Sidnie W. Crawford - Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times

Peter W. Flint, Martin G. Abegg Jr., and Florentino Garcia Martinez, General Editors

The Dead Sea Scrolls have been the object of intense interest in recent years, not least because of the release of previously unpublished texts from Qumran Cave 4 since the fall of 1991. With the wealth of new documents that have come to light, the field of Qumran studies has undergone a renaissance. Scholars have begun to question the established conclusions of the last generation; some widely held beliefs have withstood scrutiny, but others have required revision or even dismissal. New proposals and competing hypotheses, many of them of an uncritical and sensational nature, vie for attention. Idiosyncratic and misleading views of the Scrolls still abound, especially in the popular press, while the results of solid scholarship have yet to make their full impact. At the same time, the scholarly task of establishing reliable critical editions of the texts is nearing completion. The opportunity is ripe, therefore, for directing renewed attention to the task of analysis and interpretation.

STUDIES IN THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS AND RELATED LITERATURE is a series designed to address this need. In particular, the series aims to make the latest and best Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship accessible to scholars, students, and the thinking public. The volumes that are projected -both monographs and collected essays - will seek to clarify how the Scrolls revise and help shape our understanding of the formation of the Bible and the historical development of Judaism and Christianity. Various offerings in the series will explore the reciprocally illuminating relationships of several disciplines related to the Scrolls, including the canon and text of the Hebrew Bible, the richly varied forms of Second Temple Judaism, and the New Testament. While the Dead Sea Scrolls constitute the main focus, several of these studies will also include perspectives on the Old and New Testaments and other ancient writings - hence the title of the series. It is hoped that these volumes will contribute to a deeper appreciation of the world of early Judaism and Christianity and of their continuing legacy today.

PETER W. FLINT

MARTIN G. ABEGG JR.

FLORENTINO GARCIA MARTINEZ

Sidnie White Crawford

For Frank Moore Cross

,PIS -m-lin

Righteous Teacher

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The seeds of this project were planted in 1986, when Frank Moore Cross, my "doctor father," invited me to edit for my dissertation seven of the Cave 4 Deuteronomy manuscripts assigned to his lot. It was then that I first encountered 4QDeut", a manuscript containing excerpts of a harmonized text of Deuteronomy. What was, I wondered, this strange little manuscript? Then in 1989 John Strugnell invited me to take over his work on the manuscripts at the time called Pentateuchal Paraphrases, and Emanuel Tov graciously accepted me as his junior collaborator on the project. This resulted in our publication of the Reworked Pentateuch manuscripts in 1994. Again I wondered, what were these manuscripts, and what did the people who copied and read them think of them? Finally, Philip Davies of Sheffield Academic Press invited me to contribute a volume on the Temple Scroll to the series Companion to the Qumran Scrolls, which was published in 2000. I raised more questions for myself - how did these different texts fit together, if at all? Thus when Peter Flint asked me to contribute a volume on the "Rewritten Bible" texts from Qumran to this series, I enthusiastically accepted. He has been a most kind editor, waiting patiently to receive a long-delayed manuscript.

In addition to those mentors and colleagues mentioned above, I have many people and institutions to thank. My research assistants at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Deanne Hyde Manion, Jessica Buser, Nelson Schneider, and T. Matthew Meyer, rendered invaluable clerical help. Mr. Kenneth Rolling prepared the indices. I gave presentations on various parts of the book at Harvard Divinity School, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Society of Biblical Literature, the Colloquium for Biblical Research, Augustana College, the Center of Theological Inquiry, and Princeton Theo logical Seminary. To all those who participated and gave helpful feedback, I owe my thanks. Several colleagues read and commented on drafts of chapters, which immensely improved the final product: Martin Abegg, Jr., Moshe Bernstein, Dan D. Crawford, Frank Moore Cross, Chip Dobbs-Allsop, Peter Flint, and Benjamin G. Wright III. My husband Dan lived with the project for over five years, offering encouragement, support, and a sharp editorial eye. This volume was completed while I was a member at the Center of Theological Inquiry during the winter and spring of 2005. I would like to thank Wallace Alston, Robert Jenson, Kathi Morley, and the rest of the staff, and the other members of the Center for creating and fostering an ideal environment for scholarship.

Finally, this book is dedicated with gratitude and love to Frank Moore Cross, who for over two decades has been for me the real Righteous Teacher.

SIDNIE WHITE CRAWFORD

Lincoln, Nebraska

in ways too numerous to list here. Two subjects about which the Dead Sea Scrolls give us important new data are the history of the transmission of the text of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) and the ways in which that text was interpreted.

This book is concerned with these two related phenomena, the process of the transmission or handing on of what became known to later Judaism and Christianity as the "Bible" or the "biblical" text by the scribes of the Second Temple period and the methods used to interpret it for contemporary Jews. Although consensus in the field of Hebrew Bible study is hard to come by, most scholars would agree that by the second half of the Second felt the need to interpret or exegete their sacred texts to ensure their continued relevance in the changing contemporary situation. After the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s and 50s, much new evidence came to light on how the exegesis of those sacred texts was carried out by Second Temple Jews.

It was Geza Vermes in 1961 who first identified a group of late Second Temple works as examples of a particular form of interpretation, a group that he identified as a genre dubbed "Rewritten Bible" texts. Vermes defined this genre as characterized "by a close attachment, in narrative and themes, to some book contained in the present Jewish canon of Scripture, and some type of reworking, whether through rearrangement, conflation, or supplementa Vermes's original list of works belonging to this genre included Josephus's Antiquities, Jubilees, the Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum of Pseudo-Philo, and the Genesis Apocryphon. These constitute a wide variety of works, in different languages and from different time periods, and the question arises of whether in fact they constitute a genre. Nevertheless, Vermes's definition remains the starting point for any discussion of this phenomenon, and I will begin by examining his terminology, focusing on the terms "Rewritten" and "Bible."