Reflections on Literacy, Textuality, and Community in the

Charlotte Hempel

As the varied contributions in this volume amply demonstrate, the Dead Sea Scrolls have offered an unparalleled lab for scholars on textuality in antiquity.1 Given the fulsomeness of its evidence pride of place is held by the tradition. The significance of those eleven at times quite different manu- scripts produced over the space of almost two centuries goes far beyond the particularities of their equally fascinating contents. Initially scholars worked for a number of formative years only with the best preserved manuscript of the Community Rule from Cave 1 (1QS) which was considered the “manual” or constitution of an ancient Jewish group hidden for millennia in a cave in the Judean Desert.2 The publication of ten additional manuscripts (MSS) from Cave 4 in 1998 has opened up a much wider horizon of scholarly interest in these manuscripts.3 While a large proportion of their contents overlap with 1QS, some of the witnesses preserved in Cave 4 diverge markedly from what is said in 1QS. The manuscript tradition of the Community Rule (S) thus offers precious first hand-hand evidence of textual growth and inter-textual relation- ships also with the and 4QMiscellaneous Rule (4Q265).4 The paradigmatic place of 1QS in discussions of the nature of the so-called “Qumran Community” has also influenced investigations of the genre of Rules. Here Ben Wright’s analysis of the issue of genre in wisdom and apoca- lyptic—where he argues for a move away from the proto-type approach—is

1 It is a great pleasure to dedicate these reflections to my colleague George Brooke who has ac- companied my career from its earliest days. His exemplary standards as a scholar, colleague, and friend are an example many of us struggle to emulate. His own meticulous, wide-rang- ing, and often adventurous contributions to scholarship alongside the enormous generosity he has extended to so many colleagues across the globe continue to have a huge impact on the field of Qumran and associated disciplines. 2 See, e.g., Jacob Licht, The Rule Scroll: A Scroll from the Wilderness of Judaea (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1965), 8 (in Hebrew), and , The Ancient Library of Qumran, 3rd ed. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995), 54–87. 3 For the principal edition see Philip S. Alexander and Geza Vermes, Qumran Cave IV.26: Serekh Ha-Yaḥad and Two Related Texts, DJD 26 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). 4 See Charlotte Hempel, The Qumran Rule Texts in Context: Collected Studies, TSAJ 154 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 109–19 for analysis and further bibliography.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004344532_005 70 Hempel illuminating also for the S tradition.5 In light of the full manuscript picture we are dealing with a selection of proto-types or at least challenges to the proto- type of 1QS and are being forced to re-draw the genre map of what constitutes a Rule text or even a Serekh manuscript.6

A Theory of Local Rule Texts

The literarily complex picture of the growth of the S tradition, in turn, led to a period of reflection on how best to square this evidence with some kind of “life on the ground.” A number of attempts have been made to propose a series of distinct realities behind the various S MSS.7 Thus, John Collins has proposed an identification of the Yaḥad with “an association dispersed in multiple settle- ments” rather than a single community that resided at the Qumran site.8 Here he is in agreement with Alison Schofield’s suggestion that different copies of the Community Rule should be associated with a variety of relat- ed settlements that were eventually brought to Khirbet Qumran at a time of

5 Benjamin G. Wright, “Joining the Club: A Suggestion about Genre in Early Jewish Texts,” DSD 17 (2010): 289–314. See also the discussion of cognitive genre theory and idealised cogni- tive models in Robert Williamson, “: A Cognitive Model of the Genre,” DSD 17 (2010): 336–60. 6 See Charlotte Hempel, “Rules,” in The T&T Clark Companion to the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. George Brooke and Charlotte Hempel (London: T&T Clark, forthcoming); Jutta Jokiranta and Hanna Vanonen, “Multiple Copies of Rule Texts or Multiple Rule Texts? Boundaries of the S and M Documents,” in Crossing Imaginary Boundaries: The Dead Sea Scrolls in the Context of , ed. Mika S. Pajunen and Hanna Tervanotko, PFES 108 (Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society, 2015), 11–60; and Jutta Jokiranta, “What is ‘Serekh ha-Yahad (S)’? Thinking about Ancient Manuscripts as Information Processing,” in Sybils, Scriptures and Scrolls: John Collins at Seventy, ed. Joel Baden, Hindy Najman, and Eibert Tigchelaar, JSJSup 175 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 637–58. 7 See, e.g., John Collins, Beyond the Qumran Community: The Sectarian Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) and Alison Schofield, From Qumran to the Yaḥad: A New Paradigm of Textual Development for the Community Rule, STDJ 77 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). For a recent assessment of how the texts from Qumran attest four “modes” of sectarian- ism (pre-sectarian, nascent, full-blown, and rejuvenated sectarianism) see the contribu- tion of the honouree of this volume George J. Brooke, “From Jesus to the Early Christian Communities: Trajectories Towards Sectarianism in the Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls and Contemporary Culture, ed. Adolfo Roitman, Lawrence Schiffman, and Shani Tzoref, STDJ 93 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 413–34. 8 Collins, Beyond the Qumran Community, 68.