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

LOREN T. STUCKENBRUCK 125
form. We reach a total of 490 years if we combine the chronological
details found in the Cairo Genizah manuscripts of the work with an
assumed period of 40 years for the Righteous Teacher’s activities:
a. 390 years: The time from the fall of Jerusalem until the appearance of the
“root of planting” (CD 1.5–8).
b. 20 years: The period of “blindness” for the group until the coming of the
Righteous Teacher (CD 1.8–11).
c. 40 years: The interval between the death of the Righteous Teacher and
the judgment of the Man of the Lie and his group (CD 20.13–15).
d. 40 years: The duration of the Righteous Teacher’s activities between (b)
and (c).
The existence of the scheme from Daniel 9 here encounters two main
problems: (1) The reference to 390 years is taken from the period given
in Ezek 4:4–7 for the punishment of Jerusalem. The author of this part of
the Damascus Document is therefore not immediately concerned with the
chronology of Daniel 9; at most, one would have to suppose that the 390
years, in the end redaction of the work, becomes a building block (though
from Ezekiel) to produce the number 490. (2) Obviously, the period of
forty years assumed for the group’s leader is simply an estimate, and
unless one takes Daniel’s scheme of 490 years as a point of departure, it
has no basis in the text. While these difficulties do not exclude the possibility
that Daniel’s chronology is presupposed, they undermine any
notion that the author(s) drew on Daniel in an explicit, immediately recognizable
way. The Damascus Document mentions “the book of the divisions
of the times in their jubilees and in their weeks” (16.3–4), and this may
suggest that the author(s) would at least have known a periodization structured
around the number seven. It is questionable, though, whether the
chronological details of the Damascus Document were coordinated with the
kind of scheme presupposed in this “book,” 76 and in any case, whether
Daniel 9 lies at all in the background of such a scheme. 77
The use of Daniel’s scheme in the fragmentary 4Q180–181 is likewise
unclear. 4Q181 fragment 2 (line 3) does mention “seventy weeks,” and
76. On the possibility that CD 16.2–4 is a later insertion into the work, see Joseph
M. Baumgarten and Daniel R. Schwartz, “Damascus Document (CD),” in The Dead
Sea Scrolls: Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek Texts with English Translations, Vol. 2, Damascus
Document, War Scroll, and Related Documents (ed. J. H. Charlesworth et al.; PTSDSSP 2;
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 39n132.
77. It is likely that “the book” of CD 16.3–4 refers to Jubilees, which views history
from the creation until the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai as divided into some 49
“jubilees,” i.e., 49 periods of 49 years; cf. Michel Testuz, Les idées religieuses du livre des
Jubilés (Geneva: Droz, 1960), 138–40.