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The Damascus Document’s Pesher of the Well (CD 6:2–11) has generally been treated as an isolated unit, either as an example of Qumran exegesis or as evidence for the history of the sect. The present study offers a fresh reading of this section that gives special attention to its rhetorical function within the document and its relationship to the document’s legal material in particular. It is argued that the pesher was intended to authorize the body of legal rulings found within the document by interpreting the two lines of Numbers 21:18 as an outline of two stages of the sect’s history. The pesher is built around two anchor-words in the lemma: שרים (“officials”), a reference to the sect’s founders who established an authoritative body of torah rulings, and נדיבי העם, a reference to the sect’s later “volunteer initiates” who were to remain faithful to these rules throughout the Epoch of Wickedness.

Abstract This contribution aims to provide an outline of the political dynamics, cultural developments, and, ultimately, historical semantics of the city of Damascus for the circle(s) of its eponymous Document.

Two of the unidentified Cave 4 fragments preserving text of the Damascus Document which were mistakenly associated with 4Q269 should instead be assigned to 6Q15, since they join to 6Q15 fragment 1. This is the first case of a join between fragments claimed to have come from different caves. Also pam 41.734 does not clearly distinguish between all Cave 4 and Cave 6 fragments.

Abstract Despite the fact that scholars often rely on the medieval Cairo Damascus Document manuscripts (CD) when reconstructing the Qumran Damascus Document scrolls (4QD), there has yet to be an attempt to reconstruct the medieval codex on the basis of the Qumran scrolls. The purpose of this contribution, then, is to offer a reconstruction of CD A that is both informed by the Qumran scrolls as well as being informative for the reconstruction of 4QD. This article will try to answer three questions: 1) the number of quires that comprised CD A; 2) the width of the first column of 4QDa; and 3) the length of the missing part of the CD A codex.

Unlike any other group or philosophy in ancient Judaism, the yaḥad sect obliged all members of the sect to leave their places of residence all over the country and gather in the sect’s central site to participate in a special annual ceremony of renewal of the covenant between God and each of the members. The increase of the communities that composed the sect and their spread over the entire country during the first century BCE required the development of the appropriate infrastructure for hosting this annual gathering at Qumran. Consequently, the hosting of the gathering became the main function of the site, and the southern esplanade with the buildings surrounding it became the epicenter of the site.

The Temple Scroll (11QTa 53:11–54:5) and Damascus Document (CD 16:6–12) each appropriate legislation concerning vows and oaths from Deut 23:22–24 and Num 30:3–17. Lawrence H. Schiffman, who has offered the only at-length comparison of these appropriations, characterizes these halakhot as incongruent and links this conclusion with his position that the Temple Scroll is Sadducean and the Damascus Document comes from a later Sadducean splinter group. However, my analysis leads to a different conclusion. I demonstrate that the authors of the Temple Scroll and Damascus Document evidence distinct aims in their appropriations of shared base texts, but not necessarily incongruence nor intentional divergence.

Soon after the discovery of 1QS, comparisons with private associations from the Hellenistic and Roman world were suggested. There are clearly some parallels in internal organization. However, scholars using this comparison to explain features of the yaḥad have rarely taken the environment that made associations in the Hellenistic world possible into account. By way of a comparison of attitudes towards temples, this article seeks to reintroduce the social context of private associations into the debate. While Hellenistic associations can be said to have developed temple ideologies not dissimilar to certain features of the yaḥad, the conditions, aims and implications of those respective ideologies were fundamentally different. This has obvious implications for understanding the social identity of members, and should caution against decontextualized comparisons.

Abstract While the Damascus Document, like other writings found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, has been mined for historical information, with which to reconstruct the history of the Yaḥad, including the process and conditions of its formation and development over time, the present study is interested in discerning the text's own understanding of the place in history occupied by its community of auditors and learners. Particular attention will be given to the text's recurring reference to its beginnings (\"first ones\") and ends (\"last ones\") and to its sense of living in a truncated time-between. Through the close reading of two hortatory sections of the text, the question of how the Yaḥad's collective social memory informs its self-understanding and practices as it faces both backward and forward in time.

Abstract This study reveals a mosaic of artful rearrangement, rewriting, and creative interpretation of prophetic texts within the Admonitions of the Damascus Document. Many explicit quotations from scriptures and implicit allusions are interwoven and interpreted in the Admonitions through various methods, including pesher interpretation. The textual backdrop of the Admonitions helps us to determine the borders of the different discourses and to define the structure of the composition, which is divided into ten discourses built in a symmetrical chiastic structure. Each discourse comprises layers of quotations and allusions arranged around a central explicit pesher. Therefore, the explicit pesher in each discourse should not be viewed as an isolated pesher, as some have claimed, but rather as part of a larger thematic pesher. Each discourse/thematic pesher presents a different aspect of the work's central theme: a polemic introduction to the rules of interpreting the Torah.

This article proposes that the emotional re-experiencing of the hortatory narratives found in the Admonition section of the Damascus Document (cols. 1-8; 19-20) may have been instrumental in preparing the community for an optimal reception of the laws that follow. The sectarian's imaginative and egocentric re-enactment of the negatively valenced emotions in these vignettes could have made foundational events of covenant re-making accessible with the vividness of first-hand experiences. The generation of self-diminishment that arises from re-experiencing these negative emotions could have staged an experience of God's immediacy, thereby replicating the conditions of divine encounter associated with the covenantal reception of laws.