Chapter 4 The Library and the Shadow it Casts on the Wall of the Cave

Jonathan D.H. Norton

The most widely-held view of the involves a deeply-rooted supposition: the scrolls disclose life at Qumran. According to this view, the scrolls’ literary contents combine with their artefactual features and discov- ery context to form a coherent picture of the scrolls’ past owners and life they led. The manuscripts’ artefactual features (e.g., leather, papyrus, stitching, ink) testify to the scribal industry pursued by the inhabitants of the Qumran settle- ment, that is, maintenance and curation of scrolls alongside production and inscription of new manuscripts. Meanwhile, as well as revealing the owners’ outlook and practices, the scrolls’ literary contents witness the owners’ scho- lastic-religious ethos; that is, intensive communal study of Israel’s Mosaic and prophetic literature, exegetical practices, transmission and editing of tradi- tional texts, and their authorship of new compositions. According to the com- mon picture, life at Qumran was substantially devoted to this literary industry; and this literary industry served the pursuit of that life. The scrolls are gener- ally deemed so organically and dynamically integral to life at Qumran that no viable account of the scrolls or their owners can omit an account of life there; and life at Qumran can only be understood by consulting the scrolls in all their material and literary eloquence. The concept of the “Qumran library” sustains this picture. Within the parameters of the Qumran-Essene hypothesis—and the term is hardly used otherwise—“Qumran library” means “the annals of the at Qumran.” Whether the scrolls really do disclose life at Qumran has long been debated. Since the 1980s debate has been overshadowed by mainstream engagement with a position famously associated with Karl H. Rengstorf and Norman Golb,1

1 Karl H. Rengstorf, Ḫirbet Qumrân und die Bibliothek vom Toten Meer (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960); idem, Ḫirbet Qumrân and the Problem of the Dead Sea Caves (Leiden: Brill, 1963); Norman Golb, “The Problem of the Origin and Identification of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Proceedings of American Philological Society 124 (1980): 1–24; idem, “Who Hid the Dead Sea Scrolls?” The Biblical Archaeologist 48 (1985): 68–82; idem, “Khirbet Qumran and the Manuscripts of the Judaean Wilderness: Observations on the Logic of Their Investigation,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 49 (1990): 103–114; idem, “Khirbet Qumran and the Manuscript

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004383371_004 The Qumran Library and the Shadow it Casts 41 whose central claim is that the scrolls are a miscellaneous sample of texts reflecting unrelated Judaean groups of the early Roman period. Mainstream scholarship has strenuously sought to refute this claim. For if it were right, the scrolls could not serve the Qumran-Essene hypothesis as its proponents require, which is: to reflect the singular life of a particular group living at Qumran between 100–50 BCE and c.70 CE. As a result, debate has in large part been framed in terms of whether or not the scrolls really reflect a single Jewish group. The central claim of the Rengstorf-Golb position was dispelled to general sat- isfaction by the 1990s when Devorah Dimant demonstrated the scrolls’ literary and ideological coherence.2 Evidently not the chance literary jetsam (membra disjecta3) of various Jewish groups, the scrolls represent a more or less coherent religious literature, apparently the heritage of a distinctive Jewish movement or religious “current,”4 which flourished during the Seleucid and Early Roman periods. This movement, often called “Enochic Judaism,” is usually identified as the “Essene” movement from which the yaḥad separated, the splinter group responsible for the sectarian core of the Qumran literature. Like their religious cousins in the wider Enochic-Essene movement, the yaḥad separatists were evidently deeply involved with the study, transmission, and prophetic signifi- cance of religious literature, both the common Jewish literature of the age and special sectarian compositions. Thus the people reflected in the scrolls have aptly been called a “textual community,”5 a term that suitably characterises

Finds of the Judaean Wilderness,” in Methods of Investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site: Present Realities and Future Prospects (ed. M.O. Wise et al.; Baltimore: Press, 1994), 51–72; idem, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The search for the secret of Qumran (New York: Scribner, 1995); , Qumran in Context: Reassessing the Archaeological Evidence (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004). 2 Devorah Dimant, “The Qumran Manuscripts: Contents and Significance,” in Time to Prepare a Way in the Wilderness: Papers on the Qumran Scrolls by Fellows of the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1989–1990 (ed. D. Dimant and L.H. Schiffman; Leiden: Brill, 1995), 23–58; eadem, “The Library of Qumran: Its Content and Character,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Fifty Years After Their Discovery: Proceedings of the Jerusalem Congress, July 20–25, 1997 (ed. L.H. Schiffman, E. Tov, J.C. VanderKam, and G. Marquis; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2000), 170–176. 3 Florentino García Martínez, “The Groningen Hypothesis Revisited,” in Dead Sea Scrolls and Contemporary Culture (ed. A.D. Roitman, L.H. Schiffman, and S. Tzoref; Leiden: Brill, 2011), 29; cf. idem, “Origins and Early History,” in Qumranica Minora I: Qumran Origins and Apoclaypticism (ed. F. García Martínez and E.J.C. Tigchelaar; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 36–47. 4 Eibert J.C. Tigchelaar, “The Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism (ed. J.J. Collins and D.C. Harlow; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 163–180. 5 Mladen Popović, “Qumran as Scroll Storehouse in Times of Crisis? A Comparative Perspective on Judaean Desert Manuscript Collections,” JSJ 43 (2012): 551–594 (591–592).