The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

324 ECONOMIC JUSTICE AND NONRETALIATION
“defilement” (6.15; 8.5; cf. 3.17–18); that is, social morality is integral to
the issue of “purity,” an idea that is heightened in 1QS.
These indictments against unjust wealth are anticipated in
4.13–5.15. 13 “Property” (or “wealth,” Nwh) along with “lust” and “defilement
of the sanctuary” are presented as the “three nets of Belial”
unleashed against Israel in the final days (4.17), as predicted by Levi son
of Jacob (4.15; cf. T. Levi 14:5–8) and exemplified by the community’s
opponents (4.18–20; 5.6–15), presumably the Jerusalem elite in particular.
Indeed, wealth itself has an insidious character as one of the ways by
which Belial entraps people. 14 Finally, the criticism of the community’s
primary opponents as “removers of the landmark” (1.16, citing Deut
19:14; 5.20; 8.3 [= B 19.15–16], citing Hos 5:10) may be intended as a
double entendre, referring figuratively to their interpretation and practice
of the Law (cf. B 20.25) and concretely to their economic injustice. 15
Corresponding to this sharp condemnation of unjust wealth in CD is
the theme of communal solidarity and support for the needy. In the
Precepts for Covenanters we find the following commitments in CD
6.20–7.1:
to love each man his brother as himself [item 9]
whmk whyx) t) #y) bwh)l
13. The theme of unjust wealth may also be referred to in CD 3.17–18a, where the
self-proclamation “This is ours” ()yh wnl), along with general “defilement,” are
among the condemned vices exhibited by those “who despise the waters” of community
instruction. Although perhaps a “miscellaneous gloss” made sometime in the
later textual history of the document (e.g., Murphy-O’Connor, “Literary Analysis,”
563), this text alludes to the unjust amassing or hoarding by the elite class, if not (but
less likely) to the mere claim to private ownership. Whether as original or as a gloss,
the idea easily merges with the denunciations against amassing property elsewhere in
CD. If the phrase refers to a claim to personal property, one might suppose it to be a
Qumranic interpolation condemning rival Essene groups for maintaining private
ownership of possessions
14. Cf. Robert H. Charles, APOT 2:809 (Zadokite Work 6.11 = CD 4.17), who shows
his privileged bias, emending to h(#rh Nwh, “wealth of wickedness,” since otherwise
“our author, like a fanatic, makes, not the sinful desire, but the object of desire a sinful
thing in itself.” Catherine M. Murphy, Wealth in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Qumran
Community (STDJ 40; Leiden: Brill, 2002), 40, observes that here Nwh can also be transcribed
as Nyh (“arrogance”), and that this net refers “to a specific kind of arrogance,
that associated with the abuse of wealth.”
15. For this idiom of removing the landmark, see also the prologue to the Damascus
Document in 4Q266 frag. 1 line 4, and the conclusion in 4Q266 frag. 11 lines 12–13.
For occurrences of the idiom (lwbgh gws) elsewhere in the Scripture, see Deut 27:17;
Prov 22:28; 23:10. The proverbial use can also be found in 4Q424 frag. 3 lines 8–10.
For further rhetoric against the economic injustice of the ruling Hasmonean priestrulers,
see below on the pesharim.