Stephen,
The use of a general term such as "law" or "legal materials" to describe the halachic material in the Qumran corpus disregards the fact that Qumran legal materials are not homogenous. As noted by P. Davies, C. Hempeland others,there is a difference in content and vocabulary between the
Dear Herb,
You make a good point! Perhaps I did push things a bit too far in order to make
the distinction between the way in which one arrives at a particular
interpretation and the interpretation itself. Having said that, please allow
me to provide three short quotations which may help to
Dear Ian:
I appreciate your thoughtful post; allow me please to
reflect at length.
I stand by what I said. People who deal with Qumran
sometimes, improperly,
just use the word halakhah to mean law as opposed to
lore and I did write in an
earlier post What we now call Midrash halakhah (likely,
