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

38 QUMRAN AND THE ENOCH GROUPS
(c) hitherto unknown material—these criteria have been applied too often,
with the result of imposing later canonical assumptions upon ancient
sources. How can we assume, for example, that for the people of the Dead
Sea Scrolls, 1 Enoch or the Temple Scroll belonged to a different category
than Genesis or Isaiah? In particular, how can we assume that a document
is sectarian simply because we formerly did not know of its existence?
The first modern collections of Dead Sea Scrolls were selections of previously
unknown “sectarian” documents, a practical and yet hardly scientific
criterion. The biblical, apocryphal, and pseudepigraphic texts from
Qumran became footnotes in the editions of the already established corpora
of the Hebrew Bible, Apocrypha, and Pseudepigrapha. In one case
only, the Damascus Document, whose sectarian features seemed too obvious
to be overlooked, the overlapping was solved by removing the document
from the corpus of the Pseudepigrapha, in which it had been previously
included, and moving it into the Dead Sea Scrolls. 4 In other cases, notably
1 Enoch and Jubilees, the recognition of sectarian features was not considered
enough to justify such a dramatic change, and the documents
remained in their traditional corpus. The Dead Sea Scrolls were and in
common opinion still are the documents discovered at Qumran minus
those belonging to other corpora. The Dead Sea Scrolls have become a
scholarly and marketing label for a selected body of sectarian texts.
The most recent editions of the Qumran texts are struggling to overcome
this “original sin” of Dead Sea Scrolls research. Older standard
collections, like that of Géza Vermes, have gradually expanded their
material, edition after edition, 5 and are now being replaced by new, more
inclusive collections. Both the García Martínez and the Charlesworth editions,
although still limited for practical reasons to “nonbiblical” material,
have abolished the most misleading distinction between apocryphal, pseudepigraphic,
and sectarian literature; they are consciously and effectively
promoting a more comprehensive approach to the entire material discovered
in the caves. 6
4. After the publication of the editio princeps by Solomon Schechter in Fragments of a
Zadokite Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), it was natural to see
the Damascus Document in the collections of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha by Robert
H. Charles, ed., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (2 vols.; Oxford:
Clarendon, 1913), 2:785–834; and Paul Riessler, Altjüdisches Schrifttum ausserhalb der
Bible (Augsburg: Benno Filser, 1928), 920–41. After the 1950s, the Damascus Document
does not appear in any of the collections of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.
5. Geza Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (4th ed.; Baltimore: Penguin, 1995).
6. James H. Charlesworth, ed., PTSDSSP (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck; Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, 1991–); Florentino García Martínez, The Dead Sea Scrolls
Translated: The Qumran Texts in English (trans. W. G. E. Watson; 2d ed.; Leiden: Brill,
1996).