Philip Davies has privately answered me well on my last questions
to him, however he wishes that it not be public on
g-megillot.
Here is more on the matter of external referents of the sobriquet
figures of the pesharim/CD.
I think I did give an argument that the sobriquet figures in the
pesharim/CD alluded to contemporary external figures, in my
Pesher Nahum book (2001). This was at pp. 57-62 on the pesharim
as like dream interpretation and "prophecy by interpretation". Perhaps
I could have been clearer, but the argument is there. The argument
is that all the ancient examples of oracles/divination/dream
interpretation involved real-world referents. There is no example
known to me of ancient contemporary oracles/dream interpretations/
divination not intended loosely or specifically to have real-world
intended referents.
So the argument is two steps: first, the likeness of the pesharim with
dream interpretation/oracles/divination. The pesharim are not exactly
those, but they are in the spectrum of those phenomena. The pesharim
are not a political assembly speech like Hugo Chavez, but they are like
the apocalyptic dreams interpreted in light of then-contemporary
reality in the ancient world. The strange creatures and things of the
book of Revelation of the NT, just as in Daniel's four kingdoms, had
intended external referents. the pesharim are not exactly an apocalypse
like Daniel/Rev, but are in that spectrum of phenomena.
In my view the TR as dead in CD is obviously recently dead, as in last
year or the year before so to speak, because the authors have
postponed "the end" by forty more years, and are certainly somewhere
within that forty years, and most likely early in that forty years. I don't
see any other reasonable way of reading it, apart from the other
possbility that the death of the TR is (imminently) future and itself
anticipated in CD. But either way, the TR is contemporary to the authors,
in their generation, even if he did just recently surprise them by dying.
At least this is how I read it.
So the main argument is the genre analogy argument: the texts are
not political speeches like Chavez's, but dream
interpretation/oracle/divinatino,
in which contemporary things are peshered by means of, in this case, ancient
texts read for wordplay and double-entendre meaning, analogous to other
ancient oracles reading livers or positions of the stars in the sky.
A second point, independent point but supporting the same conclusion,
is that it just makes sense to me that the sobriquet figures essentially
stand or fall together, as having external contemporary referents or not.
It makes no sense to me that if one or two in the pesharim/CD have
external referents, the third or fourth or fifth in the same texts, the same
in kind, do not also.
And third, I have commonly heard it said of the pesharim: they aren't
ABOUT telling history, therefore you can't use them for history. But
that is a logical fallacy. Whether their purpose is or is not to tell
history
is, strictly speaking, beside the point, as to whether they do iin fact or
don't in fact. Here I am reminded of something Thomas Thompson
said to me early on when I first arrived at Copenhagen, that has always
stayed with me: it is not what a text says directly that matters as much as
what it implies indirectly (in terms of historical information).
And as for the TR's external historicity, a detail that to me very strongly
argues for a contemporary external TR known to the authors of the
texts is the very point that they are peshering his death. They are
peshering his death because that was not supposed to happen, but it did.
Realilty has intruded upon their previous scheme. They are forced to
explain it, they are responding to external events that did not turn
out as expected.
It is true that because empirically most involved in the DSS field assume
the existence of external referents to the sobriquet figures,
I don't repeat the argument every time all over again. But I think that
argument is there in my pNah book.
On my specific identity proposals, Hyrcanus II/TR has the
misfortune of having never been argued before in earlier
days before such TR-identity discussions became almost discredited
in certain circles. But that is an accident of timing and irrelevant to
the merits or demerits of the case itself.
Greg Doudna
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