the-bible-and-the-dead-sea-scrolls

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE IMPACT OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS ON NEW
TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION:
PROPOSALS, PROBLEMS, AND FURTHER PERSPECTIVES
Jörg Frey
For biblical scholarship, the Dead Sea Scrolls1 (or better, the “library of
Qumran”) are by far the most important documentary finds of the twentieth
century. Not only the public interest, but also the amount of scholarly
publications the Dead Sea Scrolls have caused go far beyond the impact of
other quite sensational finds such as the cuneiform tablets from Ras Shamra
(Ugarit) in Northern Syria, discovered in 1929, 2 or the thirteen codices of
the Coptic Gnostic library found in 1945 in Nag Hammadi in Middle Egypt. 3
From the late 1940s up to the present, the library of Qumran has caused a
library of its own, consisting of roughly more than twenty thousand publications.
4 More than fifty years after the first discoveries, a highly specialized
1. Normally, this term is used to denote the number of about nine hundred manuscripts
found in eleven caves near Khirbet Qumran at the NW side of the Dead Sea.
Except from some texts discovered at Masada, the other documentary finds from
sites near the Dead Sea—such as Wadi Murabba(at, Wadi ed-Daliyeh, Khirbet Mird,
and Ketef Jericho—are not related with the texts from Qumran, even if they are sometimes
included in the term “Dead Sea Scrolls.”
2. Cf. Marguerite Yon, Dennis Pardee, and Pierre Bordreuil, “Ugarit,” ABD 6:695–721;
on the impact on biblical scholarship, see Oswald Loretz, Ugarit und die Bibel: Kanaanäische
Götter und Religion im Alten Testament (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990).
3. Cf. Birger A. Pearson, “Nag Hammadi,” ABD 4:982–93; see the translation of the
texts in James M. Robinson and Richard Smith, eds., The Nag Hammadi Library in English:
Translated and Introduced by Members of the Coptic Gnostic Library Project of the Institute for Antiquity
and Christianity, Claremont, California (4th, rev. ed.; Leiden: Brill, 1996); and for the impact
on biblical scholarship, the reference work by Craig A. Evans, Robert L. Webb, and
Richard A. Wiebe, eds., Nag Hammadi Texts and the Bible (NTTS 18; Leiden: Brill, 1993).
4. In 1998, Hartmut Stegemann, “Qumran, Qumran—und längst kein Ende,” TRev
94 (1998): 483–88, esp. 483, calculated about 15,000 titles. Adam S. van der Woude,
“Fifty Years of Qumran Research,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive
Assessment (ed. P. W. Flint, J. C. VanderKam, and A. E. Alvarez; 2 vols.; Leiden: Brill,
1998–1999), 1:1–45, esp. 1, counting “more than 10,000 publications that have been
itemized in the bibliographies of Ch. Burchard, W. S. LaSor, B. Jongeling, and F. García
Martínez and D. W. Parry.” Cf. Christoph Burchard, Bibliographie zu den Handschriften vom
Toten Meer (2 vols.; BZAW 76, 89; Berlin: Töpelmann, 1957–65); Bastiaan Jongeling, A
Classified Bibliography of the Finds in the Desert of Judah 1958–1969 (STDJ 7; Leiden: Brill,
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