Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran

Discovered in the caves above Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls have provided scholars with important information about the Jewish communities that resided in the environs of Qumran. credit: Israel Museum

What are the Dead Sea Scrolls? Often referred to as the most important archaeological discovery of the 20th century, the ancient texts discovered in the caves above Qumran have brought a tremendous amount of information to bear on our understanding of the ancient Biblical world and its customs—and have provoked as many questions. The recent publication The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by Timothy Lim and John Collins, proves to be a valuable tool for the newcomer as well as seasoned scholars seeking the history and latest research on the ancient texts of Qumran.

Reviewer Charlotte Hempel suggests that the book’s most impressive accomplishment is that it challenges long-held presuppositions regarding the “boxes” into which we have fit our understanding of these ancient documents and their relationship to Qumran as well as ancient Judaism. This book, according to Hempel, helps us reframe the question “What are the Dead Sea Scrolls?” and informs our modern understanding of ancient Judaism as well as the community that wrote the texts, a community that–at least at one point–must have been present in the environs of Qumran.

Hempel points out that this new handbook presents what we already know about the scrolls as well as the latest theories and interpretations of these ancient documents. This makes it an ideal text for those approaching the subject of the scrolls and Qumran for the first time and searching to understand what are the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Hempel also draws attention to the fact that the handbook contains essays that deal specifically with the theories regarding the community who wrote the ancient documents. Whether or not this is the same community that lived in Qumran—and if the Qumran community was Essene—still remains a point of debate. With so much of this ancient library discovered in the caves above Qumran yet to be thoroughly studied, it is only a matter of time before this and other scholarly disputes regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls and their relationship to Qumran are resolved.

This latest publication on the ancient Qumran library provides the reader with all of the most up-to-date information and research. As an introduction to some of the most important ancient texts in the world, The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls should prove to be an invaluable tool to answer the question “What are the Dead Sea Scrolls?”

Below, read Charlotte Hempel’s full review of The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Edited by Timothy Lim and John Collins

Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010, 785 pp.
$150 (hardcover)
Reviewed by Charlotte Hempel

This sizable volume weighs in at just under 800 pages and includes an extremely impressive and stimulating collection of studies. BAR has asked me to deal with this volume in 500 words (one word for each 1.6 pages) so I will have to be very selective.

In addition to pointing readers to what we know about the scrolls, the Handbook very successfully gets across the crucial message that some of the most groundbreaking achievements in current scroll scholarship have to do with challenging what we thought we knew. For example, two of the most stimulating and controversial entries challenge such fundamental hypotheses as the significance of the solar calendar for the formation and identity of the Dead Sea Scroll sect (by Sacha Stern) and the notion that this group had abandoned the Jerusalem Temple (by Martin Goodman). Given that Stern is one of the world’s leading experts on calendars and Goodman one of the world’s leading experts on Roman period Jewish history, it is not surprising that their case is formidable.

Dead Sea Scroll studies are, on the whole, robustly recovering from a prolonged infection: box-itis. Initially scholars tried to adjust the evidence of the scrolls to the size and shape of various prefabricated boxes. Now, however, we are beginning to realize what seems obvious: Toss out the boxes and start over with these exhilarating primary texts that have miraculously survived for 2,000 years!

Perhaps the two most important trends that emerge from such an approach and clearly come into view in these pages can be summed up as follows: The ancient controversies that are reflected in the scrolls are chiefly in the realm of legal interpretations. Here I might cite Michael Knibb’s assessment of messianism; he sees it as a response to the failure of the scroll community’s halakhic (legal) viewpoints to prevail. The second trend that jumps out at us is the pluralism that can be found in so much of the Qumran library. This apparently rather strict bunch of people preserved side-by-side a plurality of witnesses of the emerging Bible text, as well as a variety of Community Rules, perhaps reflecting a plurality of communities (entries by John Collins and Jutta Jokiranta). I have already adverted to Stern’s analysis of a plurality of calendar texts that ultimately favor a (not necessarily practiced) solar calendar and Goodman’s analysis of the scrolls’ debates about the Temple without necessarily indicating that the scroll community withdrew from it. As James VanderKam put it, “A variety of literary traditions” were held dear by the scroll community.

These glimpses of pluralistic features in the scrolls are radical only if we work with the now outmoded concept of a norm. If there was no ancient Jewish mainstream, what we have is pretty much what you’d expect to find.

Charlotte Hempel is a senior lecturer in Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism in the School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham, UK. She cochairs the Qumran section of the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting and is a member of the editorial board of Dead Sea Discoveries.

Originally appeared as “Curing Scroll Box-itis,” Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 2011.

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