Scrolls brings together fourteen previously published studies of Florentino García Martínez on a variety of thematic topics from the Dead Sea Scrolls, including English translations of essays that were hitherto only available in French or Spanish. The studies range from essays on the interpretation of the biblical texts in the Scrolls, to more general studies on topics such as priestly functions in a community without temple, Messianism, magic, wisdom, sonship between the Old and the New Testament, and the “other” in the Dead Sea Scrolls or at Qumran.

The focus of this volume is a history of covenantal theology in the Dead Sea Scrolls. At the heart of the work the author provides new insight into the origins of the "new covenant in the land of Damascus" ("Damascus covenant") and of the Qumran community ("covenant of the community"). The "Damascus covenant" arose as a national restoration movement in 3rd century BC Palestine among Jews who traced their history back to the returnees from exile. The Qumran community emerged out of the Damascus covenant in the 2nd century BC as a refuge for the faithful when the Damascus covenant and the Teacher of Righteousness suffered the betrayal of some of their adherents. Other chapters explore the topics of dualism, the righteousness of God in the thanksgiving hymns, and covenant renewal.

The study asserts that conflicting sacrificial rules were the motive of the schism in Judean society, in the last period of the Second Temple. The study substantiates the thesis by a meticulous examination and comparison of the rabbinic and Qumran exegetical methods, and an exhaustive scrutiny of biblical sacrificial rules, demonstrating their deficiencies, the cause of the exegetical dissensions among the different groups. A short record of historical struggles, due to cult issues, and a scrutiny of Qumran literature, corroborating the utmost significance of the Temple cult in that group, complement the study. The study is useful for a comprehension of Qumran literature and particularly of the system of thought of its authors and their approach to the biblical writings.

This volume examines twelve ancient and medieval manuscripts, ten from the caves at Qumran and the two so called Damascus Documents from the Cairo Geniza, presenting a new organization and understanding of these texts. The twelve manuscripts are in a composite form under the title Midrash haTorah haAcharon (MTA), the Midrash of the Eschatological Torah, a title which opens a new window into the understanding of the Jewish literary tradition during the period of the Second Temple, prior to the development of the Talmud and Christianity. Following the composite Hebrew text are a full translation, notes and commentary elucidating the MTA in light of the new evidence provided by these texts and retranslation.

It has long been noted that the Thanksgiving Hymns (Hodayot) from Qumran make extensive use of biblical language. A premise of this study of their use of scripture is that these compositions can best be understood by reading them as poetry. Using insights from the fields of comparative literature and biblical studies it establishes a method for analysis of the poems and for identification and analysis of scriptural allusions. Five poems have been chosen for detailed study. The question is asked, how would a reader familiar with the scriptural traditions of the period interpret these poems and why? The first chapter gives a useful overview of the scholarship to date and indicates the new avenues explored by this study.

Today, archaeology plays an ever growing role in Qumran studies. Fifteen papers presented in 2002 at Brown University provide the necessary data to break new ground in the recent debate about the character of Qumran. Section I discusses material from old and new excavations that help assess the validity of the traditional Qumran-Essene hypothesis. Part II discusses various aspects of the main settlement such as division of space, the character of period III, the date of the cave scroll deposits and the use of food. Part III deals with the Qumran cemetery and a similar graveyard at Khirbet Qazone.
Part IV places Qumran into a wider regional context, concentrating on local agriculture and ceramic production. The articles strongly call for a new awareness for archaeological detail and, in their various ways, instigate a renewed debate about how to bring texts and material culture into a meaningful dialogue.

The studies in this volume examine the intersection of the Dead Sea Scrolls with early rabbinic literature. This is a particularly rich area for comparative study, which has not heretofore received sufficient scholarly attention. While some of the contributions in this volume focus on specific comparative case studies, others address far-reaching issues of historical and comparative methodology. Particular attention is paid to questions of the nature of sectarian and rabbinic law, and how each may elucidate the other. These studies model the directions that need to be pursued in future scholarship on the lines of continuity and discontinuity that connect and differentiate these two literary corpora and their respective religious cultures and social structures.

This volume consists of nineteen essays, written by internationally renowned scholars such as George Brooke, John Collins, Heinz-Josef Fabry, André Lemaire, Julio Trebolle, Emanuel Tov, James VanderKam and others, presented to Émile Puech, palaeographer and Dead Sea Scrolls specialist, on the occasion of his 65th birthday.
All contributions deal with aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls, including fundamental essays on 4QMMT by Steudel, Kratz and Berthelot, and two papers on resurrection and afterlife. Other essays are concerned with textual criticism and the Hebrew Bible, the Astronomical Enoch, the Admonitions of Qahat, 4QInstruction, and Isaac in the Scrolls.
This volume will be indispensable for scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and of interest for scholars of Bible and Second Temple Judaism.

This book contains papers presented at a symposium on “Reworking the Bible at Qumran” convened in 2002 by the Institute of Advanced Studies and the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The core theme is the use and interpretation of the Bible in apocryphal and related works found at Qumran. Nearly half the papers treat legal interpretation; the other half, examines narrative exegesis. Key issues include the question of the authority of the reworked biblical texts, their exegetical techniques, motifs, and genres. This collection provides a valuable resource for the study of Bible, the history of interpretation, apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, ancient Judaism and early Christianity.

This volume investigates critical practices by which the Qumran community constituted itself as a sectarian society. Key to the formation of the community was the reconstruction of the identity of individual members. In this way the “self” became an important symbolic space for the development of the ideology of the sect. Persons who came to experience themselves in light of the narratives and symbolic structures embedded in the community practices would have developed the dispositions of affinity and estrangement necessary for the constitution of a sectarian society. Drawing on various theories of discourse and practice in rhetoric, philosophy, and anthropology, the book examines the construction of the self in two central documents: the Serek ha-Yahad and the Hodayot.

The underlying premise of this study is the close relationship between Pesher Nahum (4Q169) and its biblical base-text. Historical and literary considerations, as well as theological, sociological, halakhic, textual, and linguistic data, are examined in terms of their exegetical functions.
This edition includes a transcription and translation of 4QpNah, with textual notes. The treatment of 4QpNah follows the natural division of the extant text into five thematic literary sections, or “pericopes,” each consisting of a series of “lemma/pesher units”. For each pericope, proposed historical contextualizations are evaluated on the basis of exegetical criteria. “Equivalents” are “mapped” for each unit, such that individual elements of each lemma are aligned with corresponding elements from the biblical base-text.
A focus upon “lemma/pesher correspondence” provides the framework for systematic exegetical analysis of 4QpNah.

The papers published in this volume were presented at the Third International Orion Symposium (1998), to mark the centennial of the discovery of the Damascus Document (CD) in the Cairo Geniza and the final publication of the 4QD manuscripts in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series.

Since its discovery, CD has sparked lively debate about its sectarian origins and halacha, issues with far-reaching implications not only for the development of Jewish law but also for the very nature of Second Temple period Judaism and its continuity into the early medieval period.

The contributors examine the physical reconstruction of CD, its relationship to other legal works in the Qumran corpus and to rabbinic law. Essays on specific legal topics, as well as historical perspectives, round out the volume.

The material presented in these two volumes may be divided into two main sections. The first section covers biblical texts and texts which fall between the categories biblical and non-biblical. It also includes articles on topics relating to the history of the Qumran community and to the study of the New Testament in the light of the Qumran discoveries. The second section covers non-biblical texts, such as the Temple Scroll. The two sections are synthesized in the article by Frank M. Cross, in which he reviews the advances made and the challenges for the future in the field of Qumran studies.
Several topics recur constantly in many of the articles, such as the origins of the history of the Qumran community, the problem of the distinction between what is biblical and non-biblical in the Qumran manuscripts, and the question of the authority of the texts in the Qumran community.