Re: [Megillot] osey hattora

[RUSSELLGMIRKIN]

Hi Soren,   Sorry for the delay in responding to your questions, I had a MSS deadline.  In what follows, I will try to point out bibliography as appropriate.  This will require breaking up the discussion into several posts.   1. Survey of Scholarship   The question of whether the Qumran corpus represents the literature of a single group or multiple groups is an important one.  Historically, the Qumran field started out by classifying the scrolls as Biblical or sectarian, with an implicit premise that all non-biblical texts were produced by a single sect.  An early published text, 1QS, had significant correlations with the Essnes as described in Josephus.  There was as a result an early consensus forged that the Essenes produced all the texts then classified as sectarian.  This view found was supported by the arguments in T. Beall, Josephus’ Description of the Essenes Illustrated by the Dead Sea Scrolls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), which systematically compared the Essenes of Josephus with the scrolls and found numerous parallels.   Early scrolls scholarship was conducted to a significant degree by non-Jews with little or no interest in Jewish legal traditions.  John Strugnell, for instance, was (according to his own statements) apparently unable to summon the interest to publish one of the most significant legal texts, 4QMMT.  This text, once effectively taken out of hands, stimulated a second phase in scrolls research in which Jewish legal traditions came to the forefront.  The major interesting result of this research was to show that the halakhic texts at Qumran, which include 4QMMT, 11QT, 4Q159 (4QOrdinances) and others, reflect legal traditions that correlate with the positions of the Sadducees according to rabbinic sources.  One may thus speak of two legal traditions (or two bodies of legal materials) from Qumran, halakhic legal materials (H) that correlate with what is known of the Sadducees, and organizational legal materials (S) found in the Serekh texts that correlate (in the case of 1QS) with late Essene practices.    That the (S) rules are consistent across the Serekh texts 1QS, 1QM, and 1QSa and (S) portions of CD is especially demonstrated in L. Schiffman, The Eschatological Community of the Dead Sea Scrolls:  a Study of the Rule of the Community (Atlanta:  Scholars Press, 1989).   For the Sadducee character of the halakhic texts, see L. Schiffman, “The Place of 4QMMT in the Corpus of the Qumran Manuscripts”, in J. Kampen and M. Bernstein (eds.), Reading 4QMMT:  New Perspectives on Qumran Law and History (SBL Symposium series, 2; Atlanta:  Society of Biblical Literature, 1996) 81-98; “The Temple Scroll and the Status of its Law:  the Status of the Question”, in E. Ulrich and J. Vanderkam (eds.), Community of the Renewed Covenant, The Notre Dame Symposium on the Dead Sea Scrolls (Notre Dame:  University of Notre Dame Press, 1999) 46-48; “Miqsat Ma‘aśeh Ha-Torah and the Temple Scroll”, RevQ 14 (1990) 435-57; “Relationship of the Zadokite Fragments to the Temple Scroll”, in J. Baumgarten  et al (eds.), The Damascus Document: A Centennial of Discovery.  Proceedings of the Third International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 4-8 February, 1998 (Leiden:  Brill, 2000) 133-45.   In CD, Charlotte Hempel has demonstrated that the (H) laws belong to an older edition of CD and that the (S) laws (which see designates as CO) were added later.  See C. Hempel, The Laws of the Damascus Document:  Sources, Tradition and Redaction (Leiden-Boston-Köln:  Brill, 1998), which is foundational to any modern discussion of CD.  See also an excellent article by P. Davies, “The Judaism(s) of the Damascus Document”, in J. Baumgarten et al (eds.), The Damascus Document: A Centennial of Discovery.  Proceedings of the Third International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 4-8 February, 1998 (Leiden: Brill, 2000) 27-43.  Davies contrasts the historical situation and laws of the “Damascus Sect” (D) with the redaction of this earlier material by the “Yachad” (S) defined by the Serekh texts.   Next:  2. Old Paradigm, New Questions   Best regards, Russell Gmirkin