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

CHARLESWORTH AND MCSPADDEN 321
handbook or psalter for the community’s assemblies. 12 Perhaps the community
appreciated the Psalms as an institutional means for associating
the Righteous Teacher with David, thereby identifying the Teacher as a
holy figure like David. This seems likely since most Qumranites probably
linked the Righteous Teacher with the composition of the Qumran
hymnbook, the Thanksgiving Hymns (or at least some of these hymns),
which may have been used liturgically in Qumran services. Or again,
two curious lines in 11Q5 provide insight, “and the Lord gave him
[David] a spirit of discernment and light; and he wrote over 3,600
psalms” (27.4–5).
Do these lines not indicate the ubiquity of David-like psalms in
Second Temple Judaism? It is certainly clear that psalms 151–155, More
Psalms of David, indicate that the composition of new psalms was common
in Second Temple Judaism. Moreover, the pseudepigraphic Psalms of
Solomon are composed in the poetic style of the Psalter and receive their
inspiration intermittently from the psalms attributed to Solomon’s
father, David. 13
The Qumran Scrolls provide a sharpening of questions related not
only to the compilation of the Psalter, but also to the shaping of the
Hebrew canon. 14 Thus, we should ask, “Did the Qumranites include the
12. James A. Sanders, The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1967), 9–14; idem, “The Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPs a ) Reviewed,” in On Language,
Culture, and Religion: In Honor of E. A. Nida (ed. M. Black and W. A. Smalley; The Hague:
Mouton, 1974), 79–99. For further discussion of the Psalms in relation to Qumran
“liturgy,” see Flint, The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls, 202–27; Lawrence Schiffman, “The Dead
Sea Scrolls and the Early History of Jewish Liturgy,” in The Synagogue in Late Antiquity
(ed. L. I. Levine; Philadelphia: ASOR, 1987), 33–48; Eileen M. Schuller, “Prayer,
Hymnic, and Liturgical Texts from Qumran,” in The Community of the Renewed Covenant:
The Notre Dame Symposium on the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. E. Ulrich and J. VanderKam; Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 153–74; Moshe Weinfeld, “Prayer and
Liturgical Practice in the Qumran Sect,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Forty years of Research (ed.
D. Dimant and U. Rappaport; STDJ 10; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 241–58.
13. The “ancestors” and “magic” were important to the Qumranites. But these Jews
were paradigmatically different from the tribal life of the Kiriwinians studied by
Bronislaw Malinowski in Magic, Science and Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1948), see esp. 190–215. A comparison of these two similar, but quite different, groups
helps us perceive the central paradigmatic insight at Qumran. While these primitives
used magic to obtain herbs and other needs, the Qumranites did not see plants controlled
by spirits. The cosmos was filled with spirits, but there was only one God: “From
the God of knowledge comes all that is occurring and shall occur” (1QS 3.15).
14. Too often scholars think that there is an appreciable difference in the way scribes
copied “canonical” from “noncanonical” texts. Only occasionally is that the case in
the first millennium C.E., and the much earlier manuscripts found in the Qumran
caves do not illustrate the supposition that books in the Hebrew canon were copied
with more care than those we now place in the apocryphal collections. For example,