Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Keep in mind that I am not defending the hypothesis that the peshers refer to James the Just as the Teacher of Righteousness. If the term "Teacher of Righteousness" is a title for the "top dog" in a community, there could be more than one such dog of top-ness over the lifetime of that community, one succeeding another. I did not say that ALL of them HAD to be written on old materials.

However, I do not think that it is out of line to suggest that the peshers are, in fact, autographs. After all, unlike the Community Rule and Damascus Document, which exist in multiple copies of differing ages, I do not think there are any duplicates of them.

Also consider that our buddy Simon Bar Giora, who spent some time at Masada at the invitation of Eliezar ben Yair, and who was said by Josephus to control the regions around the Dead Sea between Summer 68 and Summer 69 CE, enlarging caves at a so-far unidentified valley called Paran where he made use of them “as repositories for his treasures...and many of his partisans had their dwelling in them; and he made no secret of it that he was exercising his men ... for the assault of Jerusalem.” Maybe it is just me, but that sounds a lot like the Qumran area.

DCH

Stephan Huller wrote:And then there is the problem with assuming that the surviving manuscript is also the exemplar. The carbon dating doesn't determine the origin of the literary composition just the date of the writing material. Even if someone did indeed write the text on 70 year old paper - a proposition hard enough to take seriously - it is impossible to believe that the autograph, the original composition, was written on near ancient stock. The 1 century BCE date is just a round approximation. We are always getting bogged down with arguments over probability. The first century BCE date is a safe bet but it could even be older than the carbon dating, perhaps almost certainly older. The first century CE dating is a fringe theory developed only to support an even stupider application - i.e. James the Just.

But as you know from our experience with the Letter to Theodore there are a great many texts from antiquity which survive with only one exemplar. The older the text is the less likely it would be to have multiple copies unless as with CD it is a kind of charter of community rule (like the document that greets eaters at every Jimmy Johns location).

Don't Judeans always buy everything "wholesale"? <tongue firmly in cheek>

First of all I don't know if the peshers are associated all that firmly with any one or another scribal "school" (presumably you mean "hand") that might have produced a number of documents found in the caves. I thought that many of them are simply described as written in a "Herodian" handwriting style.

Or are you suggesting that the scribal "schools" prepared their own materials and did not simply buy them on an open market or order them to be made by a manufacturer?

It's been a good while since I looked closely at the DSS, so I may have misspoke. If so please offer a constructive correction.

DCH

Spin wrote:How likely can you imagine it to be in a scribal school? I mean, if you think about it.

No my comments weren't that sophisticated. I am just saying if the parchment is from the first century BCE that's the most likely time of composition. Then, if it can be argued that this sort of things happened before (i.e. new composition on very old paper) you might have a case for CONSIDERING the possibility that it happened again. But surely the most likely scenario is new parchment/new composition and then way down on the list of possibilities very old parchment/old composition and then further still very old parchment/ brand new composition. It has to be agreed that there are no obvious references to the 1st century CE right? Nothing screams out first century CE ... unless I neglected to note something when I looked at this stuff 5 years ago.

Just a quibble about terminology: the C14-dated writing material under discussion is parchment, is it not?

Paleographers and codicologists are precise when they call a writing material "paper." Paper is made by reducing fibers to a watery pulp that is bound together either with plant (so-called "Oriental" paper) or animal collagens ("Western" paper). You dip a wood and wire frame into the slurry and lift it out with a layer of fiber spread on it. The sheet can either dry on the frame or be transferred to a board and pressed. As far as I know, the earliest paper made in Baghdad is attested from the eighth century CE, in Egypt from the 9th - formula having been brought from China.

Yes

I see,

I was thinking of F. M. Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumrân (The Biblical Seminar 30; 3rd ed.; 1st ed. 1958; Sheffield: Academic Press, 1995, 91-92) who deduced from the fact that not one of the pesharim is preserved in more than one manuscript that they were autographs.

I should have considered Stuckinthemuck's The Legacy Of The Teacher Of Righteousness In The Dead Sea Scrolls (Loren T. Stuckenbruck, Orion Symposium: New Perspectives on Old Texts, January 9-11, 2005,
http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il/symposiums ... nbruck.doc
or a somewhat different version in the official publication New Perspectives on Old Texts: Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 9–11 January, 2005, Edited by Esther G. Chazon and Betsy Halpern-Amaru, in collaboration with Ruth A. Clements, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, vol 88, 2010
https://www.academia.edu/1512682/Legacy ... in_the_DSS)

Oh woe is me!!!!

While the possibility remains open that some of the manuscripts may be autographs, copyist errors – for example, in manuscripts mentioning the Teacher, omissions through homoioteleuton (4QpPsa 1-10 iii 5), parablepsis (4QpIsae 5.5), dittography (1QpHab vii 1, 2; 4QpIsab i 4) and the change of hands in at least one manuscript (1QpHab at xii 13) – indicate that these scribes were working from earlier (and now lost) literary Vorlagen, and were not simply relying on oral tradition.

Per Emanuel Tov, Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert (Brill 2004):

Pesharim
The Qumran pesharim were authored by different individuals and were probably copied by yet other scribes, some of whom could have been the authors themselves. These differences in authorship are visible in the distinct focus and tendencies of the pesher methods of interpretation, scope of lemmas, etc. Differences in scribal hands are visible primarily in the handwriting, but also in scribal practices. Interestingly enough, none of the scribal hands visible in
244 Chapter 7: Special Scribal Characteristics the pesharim appears in a second pesher. At the same time, attention should be directed to the following points.
• A change of hands within a manuscript, attested relatively frequently in the Qumran scrolls (ch. 2e), attests to its status as a copy rather than an autograph. The unusual change of hands toward the end of 1QpHab (XII 13) probably indicates that this manuscript is a copy rather than an autograph.
• The erroneous copying of the scribal sign X as a single <aleph in 1QpHab II 5, where it serves no purpose, shows that this was a copy of another scroll in which the X served as a line-filler (ch. 5c6). This <aleph is written in exactly the same position as the X-signs, slightly to the right of the left vertical line.
• Scribal mistakes which are clearly based on a written Vorlage show that the specific pesher manuscript was a copy rather than an autograph. Thus, the supralinear addition μyrwk rqyk hwhy ybhwaw wryjb l[? w]rçp by the original scribe of 4QpPsa (4Q171) III 5 must have been written after the completion of the text. The writing of this added line (originally omitted by way of homoioteleuton) shows a feature which differs from the writing of the surrounding text. While, in that scroll, the Tetragramm was always written in paleo-Hebrew characters, it is inscribed in square characters in the addition in III 5

DCH

DCHindley wrote:It's been a good while since I looked closely at the DSS, so I may have misspoke. If so please offer a constructive correction.

spin wrote:How likely can you imagine it to be in a scribal school? I mean, if you think about it.

See, we can all be friends and have a reasonable conversation. Not so with others here. I too haven't looked at these things for over half a decade. Thanks for that bit of information. Very important information.

re writing materials / parchments - weren't some (or a lot) re-used?

ie. olde works/texts 'mashed up' and "re-sheeted"?

Teacher of Righteousness vs. Teacher of the Community.
Are they one in the same?

Several places in the Damascus Document it refers to the Teacher of the Community. As I understand it (non-scholar that I am) the High Priest of the community was also titled the "Teacher of the Community." How many different Teachers of the Community succeeded the original Teacher of Righteousness, I do not know, but it is clear they kept a detailed list of all members by rank from the very formation of the community and they pledged to keep a running list until the end of days: "inscribed in the Book from the day of the gathering in of the Teacher of the Community until the coming of the Messiah out of Aaron and Israel."

If only a copy of the manifest was found among the DSS this mystery would be over. If such a roster was found in the future, I strongly suspect the names of Jesus and John the Baptist would be found on the list along with Josephus and Paul.

If, I understand the history of the community right, there was a split in the community by a senior leader known as the Scoffer and/or the Liar. An end-time prophecy was made about this event: "From the day of the gathering in of the Teacher of the Community until the end of all the men of war who deserted to the Liar there shall pass about forty years (Deut. ii,14). And during that age the wrath of God shall be kindled against Israel; as He said, There shall be no king, no prince, no judge, no man to rebuke with justice (Hos. iii, 4).

Geza Vermes suggests that the Damascus Document was written about 100 BCE. However, I don't know enough about the history of the first century BCE to say if there ever was a time of no king, prince or judge in the Hasmonaean dynasty. However, after the murder of James the Just in approximately 62 A.D. the Jewish civil war soon started and with the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. I think that would fit a time of: no king, prince or judge for the people of Israel. But what do I know? That is why I ask those much smarter than me like DCHindley to tell me where Robert Eisenman got it wrong.

Respectfully,
John the Ignorant