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

186 THE TWO SPIRITS IN QUMRAN THEOLOGY
THE TWO SPIRITS: THEIR RELATION TO QUMRAN THOUGHT
Diversity Within the Dead Sea Scrolls
A scant year before Wernberg-Møller attempted a frontal assault on
the hypothesis of Zoroastrian influence, O. Betz drove a wedge into the
assumption that Qumran conceptions of the spirit were relatively uniform.
Betz discovered what he would designate the Spirit-teaching
(Geistlehre), which is located primarily in 1QH, and the Spirits-teaching
(Geisterlehre), which characterizes 1QS 3.13–4.26. These, contended Betz,
“are so closely intertwined that Qumran research until now and probably
also the sect itself did not discover their original independence.” 44 For
the division between a Spirit-teaching and Spirits-teaching, Betz offered
several pieces of evidence.
Creation
The Spirit-teaching is concerned primarily to describe the human spirit
as an impure spirit, a “spirit of flesh” which is characterized by waywardness
and sin. Thus, the Qumran psalmist thanks God for insight,
even though a human being is
a structure of dust fashioned with water,
his counsel is the [iniquity] of sin,
shame of dishonor and so[urce of] impurity
and a depraved spirit rules over him. (1QH 5.21–22)
Strikingly different is the creation imagery in 1QS 3.18–19, where not
one spirit, but two, are created, and where these are not inbreathed but
placed for humans to walk in them.
This difference is explicable in part, according to Betz, because the
Spirit-teaching of 1QH is deeply influenced by Genesis 2, with its images
of breath and clay and its focus upon the creation of individual human
beings. The Spirits-teaching, in contrast, with its reference to “generations”
and to the contrast between light and darkness, is spun from
Genesis 1, and therefore is directed toward generations of people,
children of light and darkness.
44. Otto Betz, Offenbarung und Schriftforschung in der Qumransekte (WUNT 6; Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 1960), 143.