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

306 DAILY AND FESTIVAL PRAYERS AT QUMRAN
same three-fold offering often found in biblical texts (Num 8:12; Deut
12:17; 14:23; 18:4; Neh 10:40; 13:5, 12; 2 Chr 31:5). 18
4Q509 consists of 313 fragments of prayers that contain several allusions
to a variety of Jewish festivals. “The festivals of green vegetation”
in fragment 3 line 7 may refer to the New Year Festival or Rosh
Hashanah. Fragment 3, lines 2–9, and fragments 97–98, line 1 have significant
parallels with sections of 1Q34–1Q34 bis clearly associated with
the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur. The Festival of Shavuot or Day of
Firstfruits may well be the subject of fragments 131–132 with their references
to “firstfruits” and “free-will offerings” from the produce of the
land. 4Q509 is the earliest among this Qumranic collection of Prayers for
Festivals, dating to sometime before 70 B.C.E. with its late Hasmonean
script. M. Baillet originally published the collection of prayers in 4Q509. 19
The structure of the individual prayers throughout the Prayers for
Festivals is fairly consistent and has parallels to the structure of the prayers
in the Words of the Lights (4Q504–506). The structure includes a heading
with the designated time of the prayer, a call to God to remember, a series
of historical remembrances and petitions, a closing blessing to the Lord,
and a final congregational response, “Amen. Amen.” 20 The numerous
technical terms and themes distinctive to Qumran which appear
throughout the Prayers for the Festivals suggest that these prayers were not
imported into the community from the outside; rather, they represent
genuine Qumranic compositions. 21
KEY ISSUES
4Q503
The theology of the fragmentary prayers in 4Q503 is focused on the
praise of God who is “holy” (frags. 15–16, lines 5, 13, 18; frag. 26, line 3)
18. Ibid., 181.
19. Ibid., 184–215.
20. Nitzan, ibid., 71.
21. Carol Newsom has expressed reservations about the claim that the Prayers for
Festivals were composed at Qumran. She argues that the prayers imply different
assumptions about the calendar than those typically associated with the Qumran
community. The notion of separating the covenant “from all the people” may be
referring to Israel as a whole, not the special subgroup of the Qumran community.
See Carol Newsom, “‘Sectually Explicit’ Literature from Qumran,” in The Hebrew
Bible and Its Interpreters (ed. W. H. Propp, B. Halpern, and D. N. Freedman; BJSUCSD
1; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 167–87. Newsom argues that the more