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24 - The Qumran sectarian writings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Jonathon Campbell
Edited by
William Horbury ,
W. D. Davies  and
John Sturdy
Jonathon Campbell
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
William Horbury
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
W. D. Davies
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina
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Summary

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

The Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) from Qumran comprise a corpus of nearly 800 ancient Jewish documents written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. The texts were recovered in varying states of repair between 1947 and 1956 from eleven caves around the site of Khirbet Qumran on the northwestern edge of the Dead Sea. On the basis of the general results of palaeography, carbon dating and archaeology, it became clear that the writings stemmed from the last three centuries of the Second Temple period. Although much important material was published in the first two decades after the discovery, it was not until 1991 that numerous outstanding texts from Cave 4 were released. This event led to a revival of interest in the DSS, as well as the official publication of works previously available only to a small coterie of scholars.

To aid discussion, it is possible to divide up the DSS collection in several ways. One fruitful approach is to split the manuscripts into three categories: (a) books in use among all Second Temple Jews and later forming the Hebrew Bible defined by the rabbis after ce 70, (b) other works, including several Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, also circulating beyond the confines of the Qumran group, and (c) the so-called sectarian DSS apparently composed by the religious community behind the corpus. It is worth defining each class a little more carefully.

The first comprises biblical books which are written in Hebrew – either in the palaeo-Hebrew characters of the pre-exilic period or, more normally, the square script that predominated from post-exilic times.

Type
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The Cambridge History of Judaism , pp. 798 - 821
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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