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Dead Sea Discoveries 25 (2018) 289–298

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Introduction

Shira J. Golani and Jutta Jokiranta

This thematic issue is dedicated to the study of the composition known as the Damascus Document (D). It includes new research both on Cairo Genizah manuscripts and Qumran manuscripts. Material aspects are essential in attempting to determine the full scope and length of the existing manuscript exemplars, both in scroll and in codex format, now deteriorated or partly lost. Projects of producing new editions and discussions of how to best present ancient material to the modern audience, let alone debates on defining and redefining even the basic concepts such as “text,” “manuscript,” “work,” and “composition”, have demanded a new focus on the fact that any written text is mediated in a material form and that editorial work always involves interpretative processes of the material at hand. Interpreting the contents may depend on interpreting the material, as with the question of how the Damascus Document opens and how that affects the interpretation of the following text. Contributions by Jean-Sébastien Rey, and James Tucker and Peter Porzig address questions of material reconstruction. Structural matters are also material matters, when, for example, scribal choices of organizing the text such as vacats, column measures and variation are considered to be components of conveying structure. More often, literary structure is understood as (semi)independent from the material factors, as something that organizes the text in the mind of the reader through connections and transitions. The assumed literary structure is, however, not very often made explicit by scholars of texts. This issue includes efforts to re-enter structural questions in interpreting the nature of the texts or their methods of rewriting. Contributions by Stefan Beyerle and Andreas Ruwe, and Liora Goldman take up issues related to structure and textual units. Historical questions are never far when the Damascus Document is addressed. The search for historical signs and allusions has previously been inspired by the few mentions of specific time frames (like the famous “390 years” in CD 1:5–6) and sobriquets (like the “teacher” in CD 1:11) in the text itself, but the search can also be directed in new ways, geographically—which/ why Damascus?—and historiographically—what kind of interest in history

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/15685179-12341481 290 Golani and Jokiranta is represented in the Document and how is it used? Contributions by Paul Kosmin and Steven Fraade illuminate these different aspects of history. This issue of Dead Sea Discoveries exemplifies the variety of some recent approaches. Below we shall briefly outline some of the past research on the Damascus Document for a reader not yet familiar with it and then summarize the articles in this issue.

1 Discovery and Scholarship of the Medieval CD Codices

The Damascus Document first became known to scholars in the late 19th century, with the discovery of thousands of medieval Jewish manuscripts in the Cairo Genizah, the storeroom of documents from the Old Cairo Ben Ezra Synagogue.1 The collection, together with the two medieval Damascus Document manuscripts, were brought from Egypt to Cambridge, England, in 1896–97 by Talmudic scholar Solomon Schechter, who published the first edition of the Damascus Document in 1910.2 The name given by Schechter in this first publication, Fragments of a Zadokite Work, was based on the self- ,בני צדוק) ”references of the community behind the text as “the sons of Zadok CD 4:3).3 Nevertheless, the composition is now most commonly called The Damascus Document, based on several references in the work to “The Land of ,CD 7:15 ,דמשק) ”CD 6:5, 19; 8:21; 20:12) and “Damascus ,ארץ דמשק) ”Damascus 19). The medieval document found in Cairo has come to be referred to as CD, the Cairo Damascus Document. The attribution of CD stands for the two manuscripts, CD A, the longer and older manuscript, and CD B, shorter than CD A and somewhat later: CD A

1 The collection is now known as Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Cambridge Library Collection and can be accessed and searched at https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/genizah/1. 2 Solomon Schechter, Documents of Jewish Sectaries, Vol. 1: Fragments of a Zadokite Work (New York: Ktav, 1970). For early responses to Schechter’s work, see Alex P. Jassen, “American Scholarship on Jewish Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls in Scholarly Perspective: A History of Research, ed. Devorah Dimant and Ingo Kottsieper, STDJ 99 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 101–54 (111–21). 3 The Zadokite association remained in, e.g., H.H. Rowley, The Zadokite Fragments and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Oxford: Literary Licensing/ New York: McMillan, 1952), and Chaim Rabin, The Zadokite Documents (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954, [2nd ed. 1958]); and can still be found a century later, as in, e.g., Lawrence H. Schiffman, “From the Cairo Genizah to Qumran: The Influence of the Zadokite Fragments on the Study of the Qumran Scrolls,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Text and Context, ed. Charlotte Hempel, STDJ 90 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 451–66; but see also Ginzberg’s “sectarian” title: Louis Ginzberg, Eine unbekannte jüdische Sekte (New York, 1922 [English version: An Unknown Jewish Sect, New York: JTS, 1976]).

Dead Sea Discoveries 25 (2018) 289–297 Introduction 291 contains 16 columns and dates to the 10th century CE, while the two-columned CD B is dated to the 12th century CE.4 The texts of the two manuscripts slightly overlap and the relation of the two has been debated in scholarship: are they two copies of the same composition, or do they represent two literary stages of CD? Thus, for example, Chaim Rabin (1954) produced a composite text of both versions, in line with his contention that the two manuscripts belong to two deficient copies of a single original. However, in the second edition of his book (1958), the two versions were presented separately. A variation on this thesis, suggesting that CD A and CD B represent two concurrent versions, was brought forth by Menahem Kister, followed by Liora Goldman, and supported by, for example, Elisha Qimron in his recent edition.5

2 Discovery and Scholarship of the Ancient Qumran Fragments

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls during the years 1947–1956, and specifically in Cave 4 of Qumran, revealed fragments with texts recognized by scholars as belonging to the Cairo Damascus Document’s vocabulary and theology. New, yet about a millennium older fragments of the Damascus Document were found. Fragments assigned to eight scrolls of the Damascus Document, col- lectively referred to as D, were found at Caves 4, 5, and 6 of Qumran (other scrolls, with texts relating to D, were also unearthed). Unlike the large finds from Cave 4 (4Q266–273), the relatively scant D material from Caves 5 and 6 (5Q12, 6Q15) was already published in 1962 by J.T. Milik and M. Baillet.6 The

4 For these dates, see, e.g., Stefan C. Reif, “The Damascus Document from the Cairo Genizah: Its Discovery, Early Study and Historical Significance,” in The Damascus Document: A Centennial of Discovery. Proceedings of the Third International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 4–8 February, 1998, ed. Joseph M. Baumgarten, Esther G. Chazon, and Avital Pinnick, STDJ 34 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 109–31, esp. 126–27. 5 Menahem Kister, “Two Recensions of the Damascus Document,” in Beer-Sheva 18: On the Borderline: Textual Meets Literary Criticism, (2005): 209–23 [Hebrew]; Liora Goldman, “A Comparison of the Genizah Manuscripts A and B of the Damascus Document in Light of Their Pesher Units,” Meghillot 4 (2006): 169–89 [Hebrew] (see also her article in this volume); Elisha Qimron, The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew Writings (Between Bible and Mishnah), vol. 1, Jerusalem: Ben Zvi, 2010, 1 [Hebrew]. 6 M. Baillet, J.T. Milik and R. de Vaux, Les ‘petites grottes’ des Qumran, DJD 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962).

Dead Sea Discoveries 25 (2018) 289–297 292 Golani and Jokiranta official publication of the much larger plethora of texts from Cave 4 came in 1996 by J.M. Baumgarten.7 As many of the themes, vocabulary and style of the Damascus Document fit with additional compositions found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, it has been convincingly established that the Damascus Document is to be studied together with so-called “sectarian” compositions, most notably Serekh ha- Yaḥad (S), the pesharim, Miqṣat Maʿaśê ha-Torah (MMT), and additional legal and admonition texts from Qumran. The text found in the 4QD scrolls is greatly paralleled by CD, with minor variations. However, the D scrolls also contain material, in both the admonitions (historiography) and the legal material, not attested in CD. Therefore, the scrolls are considered by scholars to represent a version of the Damascus Document that is longer than the one represented in CD. For example, Qimron, in his introduction to his edition of the Damascus Document that combines CD and D, promotes the idea that the Genizah Manuscript A (CD A) is a textually corrupted copy of a Qumran text.8

3 Scholarship of the Damascus Document in Light of Both CD and D

CD was initially divided by scholars into two parts, the first, the Admonitions, containing admonitions and historiographical information, and the second, the Laws, legal material, rules and ordinances. The more expanded Qumran texts allowed for an updated scholarly understanding of the internal division of the Damascus Document. The Laws have come to be perceived as the main part, the figurative heart of the composition, which is placed within a historiographical-admonition framework. This framework includes both a more expansive introduction than found in CD and an epilogue, not fully preserved. Scholarship of the Damascus Document in the last two decades or so has been advanced in several avenues, complementing each other.9 Studies of several material aspects of the parchment objects carrying the text of the Document—the order and text of CD’s pages and D’s scrolls, individually and the light shed by one upon the other—has been published in this timeframe.

7 J.M. Baumgarten, Qumran Cave 4.XIII: The Damascus Document (4Q266–273), DJD 18 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). 8 Qimron, The Dead Sea Scrolls, 1–2. 9 The last collected volume on the Damascus Document was published in 2000: Baumgarten et al., eds., The Damascus Document: A Centennial of Discovery. The following surveys scholarship published in editions, monographs, and articles.

Dead Sea Discoveries 25 (2018) 289–297 Introduction 293

Following Magen Broshi’s edition of CD (1992), more editions with new read- ings have been published by Ben Zion Wacholder (2007), Elisha Qimron (2010), and David Hamidović (2011).10 These material and textual aspects have been recently taken up again, with contribution of computational and exact sci- ences, bringing digital reconstructions and new mathematical paradigms into play in the study of the physical artifacts (including two articles in this volume, presenting the forefront of scholarly debates on the matter). The lion’s share of recent scholarship of the Damascus Document, however, remains focused on matters of content, relating to the written text and the various types of information it conveys. These studies discuss the literary structure of the composition, and the interrelationship of its two main components, as well as of each section on its own. Studies of vocabulary of the Document contributed to expanding the linguistic and ideological knowledge of this text and the world and world-views it represents. Scholars have revisited the varied forms of relation of the Damascus Document to earlier formative texts, that is, the “emerging scriptures” (as put by Hempel),11 and so also continue the debates as to which Dead Sea scrolls should be considered as belonging to, or relating to D. The most prominently, perhaps, is the question of the relation of 4Q265 to 4QD. Research relating to the historical information in the Damascus Document’s framework has gone into questions on the historical picture portrayed and expressed: when did “those that entered in a new covenant” enter it, and where is the “Damascus” where this is said to have happened.12 The world- views of the Judean group represented in the Document, and its relation to the group(s) represented in other “sectarian” texts found at Qumran have also

10 Magen Broshi, The Damascus Document Reconsidered (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and the Shrine of Book, 1992); Broshi’s edition includes a bibliography by Florentino García Martínez on the Damascus Document from 1970 till 1989 (63–83); Ben Zion Wacholder, The New Damascus Document: The Midrash on the Eschatological Torah of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Reconstruction, Translation and Commentary, STDJ 56 (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Qimron, The Dead Sea Scrolls; David Hamidović, L’écrit de Damas: Le manifeste es- sénien, Collection de la Revue des Études juives (Paris-Louvain-Walpole: Peeters, 2011). On material reconstruction, see also the seminal article of Hartmut Stegemann, “Toward Physical Reconstructions of the Qumran Damascus Document Scrolls,” in Baumgarten et al., eds., The Damascus Document: A Centennial of Discovery, 177–200. 11 Charlotte Hempel, The Qumran Rule Texts in Context: Collected Studies, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 154 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2013), 15. 12 See, e.g., Maxine L. Grossman, Reading for History in the Damascus Document: A Methodological Study, STDJ 45 (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Stephen Hultgren, From the Damascus Covenant to the Covenant of the Community: Literary, Historical, and Theological Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls, STDJ 66 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), esp. 5–318, 493–538.

Dead Sea Discoveries 25 (2018) 289–297 294 Golani and Jokiranta come to be reexamined, let alone with other Judean groups of the Second Temple era, such as the Jerusalem priesthood and their followers.13 The socio- logical existence of the authors of the Damascus Document (with its several “editions”) is also revisited. The “Admonitions” section has been studied in connection to the genre of admonitions, with their functions as hortatory or rebuking texts (with possible oral performance).14 And significant progress has been made in the study of the legal part of the Document, deciphering the laws themselves, and under standing their use, adaptation and interpretation of previous law codes— significantly, those known from the Hebrew Bible (the use of the pesher and midrash methods).15 Also explored are the connections of Document’s penal code to other law systems found at Qumran and elsewhere in contemporary Judea and its environs, expanding on the important research comparing the Penal Code of the Damascus Document with Rabbinic Halakha.16 Specific

13 See Philip R. Davies, Behind the Essenes: History and Ideology in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Atlanta: Scholars, 1987); idem, “The Judaism(s) of the Damascus Document,” in Baumgarten et al., eds., The Damascus Document: A Centennial of Discovery, 27–43; Davies is followed and reexamined by Grossman, Reading for History (see esp. ix–xi, 144–53, for discussion of Davies’s arguments). 14 E.g., Steven D. Fraade, “Ancient Jewish Law and Narrative in Comparative Perspective: The Damascus Document and the Mishnah,” Diné Israel: Studies in Halakhah and Jewish Law 24 (2007): 65*–99* (81*); idem, “Interpretive Authority in the Studying Community at Qumran,” JJS 44 (1993): 46–69, esp. 56–58. 15 See, e.g., Charlotte Hempel, The Laws of the Damascus Document: Sources, Tradition and Redaction, STDJ 29 (Leiden: Brill, 1998); Aharon Shemesh, “Scriptural Interpretations in the Damascus Document and Their Parallels in Rabbinic Midrash,” in Baumgarten et al., eds., The Damascus Document: A Centennial of Discovery, 161–75; idem, “The Penal Code from Qumran and Early Midrash,” Meghillot 5–6 (2007): 245–68 [Hebrew]; idem, “‘For the Judgement is God’s’ (Deut. 1:17): Biblical and Communal Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Law and Religion in the Eastern Mediterranean: From Antiquity to Early Islam, ed. Anselm C. Hagedorn and Reinhard G. Kratz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 347–63; Alex P. Jassen, “Law and Exegesis in the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Shabbat Carrying Prohibition in Comparative Perspective,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls at 60: Scholarly Contributions of New York University Faculty and Alumni, ed. Lawrence H. Schiffman and Shani Tzoref, STDJ 89 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 115–56; Sidnie White Crawford, “The Use of the Pentateuch in the ‘Temple Scroll’ and the ‘Damascus Document’ in the Second Century B.C.E.,” The Pentateuch as Torah: New Models for Understanding Its Promulgation and Acceptance, ed. Gary N. Knoppers and Bernard M. Levinson (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2007), 301–17; Shani Tzoref, “‘Pesher’ and Periodization,” DSD 18,2 (2011): 129–54. 16 See, e.g., Hempel, The Laws; idem, The Qumran Rule Texts in Context, esp. 1–21; Sarianna Metso, “The Relationship between the Damascus Document and the Community Rule,” in Baumgarten et al., eds., The Damascus Document: A Centennial of Discovery, 85–93; Jutta Jokiranta, “An Experiment on ‘idem’ Identity in the Qumran Movement,” DSD 16,3 (2009): 309–29; Reinhard G. Kratz, “Der ‘Penal Code’ und das Verhältnis von Serekh ha-Yachad (S)

Dead Sea Discoveries 25 (2018) 289–297 Introduction 295 issues, such as martial and family laws, laws regarding witnesses, communal and social behavior,17 and the calendar18 have also continued to receive attention.

4 Articles in This Issue

Numerous studies have been written on the unnamed figure of the Teacher of Righteousness but few on the explicitly named city of Damascus, the imagined or actual location of the new covenant. Kosmin, historian of the Seleucid empire, focuses on this urban oasis in Syria between mountains and desert, known for its agricultural abundance. Kosmin draws the history of the site in broad strokes from the fifth to the first century BCE: whereas the city enjoyed a central position during many centuries and especially in the crossroads of the Persian system, in the third century it suffered from unrest in the Syrian wars and lost its central status, being replaced by the new Seleucid heartland. In the second century BCE it was revived and rebuilt, and Jewish migration to and from Damascus is well conceivable during this time. Damascus meant different things in different times; for the authors of the Damascus Document it could, for example, represent lost places: displacement in front of new Hellenistic innovations.

und Damaskusschrift (D),” RevQ 25,2 (2011): 199–227. See also several publications of Lawrence H. Schiffman, e.g., “Laws Pertaining to Forbidden Foods in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Halakhah in Light of Epigraphy, ed. Albert I. Baumgarten, Hanan Eshel, Ranon Katzoff and Shani Tzoref (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 65–80; idem, “Light from the Qumran Scrolls on Rabbinic Literature,” in The Qumran Legal Texts between the Hebrew Bible and Its Interpretation, ed. Kristin de Troyer, Armin Lange and James S. Adcock (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 111–24. 17 See, e.g., Cecilia Wassen, Women in the Damascus Document, SBL Academia Biblica 21 (Atlanta: SBL, 2005); idem, “The Importance of Marriage in the Construction of a Sectarian Identity in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Social Memory and Social Identity in the Study of Early Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Samuel Byrskog, Raimo Hakola and Jutta Jokiranta (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 127–50; John J. Collins, “Divorce and Remarriage in the Damascus Document,” The Faces of Torah: Studies in the Texts and Contexts of Ancient Judaism in Honor of Steven Fraade, ed. Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Tzvi Novak and Christine Hayes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 81–93. 18 See, e.g., Shemaryahu Talmon, “Sabbath Observance according to the Damascus Document Fragments: Evening to Evening or Morning to Morning?” Meghillot 1 (2003): 71–93 [Hebrew]; idem, “What’s in a Calendar? Calendar Conformity and Calendar Controversy in Ancient Judaism—the Case of the ‘Community of the Renewed Covenant’,” in The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Second Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins. Vol. 2: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Qumran Community, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2005), 25–58.

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In editing the Qumran Damascus Document fragments, scholars have relied in many ways on the medieval Cairo Damascus Document manuscripts (CD) to fill in lacunae and arrange the order of the fragments. When the Qumran fragments revealed text that was unparalleled in CD, the question of the differences between the manuscript traditions, about a thousand years apart from each other, became again pressing. Rey starts with the assumption not previously taken that the medieval manuscript tradition could be recon- structed according to the ancient Qumran evidence. The different formats of the manuscripts, one codex and the other scroll, pose an additional challenge in the puzzle. He suggests a new reconstruction of CD A that would have included the text now preserved in 4QD manuscripts but gone missing from CD A because of lost bifolios. Rey specifically addresses the width of the first column of 4Q266 in reconstructing the beginning of CD A and comes to a somewhat different result from Tucker and Porzig, who re-investigate the material reconstruction of 4Q266 and its first column. Tucker and Porzig suggest that at least here the textual forms may have actually varied, and they thus challenge the assumption of an identical text in 4QD and CD A in the beginning. They also suggest that the famous mention of the “sons of light” in 4Q266 is a gloss. Furthermore, Tucker and Porzig engage in discussion about how the method of reconstructing and presenting the evidence in critical editions to other scholars and users involves interpretative processes that often remain implicit or invisible. An online platform presents new possibilities—some of which are difficult to explain in a traditional article format without demonstration or visualization—and the enterprise demands critical questions of the exact nature of the task of the editor. One of the most obvious overlaps between D and S and related manuscripts is the penal code, which has served as a test case for investigations of which version is earlier. Here Beyerle and Ruwe offer a structural approach that looks at each penal code from a point of view of the legislator who organizes the material by various literary techniques, such as pair formation, blocked sec- tions, attractions, and palindromic sequences. The material investigated may include regulations (offences and penalties) from different times and been updated and changed to new circumstances, but the structural organization still guides the work of the penal code scribe. Understanding the structural units helps in comparing the different versions. Beyerle and Ruwe reflect on the methodological possibilities in determining whether one version is older than another, and arrive at some tentative conclusions. In their view, many cases suggest that the S version was based on D and attempted to justify the laws by making them more realistic or adaptable. However, as not all parallel

Dead Sea Discoveries 25 (2018) 289–297 Introduction 297 regulations themselves give this information, other factors need to be taken into account, such as which regulations were left out and which were added. As laws gained more attention, fewer scholars focused on Admonitions. Goldman takes the Admonitions as an essential introduction to the laws and reads them as pesharim: units characterized by a cluster of both scriptural quotations and scriptural allusions and their revelatory interpretation. If only the explicit quotations are paid attention to, she claims, scholars will miss the rhetorical power of other pesher-like arguments in the text. Goldman takes two of these units as case studies to demonstrate how the scribe(s) created the polemic admonitions, possible only as a result of overall redaction, to justify their method of exegesis and the following laws. What does the Damascus Document reveal from the past? Fraade places the Damascus Document in a wider framework of historiography and uses of the past in the present.19 The interest in the beginnings and ends and the use of scriptural narratives and models in the text takes the focus away from the present and creates possibilities, especially in ritual settings and communal hearing of the recited text, for merging the present with the past. Even though the Damascus Document is not interested in presenting the past as facts and numbers or as a coherent narrative as such, its “ritualized memories of the past” are very much needed in the process of creating meaning and identity construction of the community, and is thus one type of cause and effect scenario that may characterize writing history. … During the process of producing this issue, the field lost a scholar who was very influential and inspirational in many regards but also in the study of the Damascus Document: Prof. Philip Davies passed away on the 31st of May, 2018. Davies was invited to contribute to the issue on the relation of the Damascus Document and the Community Rule. The editors mourn this loss to the field of Qumran and Biblical Studies.

19 Thus, reexamining the question raised by, e.g., Albert I. Baumgarten, “The Perception of the Past in the Damascus Document,” in Baumgarten et al., eds. The Damascus Document, 1–15.

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