The Textual Development Of The Qumran Community Rule

This investigation into the formation of the Community Rule is the first to make full use of all the evidence of the Cave 4 fragments which have recently been made available to scholars.

This volume is concerned with tracing the different stages in the formation of the Qumran Community Rule in the light of the material from Cave 4 that has only recently become available. The first part of this ground-breaking work is devoted to determining the differences between the manuscripts of the Community Rule found in Caves 1, 4 and 5. The second part deals with the relationship between the various versions of the Community Rule. The third part aims at creating an overall picture of the literary development of this document and includes a discussion of the different elements within it as well as a comparison of the parallel passages, which reflect different stages in the redaction of the document.

Ever since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Community Rule has been at the forefront of the scholarly imagination and is often considered a direct channel to life at Khirbet Qumran - an ancient version of 'reality TV'. Over the course of the last fifteen years - the Cave 4 era - scholars have increasingly come to recognize the significance of the Scrolls as a rich text world from a period when texts, traditions, and interpretation laid the foundations of Western civilisation. The studies by Charlotte Hempel gathered in this volume deal with several core Rule texts from Qumran, especially with the Community Rule (S), the Rule of the Congregation (1QSa), the Damascus Document (D), and 4Q265 (Miscellaneous Rules). The author uncovers a complex network of literary and more murkily preserved social relationships. She further investigates the Rule literature within the context of wisdom, law, and the scribal milieu behind the emerging scriptures.

Benefitting from the Qumran library now available, this book offers a new model for reading S that better accounts for the long and diverse history behind the text. The resulting paradigm challenges the Qumrancentric lens through which many read the “sectarian texts” and offers a fresh way of thinking about sectarian community formation.

This volume is concerned with exploring sectarian attitudes toward wealth and the economic practices that gave rise to and issued from those attitudes. An introductory chapter establishes the state of the question. Three subsequent chapters focus on major sectarian texts: the Damascus Document, the Rule of the Community, and 4QInstruction A. Other sectarian and non-sectarian texts that mention wealth are discussed in a fifth chapter, while archaeological evidence from the Qumran region and contemporary documentary texts are introduced in chapters seven and eight. Finally, ancient secondary testimony on Essene economic practices is discussed. The book breaks new ground in arguing for several biblical rationales for the practice of shared wealth. Its integration of archaeological and documentary evidence sheds surprising new light on the economic organization of the Qumran community.

In this volume, Charlotte Hempel offers the first comprehensive commentary on all twelve ancient manuscripts of the Rules of the Community, works which contain the most important descriptions of the organisation and values ascribed to the movement associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls. The best preserved copy of this work (1QS) was one of the first scrolls to be published and has long dominated the scholarly assessment of the Rules. The approach adopted in this commentary is to capture the distinctive nature of each of the manuscripts based on a synoptic translation that presents all the manuscripts at a glance. Textual notes and Commentary deal with the picture derived from all preserved manuscripts. The publication of the Cave 4 manuscripts in 1998 can be likened to a volcanic eruption that challenged prevalent notions of the Community Rules that were founded on the quasi-archetypal status of the Cave 1 copy published in 1951. Since then the smoke has lifted and, as the pieces have begun to settle, we see green shoots emerging in the scholarly debate.. This commentary embraces the post-volcanic landscape of the Community Rules, which is carefully sifted for clues to establish a fresh reading of the material in conversation with the latest research on the Scrolls. The evidence suggests that some of the practices described as the beating heart of the movement's organization reflect the aspirations of a privileged sub-elite from the late Second Temple Period.

An authoritative critical edition The discovery and translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls transformed our understanding of the life and history of ancient Jewish communities when both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity were emerging. As part of this rich discovery, the Community Rule serves to illuminate the religious beliefs and practices as well as the organizational rules of the group behind the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, there is no single, unified text of the Community Rule; rather, multiple manuscripts of the Community Rule show considerable variation and highlight the work of ancient Jewish scribes and their intentional literary development of the text. In this volume, Sarianna Metso brings together the surviving evidence in a new edition that presents a critically established Hebrew text with an introduction and an English translation. Features: A critical apparatus and textual notes All the surviving evidence of the Community Rule A new method for presenting complex developments and transmission history of ancient texts

In The Formation of the Hebrew Bible David Carr rethinks both the methods and historical orientation points for research into the growth of the Hebrew Bible into its present form. Building on his prior work, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart (Oxford, 2005), he explores both the possibilities and limits of reconstruction of pre-stages of the Bible. The method he advocates is a ''methodologically modest'' investigation of those pre-stages, utilizing criteria and models derived from his survey of documented examples of textual revision in the Ancient Near East. The result is a new picture of the formation of the Hebrew Bible, with insights on the initial emergence of Hebrew literary textuality, the development of the first Hexateuch, and the final formation of the Hebrew Bible. Where some have advocated dating the bulk of the Hebrew Bible in a single period, whether relatively early (Neo-Assyrian) or late (Persian or Hellenistic), Carr uncovers specific evidence that the Hebrew Bible contains texts dating across Israelite history, even the early pre-exilic period (10th-9th centuries). He traces the impact of Neo-Assyrian imperialism on eighth and seventh century Israelite textuality. He uses studies of collective trauma to identify marks of the reshaping and collection of traditions in response to the destruction of Jerusalem and Babylonian exile. He develops a picture of varied Priestly reshaping of narrative and prophetic traditions in the Second Temple period, including the move toward eschatological and apocalyptic themes and genres. And he uses manuscript evidence from Qumran and the Septuagint to find clues to the final literary shaping of the proto-Masoretic text, likely under the Hasmonean monarchy.