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

CHAPTER TEN
THE QUMRAN CONCEPT OF TIME 1
Henry W. Morisada Rietz
The concept of “time” provides us with a heuristic category to coordinate
several different aspects of the Qumran community’s thought and theology.
These aspects include the calendar, halakot, predetermination of history,
cosmology, angelology, and the “latter days” (so-called eschatology).
Scholars have long recognized that the collection of documents found
in eleven caves near Khirbet Qumran constitute a sort of “library” of the
community whose ruins are adjacent to the caves. 2 The significance of
the collection being a “library” is the recognition that the documents represented
are from a variety of sources. Thus, in order to study the
Qumran community, it is necessary to identify documents that were
composed by the community, i.e., the “sectarian” Dead Sea Scrolls. 3 The
most reliable indicator of Qumran authorship is the distinctive use of certain
technical terms. 4 The sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls include the Rule of the
1. I adapted and subsequently developed portions of this paper in my dissertation,
“Collapsing of the Heavens and the Earth: Conceptions of time in the sectarian Dead
Sea Scrolls” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, 2000). I greatly
appreciate the guidance provided by the members of my committee, Dennis T. Olson,
Donald H. Juel, and initially Brian K. Blount, and especially, James H. Charlesworth,
who chaired the committee. For a fuller discussion, see my Time in the Sectarian Dead
Sea Scrolls (WUNT II; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, [forthcoming]).
2. The association between the manuscripts, the caves and the ruins is well supported.
See the classic work by Roland de Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls
(Schweich Lectures 1959; rev. ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 53–57.
More recently, see Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), esp. 43–44. The few proposals that seek to separate
the connection between the ruins and the manuscripts are not persuasive; e.g.,
Norman Golb who disassociates the scrolls from the ruins at Qumran and suggests
that they are the remains of the Jerusalem temple’s library, which was hidden in the
caves during the first revolt (Norman Golb, “Who Hid the Dead Sea Scrolls?” BA 48
[1985]: 68–82; and Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret of Qumran
[New York: Scribners, 1995], 3–171).
3. The word sectarian is used in mutually exclusive ways by various scholars. In
this paper, it denotes documents composed or edited by the Qumran Community.
4. For example, the classic but dated work of Friedrich Nötscher, Zur theologischen
Terminologie der Qumran Texte (Bonn: Peter Hanstein, 1956). Devorah Dimant provides
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