Chapter 1 Second Temple Jewish Law in Light of the Scrolls: Widening the Paradigm

Lawrence H. Schiffman

1 Introduction

I would like to begin this discussion with a note of celebration. In 1974 when I completed my doctorate, I began to attend scholarly meetings. At that time the Society of Biblical Literature had a section that met in one session. Attendance consisted of at the most eight to ten people, most of whom were friends of presenters and were involved in other fields of research. In work- ing on the field of halakhic texts, I joined our late esteemed and beloved col- league Joseph M. Baumgarten1 in a group of two. Our work was considered strange since most colleagues, including even some Israelis, regarded the as of primary interest for the history of Christianity and not for Judaism. We will not trace here the variety of factors that contributed to the eventual ascendance of Qumran Studies. Suffice it to say that the publication of the Temple Scroll2 and the Cave 4 Jewish legal material3 transformed the

1 See Joseph M. Baumgarten, Studies in Qumran Law, SJLA 24 (Leiden: Brill, 1977) for some of his major studies. Full bibliography in Moshe J. Bernstein, Florentino García Martínez and John Kampen, eds., Legal Texts and Legal Issues: Proceedings of the Second Meeting of the International Organization for Qumran Studies, Cambridge, 1995: Published in Honour of Joseph M. Baumgarten, STDJ 23 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), xix‒xxv. 2 , Megillat Hamiqdash, 3 vols. (: The Exploration Society and the Shrine of the Book, 1977); idem, The , 3 vols. and suppl. (Jerusalem: The Israel Exploration Society and the Shrine of the Book, 1983); , The Temple Scroll: A Critical Edition with Extensive Reconstructions (Beersheva and Jerusalem: Ben- Gurion University of the Negev and Israel Exploration Society, 1996); idem, Megillot Midbar Yehudah: Haḥiburim Haʿivriyim, Between Bible and Mishnah (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2010), 1:137‒206; Lawrence H. Schiffman, A. D. Gross, and M. C. Rand, eds., Temple Scroll and Related Documents, vol. 7 of The Dead Sea Scrolls: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek Texts with English Translations, ed. James H. Charlesworth et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011); cf. Lawrence H. Schiffman, The Courtyards of the House of the Lord: Studies on the Temple Scroll, ed. Florentino García Martínez, STDJ 75 (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 3 Joseph M. Baumgarten, Qumran Cave 4.XIII: The (4Q266‒273), DJD 18 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Joseph M. Baumgarten et al., Qumran Cave 4.XXV: Halakhic Texts, DJD 35 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004393387_002 2 Schiffman field. Today, we are able to organize manifold sessions around rule scrolls and legal (halakhic) texts (among many other important topics) and we ought all to take pride in this amazing accomplishment. Before launching into our study, a brief methodological note is in order re- garding how we study the Dead Sea Scrolls. Many scholars have explored the Scrolls in order to learn about a small sect of Jews who inhabited the “settle- ment” at Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were gathered and ultimately left for posterity. This approach, however, is not the one that we have taken. We have advocated looking at the corpus of Qumran Scrolls, along with other Second Temple literature known to us previously, as a means to uncovering, after due correction for the bias of our sources, information pertaining to the various manifestations of Second Temple Judaism.4 Such an agenda looks at the nature of the biblical texts as examples of the state of the Hebrew Bible in the Land of Israel as a whole, and at the nonbiblical manuscripts as in many cases testifying to views and approaches much more widely held than only among the circles of the sectarians of Qumran. Further, this method of inves- tigation examines anti-Pharisaic polemics in the Scrolls in order to make pos- sible the reconstruction of numerous Pharisaic views, especially on Jewish law, as well as of much of the views of the on Jewish law and exegesis, based on the Qumran corpus and other texts. In the spirit of this wider ap- proach, we seek to use the Dead Sea Scrolls as part of the corpus of Second Temple halakhic material that enables us to gain a much more detailed picture of the competing views and at the same time to show that numerous aspects reflected in later sources can be securely dated to the Second Temple period. The study of the history of Jewish law (termed by the rabbis “halakhah”) has progressed enormously as a result of the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls.5 The earliest origins of research in this area came from two different directions. Beginning in the Renaissance, Jewish scholars began to look at Josephus, Philo, and the apocryphal books and to realize that they provided what they then considered to be evidence for earlier forms of Jewish law than that enshrined in the rabbinic corpus. Not much later, to a great extent as a result of the Reformation, Christian scholars began to seek evidence in rabbinic sources, and to some extent in Second Temple materials, for practices of Judaism that

4 This is the approach followed in Lawrence H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: The History of Judaism, the Background of Christianity, the Lost Library of Qumran (Philadelphia and Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society, 1994). 5 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, STDJ 99 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 101‒54; Aharon Shemesh, “Trends and Themes in Israeli Research of the Halakhah in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Dimant, Dead Sea Scrolls in Scholarly Perspective, 345‒61.