Dear Ian W., You have restated (below) that you consider it "helpful" to call Qumran legal texts "halakhic" I really do not. I find that it is either (a) assigning to them a quite distorting view owned by sect they opposed (Pharisees) and/or (b) retrojecting, without warrant, rabbinic terminology, on a group not rabbinic. There were more groups in the second temple period than what became later Judaism and Christianity. To study second temple period sectarian history, I think, a historian needs first of all to read them in their own voice.
This is not a new problem, but it remains a problem (as I wrote in DSS After Fifty Years vol 2.) One of the occasion that this occured to me is when I years ago saw in the library a learned book by Bernard Revel: _The Karaite Halakha and Its Relation to Sadducean, Samaritan and Philonian Halakha_ (Philadelphia: Cahan, 1913; based on JQR 1911-12 articles). I thought: did Sadducees have halakha? Isn't that exactly what they rejected? If I may also suggest: "Sadducees," in some (2nd temple period) uses may be a distorting retrojection of a later, rabbinic sense (eventually used even to include Christians after all!). Words like halakha, Sadducees, Essenes, Ossaioi, Ebionim, minim (see, e.g. R. Kimelman in Jewish and Christian Self Definition v. 2 1981; and articles by Daniel Boyarin), hairesis, Nazarenes, maybe even ioudaismos, evolved. Sometimes with more than one concurrent sense. I suggest we can see that evolution if we are sensitive to appropriate time and terminology calculus. It it easy to start; see, e.g., Joseph M. Baumgarten's title in Proc. 12th World Congress of Jewish Studies: "The Relevance of Rabbinic Sources to the Study of Qumran Law." It's not hard; it might help. But you are of course free to think differently and perhaps we will agree to disagree. best, Stephen Goranson Quoting Ian Werrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: [....] For the moment, however, it is helpful in > scholarly discussions to describe the legal material at Qumran as 'halakha'. _______________________________________________ g-Megillot mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.McMaster.CA/mailman/listinfo/g-megillot
