Qumran

Calendrical disputes, which recurred frequently in ancient and medieval Jewish communities, created alternative dates for festivals such as Yom Kippur and Passover. Here, we look at four disputes and the different ways that communities navigated them. 

For most Second Temple scribes, the Torah’s sanctity did not translate into a requirement to avoid the imprecisions common in all books. The Paleo-Hebrew and Proto-MT scribes were an exception, although the latter were committed to precise copying of all biblical scrolls. Only with the emergence of scrolls containing all five books (2^nd cent. C.E.) did Torah scrolls take on their special level of sanctification.

In the famous story of the Oven of Akhnai, Rabbi Eliezer makes recourse to divine revelation to defend his legal ruling. Rabbi Joshua responds that “the Torah is not in heaven” and God has no say. Elsewhere in the Talmud, however, heavenly voices are considered authoritative, a view which aligns with that of the Qumran sect, which believed God continues to reveal secret details of Torah laws.

In the Second Temple Period the idea of “Torah” was not limited to the Five Books of Moses.

“The secret things belong unto YHWH our God; but the things that are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever”—the verse has eleven dotted letters indicating erasure marks, but why? The answer lies in a controversial interpretation found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Three traditions of pronouncing the Hebrew Bible existed in the first millennium C.E.: Babylonian, Palestinian, and Tiberian, each with its own written vocalization system. From the later Middle Ages on, however, biblical manuscripts have been written almost exclusively with the vowels and cantillation marks of the Tiberian system while paradoxically, the Tiberian pronunciation itself fell into oblivion.

Beyond the two versions of the Decalogue in Exodus and Deuteronomy, and the usual differences between MT, SP, and LXX, in Second Temple times, liturgical texts in Qumran (4QDeutⁿ) and Egypt (Nash Papyrus), Greek references in the New Testament and Philo, and even tefillin parchments, reflect slightly different recensions of the text.

Throughout the Bible, we find that the land of Israel is blessed with grain, wine, and oil (דגן, תירוש, ויצהר). In the Torah, however, the festival of Bikkurim, “First Produce,” only celebrates the wheat harvest. In the Temple Scroll, the Essenes rewrote the biblical festival calendar to include two further bikkurim festivals to celebrate wine and oil.

Popular legend tells us that Rabbenu Gershom (d. ca 1028) was the first to prohibit polygyny. The Damascus Covenant’s understanding of the law in Leviticus 18:18, however, suggests that polygyny may have been prohibited more than a thousand years earlier by the Priestly authors.

The final phrase of Haazinu (Deut 32:1-43) in the MT, וכפר אדמתו עמו, “and he will atone for his land, his people,” is difficult to parse. The textual variants from Qumran, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Septuagint offer a clearer, if more dismal, understanding of the phrase.

And the Re-imagining of the Harvest Festival in the Wake of the Babylonian Exile

Leviticus requires covering the blood of undomesticated animals; Deuteronomy requires pouring out the blood of slaughtered domesticated animals onto the ground. How do these laws jibe with each other? The Essenes have one answer, the rabbis another, the academics a third.

A careful examination of the three oldest copies of the Decalogue—4QDeutⁿ, 4QPaleoExodus^m, and the Nash Papyrus—surprisingly shows that none of them reflects the Masoretic Text.