Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James C. VanderKam is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Hebrew Scriptures Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. Among his many other books are The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, and the two-volume commentary on the book of Jubilees in the Hermeneia series. He also served as an editor for thirteen volumes in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series and was editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature from 2006 to 2012.

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The Dead Sea Scrolls Today

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition.................................................xiiPreface to the First Edition..................................................xiv1. Discoveries................................................................1A. INTRODUCTION...............................................................1B. THE QUMRAN DISCOVERIES.....................................................22. Survey of the Manuscripts..................................................47A. BIBLICAL TEXTS.............................................................47B. APOCRYPHAL AND PSEUDEPIGRAPHAL TEXTS.......................................52C. OTHER TEXTS................................................................613. The Identification of the Qumran Group.....................................97A. THE CASE FOR THE ESSENE HYPOTHESIS.........................................97B. PROBLEMS WITH THE ESSENE HYPOTHESIS........................................114C. OTHER THEORIES.............................................................1194. The Qumran Essenes.........................................................127A. A SKETCH OF THE QUMRAN GROUP'S HISTORY.....................................127B. A SKETCH OF QUMRAN THOUGHT AND PRACTICE....................................137C. THE QUMRAN ESSENES AND THEIR PLACE IN JUDAISM..............................1475. The Scrolls and the Old Testament..........................................157A. THE TEXT OF THE HEBREW BIBLE/OLD TESTAMENT.................................157B. NEW INFORMATION ABOUT THE HISTORY OF SOME TEXTS............................171C. A CANON OF SCRIPTURE.......................................................1786. The Scrolls and the New Testament..........................................197A. INTRODUCTION...............................................................197B. SIMILARITIES BETWEEN THE SCROLLS AND THE NEW TESTAMENT.....................201C. CONCLUSIONS................................................................2247. Controversies about the Dead Sea Scrolls...................................227A. EDITING AND PUBLISHING THE SCROLLS.........................................227B. EVENTS SINCE 1989..........................................................233Postscript....................................................................243Index.........................................................................249

Chapter One

A. INTRODUCTION

The territory of the modern state of Israel has not proved to be congenial for finding written remains from antiquity. Unlike Egypt and Iraq, where excavations have brought innumerable texts to light, Palestine had produced virtually nothing of the kind until 1947. There were reports that centuries ago manuscripts had been found in the region of Jericho, near the Dead Sea. Origen, the Christian scholar who lived from A.D. 185 to 254, was an acute student of the exact wording of the biblical texts. As an aid to text-critical labors, he compiled an enormous work that included in parallel columns six versions of the entire Old Testament (in Hebrew and in Greek). It is called the Hexapla, or sixfold book. He mentioned that the sixth Greek version of the Psalms that he presented in his Hexapla had been found in a jar around Jericho. In describing the same text, the church historian Eusebius, who lived from about 260 to 340, added in his Ecclesiastical History (6.16.1) that a Greek version of the Psalms and other Greek and Hebrew manuscripts had been found in a jar at Jericho during the reign of the Roman emperor Caracalla (Antoninus; reigned 211-17). Later, in approximately the year 800, the Nestorian patriarch of Seleucia, Timotheus I (727-819), wrote a letter to Sergius (who died about 805), the metropolitan (a position like that of an archbishop) of Elam. In it he noted:

We have learnt from trustworthy Jews who were then being instructed as catechumens in the Christian religion that some books were found ten years ago in a rock-dwelling near Jericho. The story was that the dog of an Arab out hunting, while in pursuit of game, went into a cave and did not come out again; its owner went in after it and found a chamber, in which there were many books, in the rock. The hunter went off to Jerusalem and told his story to the Jews, who came out in great numbers and found books of the Old Testament and others in the Hebrew script.

The patriarch goes on to tell how he asked an expert whether passages that in the New Testament are considered quotations from the Old Testament but cannot be found in existing copies of Israel's scriptures were present in these manuscripts. He was assured that they were indeed there, but his attempt to obtain more information on this point failed. The Jewish expert also told him: "We have found more than two hundred Psalms of David among our books." We have no way of checking whether the cave of manuscripts located just before A.D. 800 is one of those in which the Dead Sea Scrolls would be found almost 1,150 years later, but the parallel is at least intriguing, and the description of the scrolls in some ways matches those from Qumran, the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Some Jewish and Arabic sources also refer to a medieval Jewish group that went under the name "the cave people" (magariyah in Arabic) because their teachings arose from books found in a cave.

B. THE QUMRAN DISCOVERIES

No other finds of this kind are attested until 1947. In that year some Arab shepherds stumbled upon a cave, and their find led to what was soon hailed as the greatest archeological discovery of the twentieth century. The ways in which the caves were found and the texts in them came to the attention of scholars are a dramatic story in themselves.

1. The First Cave

a. The Seven Original Scrolls

John Trever (1915-2006), one of the first scholars to lay eyes on any of the scrolls and the first to photograph those brought to him in 1948, wrote a thoroughly researched and documented history of the initial Qumran finds. Much of his report came from his own experience and notes. According to his account, three Bedouin shepherds were in an area called Qumran on the northwest side of the Dead Sea in the winter or spring of 1947 (possibly in late 1946, as the Bedouin claimed). At that time the territory was under the rule of the British Mandate in Palestine. The shepherds, who were cousins and members of the Ta'amireh tribe, were apparently tending their flocks when one of them, named Jum'a Muhammad Khalil, who enjoyed searching for caves, amused himself by tossing rocks at a cave opening in the cliffs to the west of the plateau at Qumran. One of the rocks went into the mouth of the cave and shattered something inside. The three did not enter the cave at that time to check what had broken, but two days later one of the shepherds, Muhammad ed-Dhib (his real name is Muhammad Ahmed el-Hamed), rose early in the morning before his companions had awakened, located the cave, and squeezed into it. There he found ten jars, each about two feet high. To his dismay, all but two of them were empty. One of these two had dirt in it; the other contained three scrolls, two of which were wrapped in linen. The scrolls were later identified as a copy of the biblical book...