Lawrence H. Schiffman

The Modern Scholar is an interesting series of audio books. I previously listened to a good book on Alexander the Great by Robin Lane Fox. Along with the audiobook they have an extensive reference manual.
I knew very little about the Dead Sea Scrolls before I listened to this book. It was a very good introduction to the topic which covered a little bit of everything about the scrolls. They aren't really scrolls anymore. They used to be but they laid up in jars for 2,000 years and now they are fragments of paper with writing on them that are like a jigsaw puzzle to try to read. The jars were just storage jars from that time and were not adapted to storage of documents. As I was listening I was thinking of them sitting there for 2,000 years waiting to be found. A documentary snapshot of a very different way of life. The lecturer provides a lot of detail about what is in the scrolls and gives the listener an idea of what it was like to live in Qumran.
The lecturer does a good job of educating the reader about what the Dead Sea Scrolls are and what they are not. What they are is what left of the library of a Jewish sect that flourished during the Second Temple period which ended with the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. They have large portions of the Hebrew Bible and a big section on the rules of the day to day life of the sect. They were most likely a group of Essenes who lived a communal life strictly regulated by their religion. They are not documents that have anything to do with the beginning of Christianity. They discuss the Jewish messianic tradition but there is no mention of Jesus Christ or any early Christian doctrines.
Pieces of the scrolls surfaced as far back as 1897. A Bedouin family found them again in 1947 and began selling fragments. In the 1967 war Israel took possession of the scrolls that had been found and the area where the Qumran library was located. They have now all been published with translations and are available to anyone with a library card.
Finding the scrolls was probably the greatest archaeological find of the 20th century. I recommend the book highly for the fascinating knowledge it contains and look forward to listening to it again.… (más)

RECLAIMING THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
by Lawrence H. Schiffman

While almost certainly the fault of the marketing arm of the publisher rather than of the author, it is a bit disappointing that the dust jacket promises a Forward by Chaim Potok (in brighter lettering than the author’s name) that turns out to be a mere one and a quarter pages, and merely baldly restates the thesis of the book that the Dead Sea Scrolls were not the library of a community foreshadowing Christianity, but the library of a community firmly within the Jewish tradition.

To get to the substance of the book itself, there is some disappointment there, also. It appears to be a very good draft of a not-quite-edited book. There are often shifts between the documents found at Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls) and those found elsewhere at other times. Although the documents are named when being discussed, the general reader is often left to ponder the sources, the origins, and the relative dates of the documents.

At the beginning, there are several tables that illustrate in detail points that could have been made in summary. For example, there is a table setting forth the age of various Dead Sea Scrolls as calibrated by Carbon-14 dating. The table even includes the number of samples of particular scrolls tested, although the meaning of those numbers is not apparent to a non-expert reader, and not explained by the author—yet there is an entire column of data. (p. 32). On the next page is a graphic showing that the Carbon-14 dating of the scrolls was not that far off from the dating performed by paleographic scholars or explicit dates set forth in the scroll itself. Whether the table distorts the statistics would not be apparent to any non-expert, so the point would just have been better made by authorial assertion. On the very next page is a pie chart illustrating the percentage distribution of the Dead Sea Scrolls among Biblical materials, sectarian material peculiar to the Qumran community, non-sectarian material, and unidentified material. Why the percentages are important is not disclosed. Moreover, it is not even clear whether the percentages refer to the number of separate documents or to the bulk of the documents—in other words, do the percentages refer to the number of separate works or to the number (and size) of pages? A table that would be helpful is a list of every book discussed, where it was found, the language in which it was written, and the approximate date of its composition. For example, in Chapter 19 the author discusses “The Assumption of Moses” in a single brief paragraph. This text is not mentioned anywhere else in the entire book. A non-specialist is in the dark as to what this esoteric text may be, or any other information that would shed light on its significance. Indeed, the author adds to the puzzle when he states that the text is “written in either Hebrew or Aramaic.” Can it be that the author does not know in which language it is written? Is there more than one text of it, written in different languages? We do not know. The author tells us, unhelpfully, that the text was written “most probably around the turn of the era.” (p. 321). Which era?

The want of an editor’s pen is noted in unnecessary repetitions. On pages 276 the Qumran community’s limits of travel on the Sabbath are set forth: “..on the Sabbath one was permitted to walk only one thousand cubits (about 1,500 feet or 450 meters) beyond the city limits." But the second text notes an exception: in order to pasture an animal, one could go another thousand cubits…” A few pages later (pages 282-83), the same information is given: “The sect had two Sabbath limits: One permitted a person to walk only one thousand cubits beyond the city; if one were pasturing an animal, one could go an additional thousand.”

Similarly, one is frustrated when the author quotes a passage that is unambiguous in its meaning, and then unnecessarily paraphrases the passage:

“’He (the king) shall choose for himself from them (those he has mustered) one thousand from each tribe to be with him, twelve thousand warriors, who will not leave him alone, lest he be captured by the nations. And all those selected whom he shall choose shall be trustworthy men, who fear God, who spurn unjust gain, and mighty men of war. They shall be with him always, day and night, so that they will guard him from any sinful thing, and from a foreign nation, lest he be captured by them. (TEMPLE SCROLL 57:5-11)’

The king is also required to select twelve thousand men, one thousand from each tribe, to serve as a palace guard. They must never leave him, lest he be captured by foreign enemies. The members of the guard are to be honest, God-fearing men, of the highest military prowess.”

Pp. 269-70. Another example:

“’For Jerusalem is the camp of holiness, and it is the place which He (God) chose from all the tribes of Israel, for Jerusalem is the chief of the camps of Israel. (HALAKHIC LETTER B58-62)’

Only Jerusalem has this exalted status since God chose it. Furthermore, for legal purposes the city is the equivalent of the wilderness camp.”

P. 389.

For all of the author’s insistence on the complexity of the Jewish world with the many sects and communities during the time of the Qumran community, he dismisses the century after that with the simplistic notion that the rise of Christianity caused a Jewish consensus by the year 132 C.E. He concludes that the Jews unified against the Christians as a competing group for the “mantle of the true Israel.” P. 404. This is despite the fact that many early Christians continued to worship in Synagogues for a couple of centuries. See, e.g., When Christians Were Jews, by Wayne Daniel Berard. Why the splintered groups would coalesce in the face of the common enemy of Christianity when they did not unite against the much more powerful Romans is not addressed.

Overall, reading the book is like hearing one conclusory position in a scholarly debate, without hearing the responses from the other scholars, or without having the specialized knowledge required to determine whose opinion would be more plausible. Even so, I learned a lot about the different Jewish doctrines of the first centuries B.C.E. and C.E., as well as about the archeological remains at Qumran.… (más)