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

314 BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION AT QUMRAN
gives Habakkuk’s prophecy an eschatological reading. But the text and its
interpretation are also linked through a wordplay: the Lord’s “palace” or
“temple” (lkyh, hykl) does not feature explicitly in the interpretation, but
another word using the same letters does occur there, “will eradicate”
(hlky, yklh), and in similar fashion such eradication is not actually indicated
in the text of Habakkuk. 73 The two points belong together: for the
Qumran interpreter, the clear message of Habakkuk was that when God is
in his eschatological temple, idolaters will be destroyed. This passage is a
good example of the way in which prophetic exegesis at Qumran is not
atomistically arbitrary, but links text and interpretation carefully so that
exegetical techniques enable theological insight into the text.
D. Theological Issues
1. Copying the Divine Initiative
It is clear from the books of the Torah that God is a communicator. In the
first creation account (Gen 1:1–2:4a) order is established through divine
command, and at Sinai God expresses his will for his people, and even his
words are relayed indirectly by Moses. The way in which the Qumran
covenanters privileged certain writings as authoritative, especially the
Torah, and then continued to offer interpretations and new understandings
of them that supposedly had been hidden from the outset—all this
suggests that the Qumran exegetes saw themselves as imitating the divine
initiative, as continuing the ongoing process of revelation. Scripture for
them was not a closed affair only to be supplemented by an oral law
whose authority had to be asserted rather than proved. The Qumran
covenanters thought of themselves as participating in the process of
revelation itself. It is not surprising that the Temple Scroll is presented as a
literary fiction, as if God himself is speaking; such a device is not just a
neat trick to try to claim authority for the contents of the composition, it
is also a hint that is to be found in the Torah itself, that God continues to
communicate with those who would obey him. Just as Deuteronomy was
a rewrite of much in Exodus, so several Reworked Pentateuch texts (4Q158;
4Q364–367) have come to light in the Qumran library. Thus, the community
at Qumran apparently believed “in the progressive revelation of the
73. This was the intriguing suggestion of John V. Chamberlain, “An Ancient
Sectarian Interpretation of the Old Testament Prophets: A Study in the Qumran
Scrolls and the Damascus Fragments” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1955), 115–16.