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Esotericism, Election, and Culpability in Qumran and Related Literature*

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Esotericism, Election, and Culpability in Qumran and Related Literature* THE “HIDDEN” AND THE “REVEALED”: ESOTERICISM, ELECTION, AND CULPABILITY IN QUMRAN AND RELATED LITERATURE* Shani Tzoref University of Sydney הנסתרת לה' א-להינו והנגלת לנו ולבנינו עד עולם (Deut 29:28 (MT לעשות את כל דברי התורה הזאת1 1. Introduction It is widely accepted that the words nistarot and niglot function as tech- nical terms in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The standard textbooks describe the use of this terminology, derived from Deut 29:28, to distinguish between the “revealed laws explicitly stated in the Torah” and “the hid- den laws known only to the sect.”2 It is perhaps less widely known that a number of recent studies have uncovered additional technical uses of * This is a revision of a Hebrew article, Shani Tzoref, “The ‘Hidden’ and the ‘Revealed’: Progressive Revelation of Law and Esoterica,” Meghillot 7 (2009): 157–90. Earlier versions of some of this material were presented at the annual SBL conference in Philadelphia (2005), the annual Meghillot conference at the University of Haifa (2006), and a symposium of the Bible department of Hebrew University (2006) held at the home of Prof. Yair and Valerie Zakovitch. I am grateful for feedback I received on those occasions and to Prof. Michael E. Stone, Prof. Hanan Eshel, Dr. Matthew Goff, Dr. Noam Mizrahi, and Idan Dershowitz for their comments on earlier drafts. Funding for this research was provided by the Yad Hanadiv Rothschild Foundation in Israel and the University of Sydney in Australia. 1 “Secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those that are revealed belong to us and our children forever, so that we might obey all the words of this law,” NRSV Deut 29:29. 2 Lawrence H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls (NY: Doubleday, 1995), 247. This understanding is implicit in James C. VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 113. See the sources cited by Schiffman, idem, 438, esp. Naphtali Wieder, The Judean Scrolls and Karaism (London: East and West Library, 1962), 53–62; Schiffman, The Halakhah at Qumran (SJLA 16; Leiden: Brill, 1975), 22–32. See also, Jacob Licht, The Rule Scroll. A Scroll From the Wilderness of Judea. Text, Introduction, and Commentary (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1965), 132 [Hebrew]; Joseph M. Baumgarten, Studies in Qumran Law (SJLA 24; Leiden: Brill, 1977), 30–35; Philip R. Davies, The Damascus Covenant: An Interpretation of the Damascus Document (JSOTSup 25; Sheffield: JSOT, 1983), 80–87; Alex P. Jassen, 300 shani tzoref these terms at Qumran. Elisha Qimron, 3 Gary Anderson,4 and Aha- ron Shemesh and Cana Werman5 have focused upon the concepts of nigleh and nistar in legal contexts. Ben Zion Wacholder has indicated that nistarot may also be employed in esoteric sapiential contexts,6 and David Flusser extended the technical usage of this term to include even broader ideological applications.7 In the following reevaluation of exegetical traditions pertaining to Deut 29:28, I point out the differ- ent uses of niglot and nistarot in texts of different genres, and exam- ine how juridical and epistemological exegeses of this verse function independently and interdependently within the Qumran corpus and in the book of Jubilees.8 My aim is to examine the broad use of these Mediating the Divine: Prophecy and Revelation in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 331–34. 3 Elisha Qimron, “Terminology for Intention Used in the Legal Texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies 10.1 (1990): 103–10 [Hebrew]. 4 Gary A. Anderson, “Intentional and Unintentional Sin in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Pomegranates and Golden Bells; Studies in Biblical, Jewish, and Near Eastern Ritual, Law, and Literature in Honor of Jacob Milgrom (ed. D. P. Wright, D. N. Freedman and A. Hurvitz; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1995), 49–64. See also, idem, “The Status of the Torah Before Sinai: the Retelling of the Bible in the Damascus Cove- nant and the Book of Jubilees,” DSD 1.1 (1994): 1–29; and idem, “The Status of the Torah in the Pre-Sinaitic Period: St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans,” in a Biblical Per- spectives: Early Use and Interpretation of the Bible in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Proceedings of the First International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 12–14 May, 1996 (ed. Michael E. Stone and Esther G. Chazon; STDJ 28; Leiden: Brill, 1998), 1–23. 5 Aharon Shemesh and Cana Werman, “Hidden Things and Their Revelation,” RevQ 18:3 (1998): 409–27. 6 Ben Zion Wacholder, “The Preamble to the Damascus Document: A Composite Edition of 4Q266–268,” HUCA 69 (1998): 31–47, esp. 45. 7 David Flusser, “The Secret Things Belong to the Lord (Deut 29:29): Ben Sira and the Essenes,” in Judaism of the Second Temple Period, Qumran and Apocalypticism (trans. A. Yadin; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 293–98. Flusser casts a very wide net for an epistemological meaning of nistarot at Qumran. He agrees with previous scholars that the Qumran Community read Deut 29:28 in support of their self- understanding as recipients of revelation concerning legal matters, but he states that this was only part of the Community’s perspective towards nistarot. Flusser makes an important, and insufficiently acknowledged, point, in arguing that we must not view the Qumran conception of nistarot as confined to knowledge of halakhot. 8 In some respects, my observations dovetail with some of Paul Heger’s evaluations of these terms in “The Development of Qumran Law: ‘Nistarot’, ‘Niglot’ and the Issue of ‘Contemporization,’” RevQ 23.2 (2007): 167–206. We differ, however, in our overall approaches. Heger rejects attempts to impose a system of classification on the use of the terminology, urging that each text must stand on its own. In this study, I work within the rubric of existing categories, but aim to refine conventional distinctions by correlating genre with exegetical usage of the terms..
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