Metabiblical

Although the people of Qumran represented an extreme sect, their writings still serve as a unique witness for the methods and content of biblical interpretation in early Judaism. Before the discovery of this community and its texts, one was familiar only with the interpretations of the Torah of the rabbis. — Henning Graf Reventlow, The History of Biblical Interpretation, Volume 1, p. 28.

Reventlow gives a brief overview of the community behind the Qumran Scrolls. He considers them to have been Essenes. Whoever they were, their surviving literature shows a deep engagement with biblical texts.

Like later Jewish interpreters, they worked to make the Torah relevant to their own lives in part by finding ways to extend it and fill in its gaps. Interestingly, Reventlow selects some examples that, on closer inspection, reveal that Reventlow himself is extending and filling in some gaps in the Qumran fragments themselves.

Examples of halakah as actual Torah are found in the Damascus Document. … In an argument by analogy to the interdiction mentioned in Lev 18:13 that forbids taking as a wife a sister of the mother, the same is also true for disallowing a man’s marrying the daughter of his brother or sister. This is something that is not forbidden in the rabbinic halakah: “While the laws prohibiting incest are written for men, they are also (valid) for women” (CD 5:7-11). In opposing polygamy, allowed in Judaism, Gen 1:28 is cited: “man and woman he has created them,” thus appropriately as a pair (CD 4:21). — p. 30.

If you go search through all the manuscripts found at Qumran, you will search in vain for either of the examples Reventlow gives. In fact, the “CD” to which he alludes is a manuscript produced about a millennium later, and found in the Cairo Geniza several decades before anyone had heard of the scrolls from Qumran.

The work found in CD is often called the Damascus Document, and there are indeed enough small fragments of it found among the Dead Sea Scrolls to make it seem very likely that the community possessed something very much like a whole copy of CD. For more on the relationships between these manuscripts, see Steven D. Fraade (2021), The Damascus Document.

One of the things that makes a broad overview like Reventlow’s so interesting to read is the way it briefly touches so many topics, each of which is fascinating in its own right. For example, it is thanks to Reventlow that I began looking into the Damascus Document, and learned that through careful triangulation it was possible for scholars to take a medieval manuscript from the Middle Ages and deduce that it spoke with the voice of Qumran.

Another fascinating issue that Reventlow briefly touches on is pesher, a form of biblical commentary characterized by the use of the term pesher, “interpretation”. In the case of the Habakkuk Pesher, the way it works is that a sentence or so of Habakkuk will be quoted, followed by a remark along the lines of “The pesher of it is …”

The Habakkuk pesher takes up the hermeneut’s task by taking Habakkuk, the work of a sixth or seventh century BCE, and interpreting it in such a way as to make it relevant to the community at Qumran half a millennium later. Thus, comments about the Chaldeans, the primary threat to Judah in the years leading up to 587 BCE, are re-applied to the Romans, the empire ruling over Judea in the time the pesher was written. Where Habakkuk says, “the righteous shall live by his faith”, the pesher applies this specifically to the Qumran community. “This interpretation is concerned with all those who practice the law in the house of Judah, whom God will redeem from the house of judgment due to their hardship and their loyalty to the teacher of righteousness” (p. 31).

This sort of interpretation has its costs.

When we sit down with a text, we are, in a way, attempting to have a meeting of minds with the author of that text. We attempt to understand what it is that the author was trying to say when writing a given text, and that understanding will need to make sense in terms of the authors situation in life and in history. However, when a readership demands that the a long-dead author speak directly to us, right now, the mind of the author must be set aside somehow.

Consider the beginning of Habakkuk 2 as it appears in the Pesher. Here I am slightly adapting the wording of the Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition — leaving the wording as is but altering the formatting for clarity. Below I do not distinguish translated from reconstructed text; the interested reader is directed to the original work itself for more.

(Habakkuk 2:1-2) I will stand firm in my sentry-post, I will position myself in my fortress, and I will look out to see what he says to me, and what he answers to my reproof. YHWH answered me and said: Write the vision; inscribe it on tablets that that may run the one who reads it.

And God told Habakkuk to write what was going to happen to the last generation, but he did not let him know the consummation of the era. And as for what he says, So that may run the one who reads it. Its interpretation concerns the Teacher of Righteousness, to whom God has made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants, the prophets.

For the vision has an appointed time, it will have an end and not fail.

Its interpretation: the final age will be extended and go beyond all that the prophets say, because the mysteries of God are wonderful.

In other words, the typical assumption about authorship is reversed. Sure, Habakkuk may have written Habakkuk, but he did not understand what he was writing. You know who really understands Habakkuk? Our righteous teacher, five hundred years later. And our righteous teacher also understands that Habakkuk wasn’t talking about anything Habakkuk would find interesting, but was in fact concerned with the things our community finds interesting today.

There is a tension in all interpretation of this sort. On the one hand, Habakkuk is needed for the authority he lends to the sects’ teaching. On the other hand, Habakkuk is effectively pushed aside. In fact, the real expert on Habakkuk’s writing turns out to be not Habakkuk himself but instead the community’s favorite teacher, who has been gifted by God with interpretive abilities.

This raises an uncomfortable question. If Habakkuk didn’t know what was going on, and the new Teacher of Righteousness does know what’s going on, why is it that we need to turn to Habakkuk at all? Why can’t the Teacher of Righteousness, from his superior vantage point, simply speak truth in his own name?

A cynic might say that the biblical interpretation at Qumran was simply a ploy, a trick used by some cult leader out in the wilderness to co-opt previously existing religious beliefs, like a trust in the inspiration of Habakkuk.

Reventlow assures us that these sorts of re-interpretation are not simply a fraud in the next installment.