THE DAMASCUS DOCUMENT 2.1 Introduction Recovered at The
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CHAPTER TWO THE DAMASCUS DOCUMENT 2.1 Introduction Recovered at the end of the nineteenth century from the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, the Damascus Document and its contents were first published in 1910 by the Talmud scholar Solomon Schechter.1 After receiving financial support from a colleague at Cambridge University, Schechter travelled to Cairo in 1896 in order to locate an ancient manuscript rumoured to contain the original He- brew of Ben Sira.2 While searching for the Ben Sira text, Schechter came across two copies of a previously unknown document in the genizah (a storeroom for worn-out texts) of the Ben Ezra Syna- gogue.3 Schechter dubbed this document Fragments of a Zadokite Work in accordance with its fragmentary state and with the authors of the work who seem to have understood themselves as being syn- onymous with, or related to, the “sons of Zadok” (CD 4.3).4 Although some of Schechter’s contemporaries questioned his identification of the text as Zadokite,5 the title Zadokite Fragments 1 S. Schechter, Documents of Jewish Sectaries. I. Fragments of a Zadokite Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910). 2 S. C. Reif, “The Damascus Document from the Cairo Genizah,” in The Damas- cus Covenant: A Centennial of Discovery. Proceedings of the Third International Symposium of the Orion Center, 4-8 February, 1998 (ed. J. M. Baumgarten, E. G. Chazon, and A. Pinnick; STDJ 34; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), 109-31. 3 A third manuscript from the Cairo genizah containing nine lines of text has also been identified as having a possible connection with the Damascus Document. In particular, the presence of the word Damascus and the phrase “the congregation of the sons of Zadok” presents a strong case in favour of this text being related to the Damascus Document. However, aside from the shared terminology, the contents of this text do not overlap with any of the Damascus Document material from Cairo or Qumran making it difficult to ascertain its relationship with these manuscripts. For more, see I. Levi, “Documents relatif a la ‘Communaute des fils de Sadoc,’” REJ 65 (1913): 24-31; J. Fitzmyer, Prolegomenon to the reprint of S. Schechter, Documents of Jewish Sectaries. I. Fragments of a Zadokite Work (New York: Ktav, 1970), 9-37. 4 Schechter, Documents of Jewish Sectaries, xix-xxii. 5 Cf. for example L. Ginzberg, An Unknown Jewish Sect (1922; repr. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1976); A. Büchler, “Schechter’s ‘Jewish Sectaries,’” JQR 3 (1912-13): 429-85. 20 CHAPTER TWO continued to be used by scholars until copies of the document were identified among the manuscript discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1950’s. Shortly thereafter, Schechter’s title was abandoned in favour of the title Damascus Covenant or Damascus Document based on the text’s frequent references to Damascus (CD 6.5, 19; 7.15, 19; 8.21; 19.34; 20.12) and on the overwhelming popularity of Eleazar Sukenik’s Essene hypothesis, which identified the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls as being connected with the Jewish sect known as the Essenes.6 Of the two manuscripts recovered by Schechter from the Cairo genizah, manuscript A contained sixteen pages of material written on the verso and recto of eight leaves of paper and was dated by Schechter to about the tenth century CE. Manuscript B consisted of two pages written on the verso and recto of one leaf and was dated to about the twelfth century CE. By contrast, the copies of the Damas- cus Document that were identified among the Dead Sea Scrolls were written sometime between the first century BCE and the first century CE.7 Roughly one-thousand years older than their medieval counter- parts, the manuscripts from the Dead Sea have retained material that is not extant in the Cairo texts while simultaneously exhibiting a different order for portions of the overlapping material, thereby mak- ing them a important early witness to the Damascus Document. Schechter was the first to suggest that the Damascus Document should be read as a composite work: “its whole contents,” wrote Schechter in 1910, “are in a very fragmentary state, leaving the im- pression that we are dealing with extracts from a larger work, put together, however, in a haphazard way, with little regard to com- pleteness or order.”8 Aside from a general acknowledgement that the Damascus Document is a composite work, however, there has been little scholarly consensus on how the document should be recon- 6 E. Sukenik, Megillot Genuzot. Sequira Rishona (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialiak, 1948); cf. J. M. Baumgarten, “Sacrifice and Worship among the Jewish Sectarians of the Dead Sea (Qumran) Scrolls,” in Studies in Qumran Law (SJLA 24; Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1977), 39-56. 7 In all, ten manuscripts of the Damascus Document have been identified among the Dead Sea Scrolls: 4Q266-273, 5Q12, and 6Q15. For the Cave 4 material, see J. M. Baumgarten, Qumran Cave 4. XIII. The Damascus Document (4Q266-273) (DJD 18; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). For the fragments from Caves 5 and 6, see M. Baillet, J. T. Milik, and R. de Vaux, Les ‘Petites Grottes” de Qumran: Exploration de la falaise, les grottes 2Q, 3Q, 5Q, 6Q, 7Q, a 10Q, le rouleau de cuivre (DJD 3; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). And for an overview of the Qumran copies of the Damascus Document, see C. Hempel, The Damascus Texts (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 19-24. 8 Schechter, Documents of Jewish Sectaries, x. .