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93 CHAPTER SIX THE LAW AND SPIRIT OF PURITY AT QUMRAN Joseph M. Baumgarten Half a century marks a prominent milepost in the saga of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but for some of us, contemporaries of the generation of Mohammed ed Dhib, it is also the natural time to evaluate what we have accomplished and seriously consider the benefits of retirement. In fact according to CD 10 our continued participation in deliberations on the nature of the Qumran community may be downright illegal: bcyty l)w hd(h t) +wp#l hl(mw hn# My## Nbm dw(. Those who are sixty years old or older shall no longer stand to judge the congregation. The reason given is rather blunt and lacking in polite deference to the dignities of age: “For through the burning wrath of God against those who dwell on earth he has decreed that their intelligence should depart before they complete their days” (this would be an appropriate time to sit down). If I nevertheless stand before you it is because the organizer of this symposium could not find anyone foolhardy enough to hold forth on the fascinating subject of ancient purity laws in an after-dinner setting at eight o’clock in the evening. In a vain effort to add some excitement to the topic, he suggested phrasing the title “The Threat of Purity.” I don’t know precisely what “threat” he had in mind, but I would have none of it. The word “threat” reminded me of a piece that I wrote many years ago in response to a prominent rabbinic historian who depicted the Scrolls as a threat to halakah. He was concerned about the deviations in the Scrolls from normative rabbinic law and found solace in the stalwart view of Solomon Zeitlin that the Scrolls were not ancient at all, but were the products of obscure Jewish dissidents of the medieval period. I recall asking him rhetorically whether he was equally concerned about the similar halakic deviations found in the Book of Jubilees, which even Zeitlin deemed to be ancient, though its Qumran Hebrew fragments were at that time as yet unpublished. The question remained unanswered, but the episode serves for me as a reminder that involvement in the study of Qumran law by erstwhile Yeshiva students was in those days viewed as somewhat hazardous. The views about Qumran legalism among some historians of religion have up to the present remained equivocal. For a long time the only 94 THE LAW AND SPIRIT OF PURITY AT QUMRAN significant corpus of sectarian religious law was that embedded in the Damascus Document and there are still scholars with lingering doubts as to whether it is original. Hopefully the recently published Cave 4 manuscripts will dispel these doubts and also put an end to the strange phenomenon of truncated editions of this foundational communal text from which the central core of laws is missing. Even those scholars who were aware of the extent and centrality of Qumran legal writings appear to have had difficulty with understanding how this fact could be reconciled with the spiritualistic fervor and eschatological tension characteristic of the community. The suggestion was made that the nomistic concerns with family life, the Sabbath, and purity may be attributed to the influx of newcomers with Pharisaic tendencies during the sect’s exile in Damascus. This reflects the rather dubious notion that the Essenes were not themselves concerned with the rigors of the Law. Another approach commences from the premise that intense eschatological expectation must inevitably lead toward the relaxation of law. This, it is claimed, is phenomenologically illustrated not only by the teachings of Paul but by certain dicta concerning halakic innovations in the “future to come” found in late rabbinic sources. W. D. Davies in his Torah in the Messianic Age has drawn attention to these dicta and Gershom Scholem has explored their possible influence on radical Sabbatian messianism in the seventeenth century. Aside from the huge chronological gap which separates these dicta from the Second Temple period, their problematic and speculative nature may be illustrated by one found in Midrash Tehillim on Ps 146:7: The Lord loosens the bonds Myrws) rytm. What does the verse mean by the words loosen the bonds? Some say that every animal whose flesh it is forbidden to eat in this world, the Holy One, blessed be he, will declare in the time-to-come that the eating of its flesh is permitted.…Others say though nothing...

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