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Manuscripts the Community Rule and the Damascus Document

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Manuscripts the Community Rule and the Damascus Document CREATING COMMUNITY HALAKHAH* SARIANNA METSO A person aspiring to be admitted into the Essene community was required to swear an oath to follow the Law of Moses and to separate from outsiders. That aspect of the admission procedure will be used in this article as a test case for studying the process of generating halak­ hah in the Essene community. The special focus here will be to ex­ plore the derivation of rules such as these in the light of the varying manuscripts the Community Rule and the Damascus Document, and the degree of their authoritativeness in the life of the Essene commu­ nity in relation to the laws of the Torah. 1 This topic has been dis­ cussed earlier by Lawrence Schiffman, Philip Davies, and Moshe Weinfeld, but the evidence from Cave 4 raises a new interesting pos­ sibility: some of the community legislation seems to have been de­ rived not from Scripture, but simply from the exigencies of communal life, and only secondarily argued as resting on scriptural authority. Lawrence Schiffman has argued that the sole source of Qumranic legal traditions was scriptural exegesis.2 Philip Davies has taken a dif- * It is with great joy that I dedicate this article to Gene, a learned colleague and my wonderful husband, on the happy occasion of his 65th birthday. 1 In a recent article "Halakhah at Qumran: Genre and Authority" (DSD 10 [2003]104-29) by A Shemesh and Cana Werman, the question regarding the dif­ ferent types of legal material attested in Qumran writings is posed somewhat dif­ ferently. Instead of asking whether there are different types of legal material in­ cluded within the Damascus Document and the Community Rule, as Schiffman, Davies and Weinfeld do, Shemesh and Werman compare the type of halakhah discernible in the Damascus Document with that attested in the Temple Scroll. Their central argument is that the "halakhic passages at Qumran may be ascribed to two broad genres: Temple Scroll style, in which no distinction is made between text and exegesis, and Damascus Document style, in which exegesis and text are differentiated via topical organization and rubrics" (p. 128). In the style of the Temple Scroll, the "authority emerges from its self-perception as part of the di­ vine Sinaitic relevation" (p. 111). The style of the Damascus Document, on the other hand, "admits the role of divinely inspired human intellectual activity in the creation of the halakhah" (p. 119). All texts dealt with in the present article repre­ sent the second type according to the classification by Shemesh and Werman. 2 L. H. Schiffman, The Halakhah at Qumran (SJLA 16; Leiden: Brill, 1975) 280 SARIANNA METSO ferent view, clearly demarcating the social backgrounds of the Com­ munity Rule and of the Damascus Document. He argued that while the community behind the Damascus Document derived its legal tradi­ tions from scriptural exegesis (with one or two exceptions), the com­ munity behind the Community Rule did not. 3 Moshe Weinfeld studied Greco-Roman religious groups, observing their parallels to the Qum­ ran regulations governing the community organization and admission of new members. He distinguished between rules mandated by the To­ rah and those originating from the community's practice: the laws of Torah belonged to the realm of the covenant between God and Israel, whereas the regulations concerning social organization arose within the community, the members of which voluntarily committed them­ selves to the rules decided by the group. According to Weinfeld, "Schiffman is right in arguing that rejecting the commands of one's superior means rejecting a sectarian decision, but his conclusion that this is tantamount to rejection of God's commands [Schiffman, p. 39] has no basis whatsoever."4 19-21, 75-76. See, e.g., the introduction to the book: "We can state with cer­ tainty ... that the Qumran legal traditions are derived exclusively through exege­ sis" (p. 19), and the summary of chapter 1: "All necessary guidance in matters of halakhah came from biblical exegesis" (p. 76). Schiffman presents a reformulated view in his new forthcoming article "Legal Texts and Codification in the Dead Sea Scrolls," to be published in a volume from a Bucknell University Conference on Rabbinic Literature, edited by Rivka Kern Ulmer. I thank Professor Schiffman for sending me an advance copy. 3 P. R. Davies, "Halakhah at Qumran," A Tribute to Geza Vermes. Essays on Jewish and Christian Literature and History, ed. P. R. Davies and R. T. White (JSOTSup 100; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990) 37-50. Davies argues: " ... some Qumran law is halakhah (in my sense) and some not.. .. The distinction between scripturally-derived and non-scripturally-derived law is either explicit or implicit in the Qumran literature and not a scholarly rationalization, and ... the distinction is of fundamental importance in Qumran research" (p. 38). Referring to the com­ munities behind CD and 1QS, Davies writes:" ... I want to suggest that the legal (and indeed, social) basis of each community is constituted rather differently, and that the term 'halakhah' is appropriate to the one and not to the other" (p. 39). 4 M. Weinfeld, The Organizational Pattern and the Penal Code of the Qumran Sect. A Comparison with Guilds and Religious Associations of the Hellenistic­ Roman Period (NTOA 2; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986) 71-76. See esp. p. 71: " ... the organizational rules of the Qumran sect have nothing to do with specific Jewish ideals. They rather reflect the way guilds and religious asso­ ciations of the Hellenistic period used to structure their regulations of or-.
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