Charlotte Hempel

The Wisdom Texts from Qumran and the Development of Sapiential Thought

This volume comprises the lectures delivered at a conference on the sapiential texts from Qumran hosted by A. Lange and H. Lichtenberger in Tubingen (1998) as well as a number of additional contributions. This literature, although found in the Qumran library, is mostly of non-Essene origin and can be dated to the third and second century BCE with a single exception which might be even older. The sapiential texts from Qumran add to the sparse corpus of postexilic sapiential literature and shed new light on the later Israelite and Jewish wisdom as well as on the sources from which early Christian wisdom traditions originated. Therefore, the volume attempts to understand the wisdom literature from Qumran in the broader context of sapiential thought in the Ancient near East, the Hebrew Bible, Ancient Judaism and the New Testament. Beyond this, the volume further includes treatments of introductory and linguistic questions as well as articles on specific sapiential texts.

Reflections on Literacy, Textuality, and Community in the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls

As the varied contributions in this volume amply demonstrate, the Dead Sea Scrolls have offered an unparalleled lab for scholars on textuality in antiquity. Given the fulsomeness of its evidence pride of place is held by the Community Rule tradition. The significance of those eleven at times quite different manuscripts produced over the space of almost two centuries goes far beyond the particularities of their equally fascinating contents. Initially scholars worked for a number of formative years only with the best preserved manuscript of the Community Rule (1QS) which was considered the “manual” or constitution of an ancient Jewish group hidden for millennia in a cave in the Judean Desert. The publication of ten additional manuscripts (MSS) from Cave 4 in 1998 has opened up a much wider horizon of scholarly interest in these manuscripts. While a large proportion of their contents overlapped with 1QS, some of the witnesses preserved in Cave 4 diverged markedly from what was said in 1QS. The manuscript tradition of the Community Rule (S) thus offers precious first handhand evidence of textual growth and inter-textual relationships also with the Damascus Document and 4QMiscellaneous Rule (4Q265). The paradigmatic place of 1QS in discussions of the nature of the so-called “Qumran Community” has also influenced investigations of the genre of rules. Here Ben Wright’s analysis of the issue of genre in wisdom and apocalyptic—where he argues for a move away from the proto-type approach—is illuminating also for the S tradition. In light of the full manuscript picture we are dealing with a selection of proto-types or at least challenges to the

Wisdom and Law in the Hebrew Bible and at Qumran

This article begins by noting the paucity of engagement between scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) and a number of significant studies on the relationship of wisdom and law in the Hebrew Bible. A substantial case study on Proverbs 1-9 and the Community Rule from Qumran is put in conversation with the seminal work of, especially, Moshe Weinfeld on Deuteronomy and its refinement by subsequent research to trace a dynamic interaction between wisdom and law in the Second Temple period. The article ends with critical reflections on the wide-spread model of segmenting ancient Jewish literature and those responsible for it into neat categories such as wisdom and law. It is argued that such a model presupposes a degree of specialization that is not borne out by the range of literature that found its way into the Hebrew Bible or the caves in the vicinity of Khirbet Qumran.

The Profile and Character of Qumran Cave 4: The Community Rule Manuscripts as a Test Case

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Pluralism And Authoritativeness: The Case Of The S Tradition

The once formidable gap between Hebrew Bible scholarship and the study of the non-biblical Dead Sea Scrolls has been declining in the course of recent years. This chapter uses the evidence of the S manuscripts to reflect on the issue of the function of the Rule manuscripts as authoritative works in the community in light of their literary complexity and pluriformity. Even though the Community Rule will be the main illustrative example, some of the most interesting pieces of evidence on the growth of this and other texts are cases where literary developments spill over, so to speak, from one text to another. The chapter is concerned with the copies of the Community Rule from Caves 1 and 4. Access to the full text of the ten Cave 4 manuscripts of the Rule since the early 1990s has revealed some remarkably complex literary processes in the growth of this text. Keywords: authoritative works; Community Rule ; Dead Sea Scrolls; Hebrew Bible; Pluralism; S manuscripts

Texts, Scribes and Scholars: Reflections on a Busy Decade in Dead Sea Scrolls Research

This article offers an overview of a number of developments in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the last decade. This period witnessed the full publication of the corpus as well as some very important fresh perspectives on this extraordinary collection of ancient Jewish texts.

CD Manuscript B and the Rule of the Community —Reflections on a Literary Relationship

This article begins by noting the proliferation of textual overlap between the Damascus Document and the Rule of the Community . Some examples of such over-lap, such as the penal code, have received a large amount of scholarly attention in the wake of the publication of all the Cave 4 manuscripts. This study returns to a passage from CD manuscript B (CD 20:1b‐8a) that has long been recognized as closely related to 1QS 8‐9 and offers a reconsideration of the relationship between both texts in the light of the full publication of all the S manuscripts. The analysis offered here uncovers a complex inter-relationship between both texts as well as some intriguing pointers towards a complex literary history within the S tradition.

Book Reviews : Calendars At Qumran

Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Routledge, 1998, £35.00, pp. viii + 136, ISBN 0-415-16513-X) by James C. VanderKam offers an introduction to the calendrical material contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as an assessment of the scholarly discussion. The book falls into two parts. Part One deals with the calendrical information contained in the Hebrew Bible, a number of post-biblical sources, and Rabbinic literature. In Part Two the author