FROM PARATEXT TO COMMENTARY

Armin Lange

Already in the fifth century B.C.E., the Greek historian reported about the severe consequences that await a person who alters holy texts (Hist. 7.6): With these came Onomacritus, an Athenian oracle-monger, the one that had set in order the oracles of Musaeus; with him they had come, being now reconciled to him after their quarrel: for Onomacritus had been banished from by Pisistratus’ son Hipparchus, having been caught by Lasus of Hermione in the act of interpolating in the writings of Musaeus an oracle showing that the islands of Lemnos should disap- pear into the sea.1 Herodotus’ brief note refers to measures taken by the Pisistradid tyrants of Athens in the first half of the sixth century B.C.E. The tyrant Hipparchus not only ordered a re-edition of the highly respected ora- cles of Musaius but also forced the rhapsodes to perform the Homeric poems in a fixed sequence (Plato,Hipparch . 228b–c).2 The punish- ment of Onomacritus is part of this Pisistradid effort to preserve Greek authoritative texts unchanged. I do not know if the Essene movement in particular or ancient Juda- ism in general punished those who altered their holy scriptures. Dif- ferent from classical , no evidence for such a punishment is preserved from ancient Judaism. Even the command of Deut 4:2 and 13:1 not to add or to take away anything to or from the law does not mention any such punishment. Was the Pisistradid Athens of the 6th century B.C.E. hence more serious about protecting its cultural heritage than ancient Judaism was?

1 Translation according to Alfred D. Godley, Herodotus: With an English Transla- tion, vol. 3: Books V–VII (LCL 118; rev. and repr.; Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1963), 307. 2 For a critical discussion of the Pisistradid measures, see Rudolf Pfeiffer,History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age: From the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 5–8. 196 armin lange

In this brief essay, I cannot answer this question for all groups of Second Temple Judaism. I will focus specifically on the question of the willingness of the Essenes to rewrite their scriptures. To do this I have compiled a list of interpretative texts in the Qumran library, which I will discuss in the first part of my article. In the second part, I will compare paratextual and exegetical literature with regard to how they treat their respective base texts. At the end of this article, I will draw some conclusions.

1. A List of the Interpretative Literature from the Qumran Library

The Qumran library allows for unprecedented insights into how the Essenes read and interpreted authoritative literature. More than 60 years of research on the Qumran texts enable us to distinguish between Essene and non-Essene texts.3 After almost all Dead Sea Scrolls have been published it is now also possible to compile comprehensive lists of the interpretative literature found in the Qumran library. I have compiled such a list, which is presented below.4

3 For the criteria I used in the below list to distinguish between Essene and non- Essene texts, see Armin Lange, “Kriterien essenischer Texte,” in Qumran kontrovers: Beiträge zu den Textfunden vom Toten Meer (ed. Jörg Frey and Hartmut Stegemann; Einblicke 6; Paderborn: Bonifazius, 2003), 59–71. In this, article I regard texts which use the Tetragrammaton freely, which accept calendars other than the 364-day-solar calendar, which are not composed in Hebrew, or which were written before the year 150 B.C.E. as non-Essene. But texts which employ the typical sectarian terminology described by Devorah Dimant (“The Qumran Manuscripts: Contents and Signifi- cance,” in Time to Prepare the Way in the Wilderness: Papers on the Qumran Scrolls by Fellows of the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1989–1990 [STDJ 16; Leiden: Brill, 1995], 23–58), which attest to a critical distance from the Jerusalem temple, which argue for a radical observance of the Torah, which regard other Essene texts as authoritative, which adhere to the peculiarities of Essene halakhah (e.g., the beginning of the day in the morning), and whose world view is coined by a cosmological and ethical dualism I view as Essene. 4 Texts that appear in bold font are of Essene origin (the first Essene texts can be found in section 1.1.3. of this list). Texts that are highlighted in gray might be of Essene origin. Texts which are not marked by either bold or highlighting are texts that, due to lack of evidence, cannot be attributed to any group or are not of Essene origin.