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

SARIANNA METSO 299
covenant.” In 1QS 5.8 par. 4QS b 9.6 par. 4QS d 1.5–6 a longer phrase has
been added: “Everyone who joins the council of the community shall enter
into the covenant of God in the presence of all those who willingly offer themselves.
He shall undertake by a binding oath…” The emphasis on the community
as the true keeper of the covenant is apparent in all of the examples
cited here.
IV. CONCLUSION
With only a few exceptions, the organizational terminology of the Essene
community has been taken over from the Hebrew Bible, and the community’s
documents reflect also the theological ideas of the contexts from
which the terms have been borrowed. The influence of the exodus
wilderness tradition appears to have been particularly strong, but there
are also cases where the community has provided a new interpretation
for a term.
Although it seems that the various terms have their own distinct
semantic fields, some terms appear to have been used synonymously. It
is not fully clear whether synonymous names were used simultaneously,
or rather, whether this phenomenon is due to a historical development,
so that in the course of time the names of some organizational units were
changed although their tasks remained the same. My inclination is to
consider simultaneous usage as the primary factor.
Interestingly, the duties of particular community officials (esp. maskil,
mebaqqer, and paqid) are described differently in different documents, i.e.,
the names of the officials are the same, but the tasks attributed to the officials
differ from one document to another. This would indicate that communities
behind the different documents were indeed different from one
another in their organization, although titles used for some officials were
identical. Alternatively, one could explain this phenomenon through
internal community development, but because of redactional borrowing
of passages from one document to another, the link between a specific
term and its original historical situation is difficult to establish.
The documents share many terms in common. On the other hand,
individual terms appear in one document that do not appear in the other
documents. Such terms could prove particularly important for the investigation
of sociological structures of the Qumran community and the
wider Essene movement.