From Qumran to the Synagogues

Selected Studies on Ancient Judaism

Géza G. Xeravits

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110614374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Religion

This volume collects papers written during the past two decades that explore various aspects of late Second Temple period Jewish literature and the figurative art of the Late Antique synagogues. Most of the papers have a special emphasis on the reinterpretation of biblical figures in early Judaism or demonstrate how various biblical traditions converged into early Jewish theologies. The structure of the volume reflects the main directions of the author's scholarly interest, examining the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and Late Antique synagogues. The book is edited for the interest of scholars of Second Temple Judaism, biblical interpretation, synagogue studies and the effective history of Scripture.

Part I.Dead Sea Scrolls

Some Remarks on the Early History of Qumran’s Messianic Expectations

1Introduction

This paper was written during my scholarship at K.U. Leuven provided by the Soros Foundation. I would like to thank Prof. Johan Lust for his valuable suggestions on the earlier form of the paper, and Beáta Tóth for the grammatical revision.

In recent years attention has often been called to the renewal of the interest concerning the messianic beliefs of the Qumran Community. During the nineties many new texts have been published which help to set this theological topic in a new and more comprehensive light.6 We note however that a great number of unsolved questions remain concerning the texts known to the scholarly public since the very beginning of the Dead Sea Scrolls research. The exact teaching of these works has not been so far unanimously clarified. Based on the data provided by the recently published material, many scholars want to revise earlier established views on some general questions of the Qumran Community, e.g. their messianic expectations.7

This essay will focus on the messianic loci of two texts, those of the Damascus Document and the Rule of the Community. These are the texts that have been most frequently cited and―due to the early date of their publication―they are the ones used for the longest time in discussing the messianism of Qumran.8 Generally, scholars refer to both texts to support the general Qumranic image of the expectation of the double messiah.9 Working on my doctoral dissertation on the Qumranic image of positive eschatological protagonists I came to the recognition that the general consensus on this question is not wholly acceptable. What made me further investigate the issue was the fact that contemporary research seems to be trying to describe the messianic expectations of the Qumran Community less and less diachronically. The authors of the newest general monographs and essays concentrate mainly on great thematic blocks, and the idea of thematic development does not have a central role.10 Therefore, beyond the further clarification of the messianic teaching of the aforementioned texts, in this essay, it also seems to be useful to find their exact place in the early history of the Community itself.

2The Problem

2.1The Explicit Messianic Passages of the Damascus Document

On the sheets of the Damascus Document found in the Cairo Genizah, the term mšyḥ occurs six times. From the point of view of this study, the first two (CD ii 12; v 21‒vi 1) are irrelevant, for these passages do not speak about eschatological persons, but rather about figures of the past who obtained their post by the act of anointing (the prophets, and analogously Moses). So ‘the anointed one’―in agreement with the usage of the Old Testament―is simply their epithet.11 The four other passages, however, is of crucial importance:

1o CD xii 22‒xiii 1:

wzh srk mwšb [h]m[ḥnwt]

hmthlkym bʾlh bqṣ hršʿh

ʿd ʿmwd mšwḥ12 ʾhrn wyśrʾl

2o CD xiv 18‒19:

wzh prwš hmšpṭym ʾšr [yšpṭw bhm

ʿd ʿmwd mšy]ḥ ʾhrn wyśrʾl

wykpr ʿwnm [

3o CD xix 10‒11:

ʾlh ymlṭw bqṣ hpqdh

whnšʾrym ymsrw lḥrb

bbwʾ mšyḥ ʾhrn wyśrʾl

4o CD xix 33‒xx 1:

kn kl hʾnšym

ʾšr bwʾ bbryt hḥdšh bʾrṣ dmšq

wšbw wybgdw wyswrw mbʾr mym hḥyym

lʾ yḥšbw bswd ʿm wbktbw lʾ yktbw

mywm hʾsp13 mwrh hyḥyd14

ʿd ʿmwd mšyḥ mʾhrn wmyśrʾl

As a first observation, we note that all of these passages are situated in their context in a similar manner: their only role is to mark the temporal delimitation of certain ages. None of them is a messianic passage in the strict sense, however: their aim is not to speak of the messiah(s); rather, they serve as an auxiliary topic for the better understanding of another, more fundamental message of the author.

If we analyse the passages from a merely grammatical point of view, we find that the expression mšyḥ stays in all the cases in the singular. Those scholars who classify the Damascus Document among the works that speak about two messiahs have made many attempts to prove that the author of the Document used the formal singular for some plural subjects. The attempts are mainly twofold: either palaeographical or grammatical, but, as M.G. Abegg has recently demonstrated, these arguments are both incongruent.15 On the one hand, palaeographically, another recently published fragment of the Damascus Document found in cave 4 contains the same singular reading;16 on the other hand, grammatically, the applicability of the distributive sg. construct in this place is fairly problematic.17 The ‘singular’ interpretation is supported by the fact that in the only locus where the person has a finite verb, and not an infinitive form (CD xiv 19), the verb is clearly in the singular (in the case of the distributive sg., the plural verbal form would be correct, cf. Gen 14:10).

The palaeographical and grammatical considerations thus speak in favour of the idea of a single anointed, just as does the evidence provided by the whole Document. In fact, in CD none of the messianic titles mentioned in the Qumran texts appear in an eschatological context,18 except for the now-analysed one (mšyḥ). In the famous midrash of Amos-Numeri (CD vii 13‒viii 1) however the expressions ‘sceptre’ (šbṭ) and ‘Prince of the Congregation’ (nśyʾ hʿdh) can be found in an eschatological context, but from a text-critical point of view, this passage shows an obvious independence from the context. A careful investigation of the Document’s redaction history allows for the conclusion that the midrash is secondarily inserted into the Urtext of the Document.

A statistical analysis of the placement of the passages containing the expression mšyḥ leads to the following observation: these passages are situated in two distinct parts of the Document, in part A2 and in B. A2 contains legal material, whereas B is a narrative. The only messianic locus in part A1, as stated above, is an insert (CD vii 13‒viii 1), moreover, it does not contain the expression mšyḥ. The occurrences of the expression mšyḥ in A1 have the general, technical meaning of the word. It is worth mentioning furthermore, that part A1―in which the midrash Amos-Numeri shows a clear double-messianic expectation―consistently omits all the messianic passages of part B which speak clearly of the arrival of a single anointed.

2.2The Messianic Text of the Rule of the Community

In contrast to the Damascus Document, the Rule of the Community has only one explicit messianic passage, the 1QS ix 11:

wnšpṭw bmšpṭym hršwnym

ʾšr hḥlw ʾnšy hyḥd ltysr19 bm

ʿd bwʾ nbyʾ20 wmšyḥy ʾhrwn wyśrʾl

The interpretation of this text―at least as for its messianic teaching―is quite clear: the grammatical form of the word mšyḥ is unambiguously plural, the two following singulars are all its nomina recta. The real problem of this passage lies not on the grammatical level, but in the very fact of its absence from a fragment found in cave 4 (4Q259). This fragment raises some serious questions. First, a great debate has been commenced among scholars concerning the date of its writing. J.T. Milik had placed the copying in the second half of the 2nd century BCE, F.M. Cross at first thought to place it in the beginning of the 1st century BCE, but later on he modified it to a date between 50‒25 BCE, which seems to be more and more accepted among the scholars.21 S. Metso however has called attention to the fact that the copyist of the fragment had used a hardly identifiable type of script.22 So it seems to be wiser to leave open the question of the palaeographical dating of the fragment (for the exact determination of the redactional history of the whole work, the palaeographical considerations have in any case a secondary importance).

In fact, the really important question for the present research is whether the copyist of 4Q259 had committed a fault by having omitted the passage in question, or in the time of the fragment’s copying, the passage was not yet part of the Rule at all. On the one hand, it seems that the whole 1QS viii 15‒ix 11 is not alien from the context: at first sight it is not certain that it is the result of a secondary amplification. It is perhaps possible that in the manuscript the copyist of 4Q259 relied on, this passage formed an entire column and the scribe unwittingl...