A Star from Jacob, a Sceptre from Israel: Balaam’s Oracle, as Rewritten Scripture in the Dead Sea Scrolls by Libor Marek (review)

The present study deals with the Balaam traditions as attested and rewritten in the texts of Qumran. The work focuses on the fourth oracle of Balaam (Num 24:17–19). The metaphors of the “star from Judah” and the “sceptre from Israel,” later interpreted as “messianic” in Judaism and Christianity, are documented in four separate Dead Sea scrolls. While the act of anointing is constitutive for the Hebrew Bible ( : 1 Sam 10:1; 16:13; 2 Sam 2:4; 5:3; 2 Kgs 9:6), including the title “Anointed,” which is documented above all in the Saul and David tradition ( : cf. 1 Sam 24:7, 11; 26:9; etc.; 2 Sam 19:22; 22:51; 23:1; etc.), neither of the two is included in the prophetic traditions, the so-called messianic prophecies (Isa 7:14–16; 9:1–6; 11:1–10; Mic 5:1–5; Zech 9:9–10). This tension and ambiguity, which are found already in the Hebrew Bible, mark the difficulty and the worthiness of the present study. The question of understanding the fourth oracle of Balaam in the Qumran scriptures remains puzzling and is therefore always a challenge.

Initially, the origins of the Balaam tradition and its development from the OT to the Targumim, the extensive rabbinic literature and the allusions in the NT in general are examined. It quickly becomes clear that “an exhaustive enumeration and analysis of the existing rabbinical materials that deal with Balaam would go beyond the scope of . . . [this] work” (p. 10). For this reason, the analysis concentrates on the use of the Balaam tradition, especially the fourth oracle, in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In the first chapter, the fourth oracle is examined in the context of the entire Balaam story (Numbers 22–24). The unity of the oracle (24:17–19) results from the parallelism in each verse. Due to the phrase “a star shall come out of Judah and a sceptre shall rise from Israel” (24:17b), this text belongs to the so-called messianic prophecies. Even if the potential for such an interpretation is not completely ruled out, it should be noted that neither the term “anointed” ( ) nor the divine appointment of a king expressed by the act of anointing plays any role in the Balaam story. In the narrower sense, one can hardly speak of a “messianic idea/ideology” at this point.

The investigation in the second chapter demonstrates the connection between the biblical text and its use in the Qumran scrolls from a theoretical point of view and defines the methodological prerequisites of the work, applied to “the Qumran documents to be analysed in a systematic and controlled way throughout the study” (p. 12).

The third chapter offers an overview of all Qumran texts that are based on or quote the episode (Numbers 22–24). Overall, it turns out that the image of Balaam in the Qumran texts largely corresponds to that of the OT. The textual differences and variants between the two corpora can be explained as primarily stylistic and grammatical in nature and are likely to be much less ideologically motivated, which would be one of the requirements for suggesting a deliberate change of the given images.

The following four chapters constitute the core of the study. They examine the fourth oracle of Balaam in the context of the War Scroll (1QM), the Damascus Document (CD), Testimonia (4Q175), and the Rule of the Blessings (1Q28b).

In addition, M. attempts to place the reception of the Balaam tradition in Qumran in the overall context of early Judaism. According to M., only in this way can the Balaam tradition “be contextualized in the larger field of scholarly research” (p. 236). In contrast to the common assumption in scholarly discourse, the Qumran texts do not seem to attest a...