The Dead Sea Scrolls for a New Millennium by Phillip R. Callaway

Author:Phillip R. Callaway [Callaway, Phillip R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608996605
Publisher: Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

Map of Ancient Jerusalem

—SEVEN—

The Community Scrolls

THE DAMASCUS DOCUMENT

IN 1896, A CENTURY before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Cambridge University’s Solomon Schechter went to a synagogue in the old city of Cairo, Egypt, and proceeded to salvage thousands of medieval manuscripts from the synagogue’s storage area. Two manuscripts penned in the tenth and twelfth centuries were of special interests for they seemed to refer to an ancient Jewish group with allegiance to the Zadokite priests and the city of Damascus. In fact, these pages came first to be known as the Fragments of a Zadokite Work and later as the Damascus Document (see chapter 1 above). Now scholars use the abbreviation CD to refer to the Damascus Document and fragments of the same work from other caves.1

Over half of the two medieval manuscripts is legal in nature (pages 9–16; 4, 12b–8, 10a). Among the laws were those concerned with using the divine name when swearing oaths, swearing oaths outside the presence of judges, witnesses, the fulfillment of vows and free-will offerings, leprosy, contagion and purity, sexual intercourse, relations with the Gentiles, observation of the Sabbath and other holy days, a deranged individual, the role of priests, Levites, the guardian of the community, and a rule that required members to donate at least two days wages to support widows, orphans, and the poor.

The other section of this work reads like a collection of sermons about obedience and repentance. It is a theological exhortation basing its key points on biblical citations. The first page presents a Jewish group that views its founding during the Babylonian exile. Its chronological notes suggest that this group emerged during the early second century BCE. During the time it takes a boy to become a man, this group was joined by someone they called their Teacher of Righteousness, and he was opposed by a dark figure known as the Liar. Presumably this group had formed a new covenant in the land of Damascus (pages 6, 7, 19, and 20) and cast a critical eye upon the lax religious practices in Judaea and Jerusalem. On the surface this community seems to have consisted of Jewish expatriates who had moved from Syria to Israel. They accuse Jerusalem’s leadership of fornication, accepting stolen wealth, profaning the temple, failing to observe the purity laws, and not caring for the downtrodden and the outsider. The elite of this group called themselves “the men of perfect holiness” (20:2). They advocated strict observance, apparently according to their own interpretations, of Mosaic Law and rejected the Hellenistic practices during the hegemony of an evil deity called Belial.

Once Qumran Caves 4, 5, and 6 had been cleared and studied, experts realized that this medieval work was at least a thousand years old and that it had been a foundation work for those who settled at Khirbet Qumran. Several partial manuscripts have been linked loosely with the medieval pages (4Q266–267, 269–270, 272–273). The fragments from Cave 4 deal with fornication, defiling ones holy spirit, the ancient

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