Qumran

“Sacred Texts and Paradigmatic Revolutions” illustrates how modern readers can work to recover Second Temple interpretive contexts.

Sarianna Metso’s edition of the Community Rule addresses all surviving witnesses for the Rule and includes a critical apparatus.

The University of Cincinnati’s Department of Classics has a podcast with several noteworthy episodes, including an interview with Jodi Magness and a whole series on Qumran and Judean Desert texts.

HT: AWOL

This Decoded Science article has an interesting treatment of some of the chemical elements of the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly the Copper Scroll. The article’s conclusion provides the reminder that

Archaeology allows us to look into the past. However, in order for scientists to properly examine and maintain artifacts, it’s necessary to preserve them. In many cases, chemistry makes that possible.

For the full article, see Decoded Science. HT: Jim Davila.

Peter Gurry has recently shared the video recording provided via the Leverhulme Project of the Copper Scroll’s opening.

Discussion of the recent Qumran-vicinity cave finds since the previous post tracking the story here includes:

• Ami Magazine (HT: Lawrence Schiffman): Information about the new cave find with a fuller discussion of matters related to earlier Qumran-vicinity finds. In the cave’s apparently blank parchment fragment, Schiffman also suggests we find evidence for how demonstrably later forgeries could still carbon date to the turn of the eras.
• Bible History Daily (HT: Craig Evans and Jim Davila):  Discussion of the propriety of designating the new find as “Cave 12,” given that current reports indicate no scrolls have been recovered.
• Christian Science Monitor (HT: Craig Evans) and Trinity Western University (HT: Craig Evans): Similar information to that found elsewhere.
• National Geographic (HT: Craig Evans): Reports an estimate from Randall Price of “probably another 50 sites that merit investigating in the near future,” as well as comments like those summarized above from Lawrence Schiffman on how recent forgeries might appear on old material. In a humorous turn, Schiffman “shockingly” dispels hope of “find[ing] the diary of the three wise men” in possible further Judean Desert discoveries.
• theLAB: Primarily reflections on the significance of previous Dead Sea Scroll finds with a couple comments on the new find similar to those provided elsewhere.

What seems to be shaping up as the key question about the status of this new find’s designation as “Cave 12” is the question “What makes a cave worthy of inclusion inside the numbering?”—actual textual finds tied to the location or simply a strong possibility that ancient texts were once located in the cave? Barring additional news about thus-far undisclosed contents from this cave, the apparently blank parchment showing text under multispectral examination, or known texts’ being re-provenanced to this cave, it seems more in keeping with the criteria applied to derive the existing 11-cave scheme not to include this new cave as a twelfth in that sequence. But, of course, the new find remains quite significant and reopens important questions about possible issues of provenance for texts currently classified as deriving from the standard 11 caves.

In a short interview published by the University of Notre Dame, James VanderKam urges caution about labeling the recent Dead Sea find as “Cave 12.” Comparisons have previously been drawn between the new find and Cave 8, which comes inside the numbering but contained no scrolls.

VanderKam comments,

In 1952, after the earliest scrolls finds, archaeologists made a survey of hundreds of caves and openings in the general vicinity of Khirbet Qumran…. Some 230 of them contained nothing of interest, but 26 housed pottery like that found in the first scrolls cave…. [G]iven the fact that other caves in the district, besides the 11 that held the Dead Sea Scrolls, contained pottery of the same sort as Qumran Cave 1, it seems a bit premature to call [the new find] Qumran Cave 12.

Since my previous post about Qumran Cave 12, a few other noteworthy articles have cropped up, including on:

• FoxNews (HT: Jordan Sekulow via Craig Evans),
• NPR (HT: Andreas Köstenberger), and
• Times of Israel (HT: Douglas Estes).

Much of what is in these articles about the new find is also in other reports. But, the Times piece confirms that

Experts at the Dead Sea Scroll Laboratories in Jerusalem … plan to carry out multispectral imaging of the [apparently blank parchment fragment] to reveal any ink invisible to the naked eye.

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Working under the auspices of Operation Scroll, archaeologists have discovered what is being numbered as the twelfth scroll cave in the vicinity of Khirbet Qumran.

Work in the new cave has produced no new texts, but both linen (characteristic of scroll wrappers found elsewhere) and blank parchment fragments suggest that texts probably were stored in the cave at some point. Since no [scroll-type] texts were found in this cave, as with cave 8, the new cave’s designation will likely be Q12 rather than 12Q. [Updated 15 February 2017. For explanation of this correction, please see Qumran Cave 12: Update 2.]

A while ago, I mentioned Sacred Texts and Paradigmatic Revolutions would be coming to paperback. That format is now available at about a fourth or less of the MSRP for the hardback.

Charles Haws notes that Revue de Qumrân now has a website. In commemoration of the website’s launch about a dozen articles have been made openly available.

The kind folks at Bloomsbury (the parent company of the T&T Clark imprint) have recently mentioned that a paperback release is forthcoming for my Sacred Texts and Paradigmatic Revolutions: The Hermeneutical Worlds of the Qumran Sectarian Manuscripts and the Letter to the Romans. Slated for this June, the paperback, at a $29.95 list price, will be a fiscally welcome complement to the current hardback ($120.00) and PDF ($27.99) formats. The paperback is already available for pre-order on Amazon, currently at just under the list price.

After having the product available for over 10 years, Logos Bible Software has released a substantive update to their Qumran Sectarian Manuscripts database (ed. Martin Abegg). Most significant among this update’s improvements are that the resource:

• Now contains more than 100 scrolls than in the previous version (737 documents are now represented).
• Several texts in the previous version have been reorganized to reflect the latest scholarship on their reconstruction.
• The database’s morphology has been updated to WHM 4.18.

For more information, please see the Logos blog.

The latest Bloomsbury Highlights notes the newly available volume 16 in the T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts Series. The volume is a revision of my 2011 dissertation at Southeastern Seminary and primarily explores paradigmatic, or presuppositional, aspects of the hermeneutics at play in Romans and some of the Qumran sectarian texts.

Bloomsbury presently has the hardback on sale for 10% off and is also making PDFs available at a still more substantially reduced price.

The latest reviews from the Review of Biblical Literature include:

New Testament and Cognate Studies

• Jo-Ann A. Brant, John, reviewed by Matthew Gordley
• Bart B. Bruehler, A Public and Political Christ: The Social-Spatial Characteristics of Luke 18:35–19:43 and the Gospel as a Whole in Its Ancient Context, reviewed by John Cowan
• Jaime Clark-Soles, Engaging the Word: The New Testament and the Christian Believer, reviewed by Ronald Witherup
• Gerald J. Donker, The Text of the Apostolos in Athanasius of Alexandria, reviewed by Justin A. Mihoc
• Craig A. Evans, Jesus and His World: The Archaeological Evidence, reviewed by Panayotis Coutsoumpos
• Charles W. Hedrick, Unlocking the Secrets of the Gospel according to Thomas: A Radical Faith for a New Age, reviewed by William Arnal
• Josep Rius-Camps and Jenny Read-Heimerdinger, The Message of Acts in Codex Bezae: A Comparison with the Alexandrian Tradition, Volume 4: Acts 18.24–28.31: Rome, reviewed by Vaughn CroweTipton
• Christopher D. Stanley, ed., The Colonized Apostle: Paul in Postcolonial Eyes, reviewed by Steed Davidson

Second Temple Judaism

Amazon’s selection of texts available for the Kindle platform occasionally includes some interesting oddities. For instance, those who really want to do so can apparently read the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert volumes 10 (4QMMT) and 16 (cave 4 calendrical texts) on Kindle for a mere $239.20 and $254.34 respectively, without print-equivalent page numbers. Or, used hard covers are available for just under $180. ;-)

Last evening, I was privileged to attend the second annual Prentice Meador Lecture at Lipscomb University. There, Weston Fields, the Executive Director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation, addressed what seemed very nearly to be a full house on the topic “The Dead Sea Scrolls Today.”

Overall, most of Fields’ lecture surveyed certain notable features in the history of the scrolls’ discovery, dissemination, and publication. Much of this narrative has been more or less widely discussed,  but throughout the lecture, Fields repeatedly turned our attention to an uncertain number of yet-unpublished fragments.

What wonderful news just came through from Logos:

We are about to begin processing Pre-Pub orders for Qumran Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls Database.

For a description of the resource, see here. Oh, happy day. :)

This week in the biblioblogosphere:

• Bob Cargill notes that, on December 11, the National Geographic Channel will re-air its special on “Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
• Brian LePort hypertextually ponders Derridean non-extra-textuality and deconstruction, and he notes twenty-nine doctoral theses that the University of Durham has recently made available.
• Michael Bird shows how to benefit most from the new SBL Greek New Testament and notes that the new Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters now has its own blog.
• Google Editions are poised to hit the e-book market later this month and allow fee-based full access to copyrighted titles. For some additional details and thoughts, see Blog Kindle and Google Books Help.

For those who may have missed the original special or who might just want to relive it, the National Geographic Channel’s recent documentary on “Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls,” hosted by primarily by Robert Cargill, is available here.

Robert Cargill reports that a recent test conducted by Italian scientists suggests that the Temple Scroll’s papyrus was “cured using water from the Dead Sea.” Cargill also mentions a forthcoming test that could reasonably demonstrate a connection between the scroll’s ink and the water of the Dead Sea. Even if it does so, however, Cargill qualifies, “this still leaves open the possibility that both the inks and parchment were produced at Dead Sea industrial installations and exported to other areas (for instance, Jerusalem), [but] the preponderance of evidence (animals at Qumran, inkwells at Qumran, scrolls in caves near Qumran) would seem to support the continued suggestion that at least some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were produced at Qumran.”

[caption id=“attachment_5648” align=“alignright” width=“80” caption=“Elizabeth Mburu”] [/caption]

Due out in a little less than one month is the revised version Elizabeth Mburu’s PhD thesis, Qumran and the Origins of Johannine Language and Symbolism. In the book, Mburu

sets out to demonstrate that the sectarian Qumran document The Rule of the Community, provides linguistic clues which illuminate our understanding of how the author of the Fourth Gospel used truth terminology and expected it to be understood.

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A revised edition of James VanderKam’s excellent introduction to the Dead Sea Scrolls is making its way to retailers. This new edition “retains the format, style, and aims of the first edition, and the same wider audience is envisaged” ( xii). Consequently, this edition includes five primary categories of changes ( xii–xiii):

1. Updates to VanderKam’s 1994 first edition that account for developments in scrolls publication and research over the past 16 years,
2. More extensive chapter bibliographies,
3. An added section about the scrolls’ witness to other Second Temple Judaisms,
4. Numerous rephrasings of the text, and
5. Revised quotations of the scrolls to reflect Vermes’s Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (5th ed).

According to Eerdmans,

In an essay entitled “Paul and James on the Law in the Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Martin Abegg incisively observes that

The interpretation of the law, which had been revealed by God, is the focus of the phrase “works of the law” [at Qumran]. . . . No doubt the emphasis is on Torah in its entirety (see 1QS 8.1–2) but “obeying the law” was in accordance with the correct interpretation, that which had been revealed by God. . . . [T]he phrase does not simply mean “works of the law as God has commanded,” but rather “works of the law that God has commanded and revealed fully only to us” ( 72–73; italics original).

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The University of Groningen is seeking a PhD candidate for the project: The Jewish Revolt against Rome: Religious Groups and the Shaping of Identities in First-Century Judaea:

The Graduate School of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen is looking for a PhD candidate (0,9 fte) for the project ‘The Jewish Revolt against Rome: Religious Groups and the Shaping of Identities in First-Century Judaea’.

This PhD position is financed by a grant of the SNS/Reaal Fund. It will run parallel to the interdisciplinary NWO VENI project The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jewish War against Rome (66–70), which investigates the impact of Rome on the self-understanding of a Jewish group at Qumran prior to the revolt. PhD candidates are expected to carry out research within the historical and archaeological framework of first-century Judaea in relation to the impact of the Roman Empire on the region and the conflict of 66–70/73. Projects may investigate e.g. Flavius Josephus’ position, specific Jewish groups, Roman reactions, specific sites, regions or interregional connections from different perspectives and on the basis of different sources (literary, archaeological and/or numismatic). The final form of the PhD project will be determined in consultation with the PhD candidate.

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Brill recently released the following two new resources for Dead Sea Scroll studies:

Biblical Texts from Qumran and Other Sites (Dead Sea Scrolls Concordance, Volume 3) [caption id=“attachment_4394” align=“alignright” width=“90” caption=“Martin Abegg Jr.”] [/caption] According to the publisher,

For decades a concordance of all the Dead Sea Scrolls has been a major desideratum for scholarship. The Dead Sea Scrolls Concordance covers all the Qumran material as published in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series, as well as the major texts from caves 1 and 11, which appeared elsewhere.

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John Collins rightly argues that the possibility of a positive answer to this question depends heavily on what one means by משיח (messiah).

A few weeks ago, I received confirmation that my paper, “‫ מורה הצדק‬ as a Hermeneutical Functionary in the Qumran Sectarian Manuscripts,” has been accepted for presentation at the 2010 meeting of the Southeastern Commission for the Study of Religion. Here is a brief abstract:

Although a good deal of work has been done on the hermeneutical method(s) found at Qumran, to date, insufficient attention has been given to the presuppositional matrix that allowed these methods to function at Qumran as they did. For, after all, considered in themselves, theses and interpretations appear valid not primarily because of the method by which they were derived but because of the perceived fit between a given thesis and an accepted worldview paradigm. Therefore, this paper will seek to show: (1) that ‫מורה הצדק‬ ( the teacher of righteousness) himself definitively determined the Qumran community’s hermeneutical matrix in certain, specific respects and (2) that these specific determinations helped the Qumran community understand their scriptures in conjunction with what they knew to be their own, special position in ‫’יהוה‬s plan for Israel.

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In working through some bibliography recently for a conference paper proposal about מורה הצדק ( the teacher of righteousness), I came across the following:

Der Lehrer [der Gerechtigkeit] ist von Gott autorisiert, die Geheimnisse der Prophetenworte zu enträtseln, denn die Worte der Propheten sind Geheimnisse (רזים [pHab] 7,5), die man ohne Auslegung des Lehrers nicht verstehen kann. Der Lehrer tritt also mit seiner Verkündigung nicht neben die Schrift, sondern er basiert auf der Schrift. Er allein hat von Gott das rechte Verständnis offenbart bekommen. Darum kann er und mit ihm seine Gemeinde nach dem Willen Gottes leben ( Jeremias 141).

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