Scribes and Scrolls at Qumran

Sidnie White Crawford

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781467456586
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Religion

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls altered our understanding of the development of the biblical text, the history and literature of Second Temple Judaism, and the thought of the early Christian community. Questions continue to surround the relationship between the caves in which the scrolls were found and the nearby settlement at Khirbet Qumran.

In Scribes and Scrolls at Qumran, Sidnie White Crawford combines the conclusions of the first generation of scrolls scholars that have withstood the test of time, new insights that have emerged since the complete publication of the scrolls corpus, and the much more complete archaeological picture that we now have of Khirbet Qumran. She creates a new synthesis of text and archaeology that yields a convincing history of and purpose for the Qumran settlement and its associated caves.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Two bedouin, a goat, and a rock. Thus begins the saga of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the eastern Mediterranean world in the twentieth century.¹ Since their discovery in the winter of 1946/47, the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially the subset of the scrolls found in the eleven caves in the vicinity of Khirbet Qumran, have been the subject of enormous scholarly erudition and have revolutionized the study of the Hebrew Bible, ancient Judaism, and early Christianity. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has had wide ramifications in the fields of textual criticism, the history of the biblical text, the history and literature of Second Temple Judaism, and the development and thought of the early Christian community. However, the central mystery of the Qumran scrolls—how they were deposited in the caves and the nature of the relationship between the scroll caves and the settlement at Khirbet Qumran—has never been satisfactorily resolved. My purpose in this volume is to take the insights of the first generation of scrolls scholars that have withstood the test of time, combine them with new insights from scholars since the complete publication of the scrolls corpus and the much more complete archaeological picture that we now have of Khirbet Qumran, and create a new synthesis of text and archaeology that will yield a convincing history of and purpose for the Qumran settlement and its associated caves. My proposal is that Qumran served as the central library and scribal center for the Essene movement of Judaism, that it was established to serve that purpose in the first quarter of the first century BCE, and that it continued in that function without interruption until its destruction by a Roman legion during the First Jewish Revolt against Rome in 68 CE.²

A word should be said about what I am not attempting to do in this volume. First, I am not trying to write the history of the Essene movement, beginning with its origins down to its disappearance. The Essene movement emerged in Judaism at least a generation before the settlement at Qumran was established, and therefore its origin falls outside the parameters of this volume. This is likewise the case for its disappearance. While the settlement at Qumran was destroyed by the Romans in 68 CE, there is no reason to suppose that the movement represented at Qumran died with the settlement. It could well have continued in the post-Qumran period, but that too lies outside the purview of this volume. Second, since my study is synchronic, being concerned only with the period during which Qumran was inhabited, rather than diachronic, I am not concerned with the sources, early stages, or literary development of the Qumran texts. There is no question that, like many of the works from what became the biblical literature (e.g., the Pentateuch, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Psalms), the sectarian and nonsectarian texts found at Qumran had sources and went through various redactional stages.³ However, my focus is not on the prehistory of the Qumran texts, but on their presence in the Qumran library and in the Qumran caves. Questions of sources and redaction, therefore, are engaged only as they relate to those central questions. Finally, I do not attempt to trace the nuances of the Essene movement in all of its settlements in Judea. Thus I do not discuss the relationship(s) of the different communities represented by the major rule texts from Qumran (i.e., the manuscripts of the Serek Hayaḥad or Rule of the Community [S] and the Damascus Document [D]), or whether the rules found in S or D were followed in any settlement in Judea other than Qumran itself.⁴ Rather, the focus of this study is on Qumran, its library, and the activities taking place there during the Second Temple period.

The Classic Qumran-Essene Hypothesis

Early Qumran scholarship produced a narrative of the history of the Qumran sect that intertwined the contents of the sectarian texts—in particular the Serek Hayaḥad, the Damascus Document, the pesharim, and the Hodayot (Thanksgiving Hymns)—with the archaeology of the site of Qumran that held sway until the 1980s.⁵ This narrative stated that Qumran was the main (if not the only) Essene settlement, founded about 150–135 BCE because of Essene opposition, led by their founder the Teacher of Righteousness, to the Hasmonean takeover of the Jerusalem high priesthood in the mid-second century BCE. Although attempts were made to identify the mysterious Teacher of Righteousness, who appears in the Damascus Document and some of the pesharim,⁶ he remained elusive; however, the Wicked Priest was identified with Jonathan, the first Hasmonean high priest.⁷ Because of the antagonism between the Teacher of Righteousness and the Wicked Priest, the Essenes left Jerusalem (or were driven out) and established Qumran as their desert retreat center and main (if not only) settlement. Except for a period of abandonment following a major earthquake in 31 BCE, the Essenes continued to reside at Qumran, following the rule of the Serek Hayaḥad, until Qumran was threatened with attack by the Romans during the Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–73 CE). The Essenes then deposited their library in the caves surrounding the site and fled, never to return. The site was burned by the Romans in 68.⁸ This was the reigning hypothesis in Qumran scholarship until the 1980s when, under a barrage of new evidence and new hypotheses, it began to break down.

Critiques of the Qumran-Essene Hypothesis

As new studies of the Qumran scrolls took place, especially after the publication of the Cave 4Q corpus was completed in 2001,⁹ the master narrative of the Qumran-Essene hypothesis began to be critiqued as presenting a too simplistic reading of both the contents of the scrolls and the archaeological evidence. In particular, it was noted that the sectarian texts had been read as if they were historical narratives, presenting a straightforward picture of the sect’s origins, rather than texts replete with metaphor and symbolism, saturated with the language of the classical scriptural texts of Israel, which made them ideological constructions instead of literal historical accounts. For example, in the sentence “in a time of wrath three hundred and ninety years when He put them into the power of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon he took care of them and caused to grow from Israel and from Aaron a root of planting to inherit His land” in the Admonition to the Damascus Document (CD 1:5–8), the figure 390 years was taken literally, and a date of 175 BCE posited for the emergence of the sect.¹⁰

The archaeological evidence had been interpreted by Roland de Vaux, professor of archaeology at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem and the chief excavator of Qumran, in light of the sectarian texts emerging from the caves. While it was methodologically appropriate to take the scrolls as one piece of the archaeological evidence of the site, the flaw came when de Vaux stretched the archaeological evidence to fit the emerging historical narrative.¹¹ For example, despite extremely meager evidence, de Vaux pushed the foundation of the settlement at Qumran (his Period IA) back into the last half of the second century BCE so that it fit into the supposed timetable of CD 1:5–8.

These methodological missteps have led in the last three decades to various reevaluations of both the textual and the archaeological evidence from Qumran. Jodi Magness’s redating of the founding of the site of Qumran to the first quarter of the first century BCE has been decisive in this regard. If the site was founded not at the start of the Hasmonean dynasty but in its middle, during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus (103–76 BCE), then the chronology of the origins of the sect as coterminous with the building of the settlement needs to be drastically revised or abandoned. Further, newer interpretations of the archaeological evidence called into question de Vaux’s understanding of Qumran as an Essene settlement.

Beginning with Henri del Medico and Karl Rengstorf in the late 1950s, and continuing in the 1990s with the work of Norman Golb, attempts were made to disassociate the scrolls from the site, leading to proposals that Qumran was a military fortress, some kind of rural estate, a pottery manufacturing center, or a seasonal industrial complex tied to Jericho.¹² That none of these proposals has won wide adherence points to their methodological weakness: the scrolls in the caves are an integral part of the archaeology of the site and must form a central piece of its interpretation.¹³

On the textual side, more sophisticated literary methodologies have been applied to the manuscripts, leading to convincing arguments for a more complex literary history for the Serek Hayaḥad, the Damascus Document, and the Temple Scroll (among others), including earlier sources within the received version(s) of the texts.¹⁴ The full publication of the Cave 4Q corpus has led to the recognition of the varied nature of the Qumran collection; it is not limited to “biblical” or “sectarian” texts, but takes in a complete spectrum of Jewish literature from the Second Temple period.¹⁵ Investigations of various pieces of the corpus have taken place, with the rule texts, the Aramaic texts, the liturgical texts, and the wisdom literature receiving particular attention.¹⁶

At the same time, a revolution was taking place in the recognition of the importance of the correct interpretation of the laws of the Torah in the self-identification of the sect. This revised understanding began in the mid-1980s when the existence of 4QMiqṣat Maʿaśê ha-Torah (MMT) was first revealed publicly, and the fragmentary copies of the Damascus Document, as well as the smaller legal texts, began to be published.¹⁷ It is now clear that what separated the sect from the rest of Judaism were primarily differences in legal practices, in particular the practice of purity regulations associated with food and drink, sexuality, and the temple cult.

All of these new studies and approaches are vital for our understanding of the Qumran library, the site of Qumran, and the people who lived there. However, the result has often been a fragmentation in the field; while the old synthesis had broken down, no new synthesis had emerged. That new synthesis, based on the latest archaeological data and the most recent textual scholarship, is what I wish to accomplish in these pages.

Definitions

A study of the complete corpus of the Qumran scrolls reveals it to be one collection that may be characterized as a library with both scribal and sectarian components. A “library,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a place set apart to contain books for reading, study, or reference.”¹⁸ Thus its primary meaning is as an architectural element, that is, a building, a room, or a set of rooms to hold books. As we shall see, the “library” according to this definition did exist in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world. The secondary meaning of “library,” however, is the books contained in a library, and it is that secondary usage that I employ most frequently in this study. Of course, in the ancient world the “book,” in the sense of a codex, did not exist, so ancient libraries contained tablets, papyrus rolls, or parchment rolls; at Qumran, the library consisted of papyrus and parchment rolls.¹⁹ The differences between ancient libraries and ancient archives are important as well when considering the definition of the Qumran collection. A vast literature exists on the differences between archives and libraries in the ancient Near East. The essential difference is that an archive consists of business and political documents kept as records, while libraries contained literary and religious texts. However, a study of the various tablet and book collections from the ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world demonstrates that, except for very large tablet or book roll collections, literary and documentary texts tended to be mixed together, so that very few collections were purely an archive or a library. In the case of the Qumran collection, the literary and religious texts dominate, making the designation “library” for the collection a valid one. ²⁰

By “scribal component” I am referring to the learned nature of the scrolls; scribes, in particular elite scholar-scribes,²¹ were the literati of the ancient world. Trained in reading and writing, often in several languages and scripts, elite scholar-scribes were responsible for preserving and handing on their cultural traditions.²² They did this not by merely copying earlier works, although this was an important activity, but also by expanding, updating, and interpreting them for their own times. They used earlier works, whether written or oral, as sources to create new compositions. They incorporated the knowledge of nearby cultures into their own cultural framework. In the context of Judea, scholar-scribes passed on the classical literature of ancient Israel (the biblical books) in multiple forms, as well as composing new works that became part of the literature of Second Temple Judaism. Jonathan Z. Smith defines the roles of scholar-scribes in the ancient world particularly well:

The scribes were an elite group of learned, literate men, an intellectual aristocracy which played an invaluable role in the administration of their people in both religious and political affairs. They were dedicated to a variety of roles...