Law, Literature, and Society in Legal Texts from Qumran: Papers from the Ninth Meeting of the International Organization for Qumran Studies, Leuven 2016. Edited by Jutta Jokiranta and Molly Zahn

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls provided an impetus to scholarship on ancient Jewish law, as it brought to light a wealth of new material that predated rabbinic writings. However, because of the late publication of some important legal texts, such as the Temple Scroll, and the fact that the Christian scholars first involved in editing the scrolls had no expertise in rabbinic law, it was not until the 1970s that Jewish law became a proper object of study for Dead Sea Scrolls scholars. That this subfield is still thriving about half a century later is illustrated by this volume on Law, Literature, and Society in Legal Texts from Qumran.

The volume consists of ten essays originally presented at the IOQS meeting in Leuven (Belgium) in 2016 under the theme ‘Halakhic Texts and Rule Texts’. The volume opens with Lawrence Schiffman’s chapter on ‘Second Temple Jewish Law in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Widening the Paradigm’, in which he presents an overview of the study and significance of legal material in the Scrolls and argues in favour of regarding legal texts from Qumran not as a distinct and distinctive body but as reflecting the broader context of early Judaism. Next, Dennis Mizzi (‘Were Scrolls Susceptible to Impurity?’) focuses on scrolls as physical realia and discusses their purity status as cultural objects against the background of purity regulations found in Qumran and rabbinic texts. In ‘A New Understanding of the Sobriquet דורשי החלקות ’, Harry Fox offers a new interpretation of דורשי החלקות. Though he does not deny that the term seems to designate Pharisees, he does argue that its meaning should be read as ‘seekers of divisions’ rather than ‘of smooth things’, and links it to a reconsideration of what divided the Essenes from the Pharisees. In Chapter 4, ‘4QMMT: A Letter to (not from) the Yaḥad’, Gareth Wearne takes as point of departure the hypothesis that 4QMMT was addressed to the Qumran community, and reconsiders its content and message against that background. Peter Porzig, in ‘The Place of the “Treatise of the Two Spirits” (1QS 3:13–4:26) within the Literary Development of the Community Rule’, argues that the Treatise is a Fortschreibung of earlier forms of the Serekh ha-Yaḥad. Looking at the Treatise as well, but from a different perspective, is Meike Christian. In ‘The Literary Development of the “Treatise of the Two Spirits” as Dependent on Instruction and Hodayot’, she argues that the Treatise itself is the product of a process of literary growth: it consists of an original core (1QS 3:13–14a, 3:15b–18a + 4:15a, and 4:15b–23a) which was expanded in three stages. In Chapter 7, ‘A Reassessment of 4Q256 (4QSerekh ha-Yaḥad^b) Frags. 5a–b and 1QS 6:16–17’, James Tucker proposes a compelling new reconstruction of 4Q256 and argues that this fragment represents an earlier stage in the compositional process of the Serekh ha-Yaḥad compared to 1QS. Michael Jost, in ‘Yaḥad, Maskil, Priests and Angels—Their Relation in the Community Rule’, analyses the hierarchical structure of the Yaḥad on the basis of liturgical contexts in 1QS. Tova Ganzel discusses ‘The Reworking of Ezekiel’s Temple Vision in the Temple Scroll’. While previous scholarship has emphasized the Temple Scroll’s relation to Pentateuchal writings, Ganzel widens the perspective on literary engagement: she argues that the author of the Temple Scroll, bothered by the Second Temple’s lack of preservation of purity, takes up the principles of separating the holy from the profane from the book of Ezekiel to describe his own utopian alternative. Lastly, in the final chapter, ‘The Levites, the Royal Council, and the Relationship between Chronicles and the Temple Scroll’, Molly Zahn argues against a literary connection between Chronicles and the Temple Scroll, and instead shows that both texts evidence a mutual concern to update and reformulate shared traditions that precede them.