Dead Sea Discoveries 25 (2018) 289–298 brill.com/dsd 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 specifi- cally in Cave 4 of Qumran, revealed fragments with texts recognized by schol- ars 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 admoni- tions (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.