Qumran between the Old and New Testaments. JSOTS 290 Copenhagen International Seminar 6

Written by Frederick H. Cryer & Thomas L. Thompson (eds) Reviewed By Wolter Rose

The ‘Copenhagen School’ has become a familiar name in OT Studies through the work of scholars like Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson. This volume shows that the University’s Institute for Biblical Studies is also engaged in study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, containing a collection of papers by Danish and international Qumran scholars presented at a Scandinavian conference in 1995.

The papers can be grouped into three categories: the text, composition and use at Qumran of the OT; the community’s history; and its religious views. The volume’s primary audience is Qumran specialists, but some papers are accessible to those who have little previous knowledge of the Qumran community and texts.

This is particularly the case with some of the historical articles. Garcia Martinez tests the four main hypotheses concerning the community’s origins and history against the evidence of the recently released material: ‘the traditional Essene hypothesis’ (Vermes and others), the ‘Groningen hypothesis’ (Garcia Martinez and Van der Woude), the ‘revised and augmented Essene hypothesis’ (Stegemann), and the ‘Sadducean hypothesis’ (Schiffman). He stills finds the most satisfying to be the ‘Groningen hypothesis’. This holds that the group around the Teacher of Righteousness were not Essenes but a group which split from them following a dispute about the calendar and the festive cycle. By contrast, Wacholder argues from the new Cave 4 material for a longer time of maturation than the two centuries which the usual theories (including the ‘Groningen hypothesis’) allow: the sectarian historiography itself traced its origin to the division of the monarchy after Solomon. Bilde re-examines the accounts of Philo and Josephus on the Essenes in the light of the new discussion of the Qumran community’s identity and early history. Ulfgard focuses on the Teacher of Righteousness and his role in the formation of the Qumran community against the background of post-exilic Judaism in the second century BC. Petersen discusses the archaeology of the Qumran site, evaluates the work of de Vaux, and argues (against Golb) that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls originated at the Qumran site.

Other papers accessible to a wider audience include Tov’s survey of the significance of the scrolls for the OT text, covering all the sites in the Judean Desert and including indirect evident from the non-biblical Qumran texts. There are also two papers which discuss what can be learned from the Qumran texts about the composition of OT books. On the basis of 4QTestimonia Thompson discusses how the texts can be used to test theories of OT composition, while Høgenhaven looks at the significance of the Isaiah Scroll 1QIsa for our knowledge of the composition and purpose of the book of Isaiah.

This volume shows that the lifting of the embargo on the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1991 has given fresh impetus to the study of the Qumran community and the texts found nearby. Despite the title, only one or two papers touch on the relationship between the scrolls and the NT. As the different views indicate, there is still much debate on some of the basic questions of the origins and the history of the Qumran community.


Wolter Rose

Kampen, The Netherlands