Sidnie White Crawford

Eschatology, messianism, and the Dead Sea scrolls

The New Testament is of prime importance for understanding early Jewish and Christian messianism and eschatology. Yet often the New Testament presumes a background and context of belief without fully articulating it. Early Jewish and Christian messianism and eschatology, after all, did not emerge in a vacuum; they developed out of early Jewish hopes that had their roots in the Old Testament. A knowledge of early Jewish literature, and especially of the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, is essential for understanding the shape of these ideas at the turn of the era. In this book, the inaugural volume in the Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature series, Craig Evans and Peter Flint have assembled eight essays from outstanding scholars who address this issue from a variety of angles. After an introduction by the editors, successive essays deal with the Old Testament foundations of messianism; the figure of Daniel at Qumran; the Teacher of Righteousness; the expectation of the end in the Scrolls; and Jesus, Paul, and John seen in light of Qumran.

Methods of investigation of the Dead Sea scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran site : present realities and future prospects

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Three Fragments from Qumran Cave 4 and Their Relationship to the Temple Scroll

The three fragments presented in this article are part of the cache of manuscript fragments from Cave 4, discovered in 1952. John Strugnell, the original editor, placed these fragments with 4Q365, a manuscript which he named, along with 4Q364, 366, and 367, 4QPentateuchal Paraphrases (now called 4QReworked Pentateuch). I The identification of these three fragments with 4Q365 is, however, problematic. Strugnell made his original identification on the basis of similarity between the handwriting of the fragments and 4Q365, and because the contents of the fragments is not incompatible with 4Q365. However, in his editio princeps of the Temple Scroll, Yigael Yadin ascribed all three fragments to the Temple Scroll (1 1QTa) as a second copy of that composition, parallel to the one from cave 1.2 Strugnell, on the other hand, has continued to assert that these fragments belong to 4Q365, one of the manuscripts of 4QRP.3 Tov and I, in the editio princeps of 4Q365, have followed a middle path; we have assigned one of the fragments (identified in Yadin as pl. 40, #1) to 4Q365 for reasons I will outline below, and two of them (identified in Yadin as pl. 38, #5 and pl. 40, #2), along

Genesis in the Dead Sea Scrolls

The book of Genesis occupies a prominent place in the Qumran collection of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is true for Genesis as simply a scriptural text, but also as Genesis is reworked, rewritten, and interpreted in other Second Temple Jewish works found at Qumran. The relatively large number of manuscripts of Genesis preserved in the Judean Desert caves speaks to its importance as a scriptural text in the Second Temple period. Both Enoch and Aramaic Levi were composed prior to the foundation of the Qumran community, and appear to be central texts of the wider parent movement of which Qumran was a part. The Qumran collection contains several, small, fragmentary texts that feature characters or events from Genesis in one way or another, further testifying to the importance of Genesis in the thought of the Qumran sect and its parent movement. Keywords:Aramaic Levi; Dead Sea Scrolls; Enoch; Genesis; Second Temple period

Qumran: Caves, Scrolls, and Buildings

The caves in the vicinity of Khirbet Qumran and their contents have been the subjects of much academic vitriol over the past fifteen or so years. Two competing positions currently exist regarding what Khirbet Qumran was and who lived there. The first position, originally articulated by de Vaux and today championed in the archaeological community by Jodi Magness, Magen Broshi and the late Hanan Eshel, states that Qumran was a sectarian settlement, most probably Essene, one of the three main Jewish movements in the Greco-Roman period described by Josephus, with secondary support from Philo and Pliny. The second position is not so much a position as an anti-position, arguing against the Qumran-Essene hypothesis. Thus, there is good archaeological evidence, independent of the Scrolls, for tying the caves to Khirbet Qumran. Keywords:caves; Khirbet Qumran; scrolls

4QTemple? (4Q365A) Revisited

In 1994 Emanuel Tov and the author published the group of four manuscripts known as 4QReworked Pentateuch, 4Q364-367. These manuscripts had originally belonged to the lot assigned to John Strugnell, who subsequently requested that we undertake the publication, and turned over to us his extensive notes on the manuscripts. The strongest argument for placing the fragments of 4Q365a back into 4Q365 is that they were written by the same scribe, using the same orthographic practice. The chapter demonstrates the five fragments of 4Q365a or even in its earlier Hasmonean recension from Cave 4. However, the parallels between 4Q365 23, and 4Q365a 2, strongly suggest that the fragments contained source material for the Temple Scroll . It is more likely that the fragments of 4Q365a belong within 4Q365 than with the Temple Scroll . Keywords:4QTemple; Emanuel Tov; John Strugnell; Temple Scroll

Book Review: Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel. By Bernard M. Levinson. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxvi + 206. Cloth,

165 “Why, if Jesus is understood as a Jew of his time, would he ignore the promise to Abraham which was firmly part of Jewish tradition and beliefs and would have been a socially and politically relevant issue under Herodian and Roman rule?” (p. 1). Wenell argues that Jesus considered it very important in significant ways. Jesus’ relationship to the Jerusalem temple, understanding of purity and boundary maintenance, and calling of twelve disciples together suggest that Jesus envisioned a renewed space for Israel in which the tribes, dispersed throughout many lands, would be reconstituted in the sacred space of the land promised to Abraham. Wenell argues that space is not “passive and waiting to be filled,” but is “active, productive, and has its own corresponding codes which are part of the relationship between individual members of a society and their space” (p. 15). In such space, humans socially produce spatial meanings that are not always universally shared by members of a society. She locates Jesus’ relationship to the space of Judea/Galilee within these negotiated spatial meanings. Chapter 2 describes the “contested space” of the temple. Wenell locates Jesus at odds with the group of priests controlling the temple. She argues that Jesus’ temple action, together with the saying about the “stone torn down” (Mark 13:1–2//) and the accusation that Jesus spoke about destroying the temple (Mark 14:56–59; John 2:13–22; Acts 6:12–14), indicates that Jesus envisioned the destruction, but not the restoration of the temple. Instead of appealing to the idea of a restored eschatological temple, Jesus and his followers appealed to traditions regarding the Israelites’ wilderness camp (Mark 14:58; Exod 15:17). Wenell notes that if Jesus’ act in the temple is symbolically indicative of both destruction and restoration, “it does not have any symbolic element which naturally points to restoration” (p. 50). Next Wenell discusses the “embodied space” of purity. She discusses Jesus’ relationship to sinners and concern for purity rules by first noting that purity itself can be seen as a “spatial practice” (p. 61). Con cerns for purity manifest themselves in different types of engagement with and avoidance of certain persons and things. All of these interactions can be mapped spatially. Purity itself, however, was defined differently by different groups of first-century Judeans. Wenell believes that Jesus differed from nearly all other first-century Jews in that he evidenced little concern for separation from Gentiles and lacked concern for purity in his association with meal companions. Jesus “may actually have rejected notions of purity” (p. 103) and “did not initiate a “new ritual for purity and contact with the divine” (p. 102). In the fourth chapter, Wenell describes the “imagined space” of Jesus’ movement. She describes Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God involving considerations of a future Israel reorganized around a tribal model. It is in this context that Jesus’ calling twelve disciples is particularly pertinent. This group “relates to the story of the exodus and entry into the promised land” and “provides spatial grounding for Jesus’ expectations about the future in terms of a new, imagined space” (p. 137). There are at least three difficulties requiring further explanation. While Wenell argues that she reconstructs a “plausible” Jesus rather than a “historical” Jesus, at times she is very careful with such distinctions (i.e., detailed argument about why she accepts the Twelve as more likely historical than not), while at others she is less careful. For example, she notes regarding the Twelve, “it seems that Jesus’ use of ‘twelve’ could have locative implications” (p. 106). Two sentences later, however, she argues that Jesus’ “action of calling twelve disciples evokes a new spatial vision which includes the land” (p. 106). This second statement goes well beyond what she suggests in the first. A second difficulty has to do with the concepts of “sacred” and “socially meaningful” spaces. Throughout the work, these terms shift in meaning, a fact complicated by her description of “sacred space” as an “ana chronistic” concept for antiquity (p. 6). The very fact that the temple can be a place of contested meaning shows that, even if one allows for sacred space as a place “associated with divinity” (p. 6), the meaning of such a space is still determined by the social meaning (whether shared broadly or contested heavily) associated with such a place. Finally, Wenell says, “To focus only on beliefs about space ignores the sense that sacred space is maintained by humans in social environments” (p. 146). In the end, however, if the only space with which Jesus is concerned is eschatological space, and he did not create a new spatial practice due to his lack of concern for purity, then the space of Jesus and his group of twelve is only belief about space and not actual space. Here Wenell might say more about how Jesus’ activities create a new spatial practice even before the eschaton. These criticisms notwithstanding, this book raises many important questions and is significant for anyone interested in the study of space in early Christianity. Eric Stewart Augustana College Rock Island IL