Authoritative Literature in the Dead Sea Scrolls

AUTHORITATIVE LITERATURE IN THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

JAMES C. VANDERKAM University of Notre Dame

Introduction

It is a commonplace that the Dead Sea Scrolls have contributed enor- mously to our knowledge about the scriptures, early Judaism, and early Christianity. Scholars perceived the relevance of the scrolls for biblical and related studies from the very beginning, once the period to which the scrolls belonged became evident. Any corpus of Jewish texts found in the holy land and dating from the last centuries BCE and the first century CE could hardly help being of significance for understanding the Bible, since these centuries saw the Hebrew Bible taking shape and exegetical traditions on it continuing to evolve. One of the areas of study to which the scrolls make a significant contribution is the history of a developing notion of a Bible, that is, of a set of uniquely authoritative writings. One-fourth of the scrolls identified in the Qumran caves are copies of books that are now in the Hebrew Bible (202 of more than 800 scrolls). The sheer number of these copies indicates the importance that the community ascribed to (at least several of) these books, and the distribution of copies gives some information, however limited, about which books were consid- ered unusually important or helpful. The most frequently attested book is the Psalter, present in 36 copies, not all of which share the same form; it is followed by Deuteronomy with 29, Isaiah with 21, Exodus with 17, Genesis with 15, and Leviticus with 13. No other book in the traditional Hebrew Bible has survived in as many as ten copies, and two books are not represented at all: Nehemiah and Esther.' Not only are almost all of the books of the Hebrew Scriptures found at Qumran; they were obviously pressed into service there and

1 For the numbers of copies, see J.C. VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994) 30-31. 383 were not left lying around in rooms or caves collecting dust. Anyone familiar with the Dead Sea Scrolls knows that they may aptly be char- acterized as a biblically saturated literature. Or, as E. Cook has recently put the matter:

Almost all of the Dead Sea Scrolls that are not themselves copies of biblical books are still connected in some way with the Scriptures of Israel. The poetic compositions, however creative, are still suffused with biblical phrases; the legal texts are based openly or implicitly on scriptural precedents; and the narratives of the past or predictions of the future are retellings or refashionings of sacred stories or prophecies.z

This suffusion with biblical language has been called "le .style anthologique, the working of Old Testament expressions and phrases into the very fabric of the composition."3 The phenomenon of "le style anthologique" is an important yet elusive measure of the influence a book had on writers of the scrolls. In a much earlier day of Qumran scholarship, I.H. Eybers was able to show that even several poorly attested books of the ketuvim that are present in only a few or a single copy in the caves exercised some influence on the style and wording of other texts.4 Whether the scriptural books were the only ones to fill the minds of these authors with words, phrases, and ideas and whether they did so directly or through intermediaries should remain open questions. We should also keep in mind that the Qumran community was probably an unusual one; its views on which texts were consid- ered authoritative and how they were to be read were very likely not shared fully by all Jews at the time. But the huge part played by the scriptural writings in the sundry literary categories represented in their manuscript collection is eloquent testimony to the fact that these books were highly significant for the group. The subject of this paper is not so much the number of copies of what became scriptural texts or the widespread evidence for use of these works at Qumran; it is rather what in later times would be called

2 E. Cook in M. Wise, M. Abegg, and E. Cook (eds), The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996) 114. The words are from his introduction to 1QpHab. Translations from the scrolls in this paper are taken from The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. 3 J. Fitzmyer, "The use of explicit Old Testament quotations in Qumran literature and in the New Testament," NTS 7 (1960-61); reprinted twice, most recently in idem, The Semitic Background of the New Testament (The Biblical Resource Series; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans/Livonia,MI: Dove, 1997) 5. 4 I.H. Eybers, "Some Light on the Canon of the Qumran Sect," De Ou Testa- mentiese Werkgemeenskapin Suid-Afrika, 1962 (repr. in S.Z. Leiman [ed.], The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible: An Introductory Reader [New York: Ktav, 1974] 23-36).