Devora Dimant and Uriel Rappaport, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Forty Years of
Research Brill, Magnes Press and Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, Leiden and Jerusalem,
1992, vii and 370 pages.
This book is the proceedings of a symposium
sponsored by Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi at Haifa University on 20-24 March, 1988. The
occasion was the fortieth year of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is
of the nature of such proceedings to be diverse in content, level and quality.
On the whole, however, the present volume is a significant work, marking a
stage in research into the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Haifa Conference came at a
time when a number of such meetings were held, at Madrid, at Groningen and
elsewhere, stimulated by the revival of Scrolls research that took place in the
1980's. In viewing the volume in this context, it is interesting to note that,
of the twenty-five contribution, nine were written by Israeli scholars. Does
this reflect the way this field of learning has developed?
The volume contains a range of studies on various
aspects of the Scrolls, reflecting a significant aspects of the current
research on these manuscripts. The book is divided into six parts. These are
the following: (1) Texts and Text Studies; (2) The History of the Qumran
Community; (3) Halakha at Qumran; (4) Qumran and the Hebrew Bible; (5) Qumran
and the New Testament; and (6) The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls. A List of
Abbreviations, a Selected Index of Sources, and an Index of Names and Subjects
conclude the book.
We shall mention some of the studies, it being
impossible to deal with all of them in a brief review. As is natural at the
present stage of research, two aspects of Scrolls study are particularly
strongly represented, the study of texts and the history of the sect. The
present volume has reassessments of some texts (e.g., of Divrei ha-me'orot (E. Chazon, with significant methodological
observations), of the exorcisms from the Apotropaic Psalms Scroll from 11Q (E.
Puech) and of the exorcism hymns, 4Q450-510 (B.Nitzan). The papers by Nitzan
and Puech serve to highlight magicial and exorcistic material that is becoming
increasingly the object of attention. Carol Newsome and Eileen Schuller offer
pre-publications of material which is their resposibility to prepare for the Discoveries in the Judean Desert series:
4Q374: A Discourse on the Exodus Tradition (Newsome) and 4Q380 and 381
Uncanonical Psalms (Schuller). These form additions to the corpus of Dead Sea
Scrolls now at the disposal of scholars.
In the historical section, the reviewer found
particularly fascinating material in Madelaine Petit's paper on "Les
Esséniens de Philon d'Alexandrie et les Esséniens" which is
full of interesting information about the possible sources of Philo and
Josephus and the relationship between their information and various sectarian
groups mentioned in Rabbinic literature. H. Stegemann emphatically repeats
arguments for the antiquity of the Temple Scroll based on the character of the
institutions described by it. The Temple Scroll is also to the fore in three
further studies in the book, those of Schiffmann in its laws pertaining to
women, and of Brooke and Swanson on different aspects of its text-critical
significance.
The section on Qumran and the New Testament is
notably smaller than most, being composed only of two papers. The impact of the
newly published material on New Testament studies is surely more significant
than this. On the other hand, the substantial sections on halacha and on
biblical textual tradition are accurate reflections of the present stage of research.
This is a useful and interesting work and reflects
the development and growing maturity of the field of research into the Dead Sea
Scrolls.
Michael E. Stone
Hebrew University of Jerusalem