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Introduction: In the Beginning
- University of California Press
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1 Introduction In the Beginning In a 1990 article, “The History of Halakhah and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Jacob Sussman surveyed the early attempts made by the pioneers of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement to study the history of halakhah, the body of Jewish law that supplements scriptural law, and to chart its development.1 The need for such research is self-evident: to bridge the gap between the Bible and the established halakhah of the Rabbis as found in rabbinic literature . Two leading scholars were in the forefront of this project: Abraham Geiger, who, as a biblical scholar, conducted his research forward in time, from the Bible to the Mishnah, and Zacharias Frankel, who proceeded in the opposite direction—from rabbinic literature backward to the Bible.2 But this research trend quickly proved disappointing and was abandoned, hampered primarily by the lack of reliable, authentic sources. Though brilliant, Geiger’s andFrankel’ssuggestionswere basicallyhypotheses,notgrounded in solid evidence. In their day, only indirect source evidence was available for early halakhah. This included the Apocrypha, Jose- Introduction / 2 phus, Philo, the New Testament, and the ancient translations of the Bible. It was mainly for this reason that the next generation of scholars shifted its interest to a less sensitive topic. Instead of treating the history of halakhah, they now looked at the history of halakhic literature. Their discussions focused not on discovering the ancient layers of the halakhah, but on uncovering the historical layers of halakhic literature, such as the Mishnah, instead.3 For nearly a century, no new serious attempts were made to return to the original project. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the situation changed dramatically. For the first time, the scrolls that gradually came to light during the 1950s provided primary material from the period of the Second Temple.4 Note, however , that Dead Sea Scrolls research has its own history. In its early days, due mainly to the nature of the scrolls first published—the Pesharim and the Rule of the Community—the research emphasis was on the sect’s worldview: its theology and ideology. Recognition of the centrality of the law to the life and consciousness of the Qumran sectarians came with the publication of the Temple Scroll in 1977. Since that time, a goodly number of halakhic compositions have been published, including the Cave 4 manuscripts of the Damascus Document, the Halakhic Letter Miqsat Ma’ase ha-Torah (MMT), and others. Major scholarly effort has been directed to the study of Qumran law: its biblical origins, sectarian exegetical methods , and a comparative analysis with later rabbinic halakhah. Despite the many articles and books treating halakhah at Qumran (suffice it to mention the works of Joseph Baumgarten and Lawrence Schiffman), nevertheless, we still lack a comprehensive reassessment of these findings with respect to the original project, that is, the history and development of halakhah. [34.230.84.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:39 GMT) Introduction / 3 It is exactly this challenge that I hope to meet in the present work. In the following chapters, I wish to present readers with the results of my research in the last five years concerning various aspects of the relationship between the Dead Sea Scrolls and rabbinic halakhic literature. There is, however, one major problem confronting any attempt to compare these two bodies of literature—the Dead Sea Scrolls on the one hand, and rabbinic literature on the other—and this is the two-hundred-year gap between them. Whereas the Qumran literature was composed mainly during the second and first centuries b.c.e., the rabbinic literature, although it does include some first-century material, did not reach its current form until its final editing no earlier than the third to fourth centuries c.e. SOME THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS Two models can be used to describe the relationship between Qumranic and rabbinic literature. The first model can be termed “developmental.” According to this model, Qumran halakhah represents “‘old’” halakhic traditions, whereas rabbinic halakhah is the result of a new, post–70 c.e. (post-destruction) development. This was Abraham Geiger’s assumption in his work, reached almost a century before the discovery of the scrolls. Using the limited material at his disposal, Geiger theorized the development of halakhah from the early Sadducean legal system to the new, later, rabbinic halakhah. In his works published during the second half of the twentieth century, Yitznak Gilat basically followed Geiger’s developmental model. Gilat convincingly demonstrated how...