Interpreting and Living God's Law at Qumran: "Miqṣat Ma'aśe ha-Torah," Some of the Works of the Torah (4QMMT) ed. by Reinhard G. Kratz (review)

This book provides a new edition of the Hebrew Qumran text 4QMMT (4Q394) together with a translation and nine thematic essays. It consists of parts A ("Introduction"), B ("Text, Translation and Notes"), C ("Essays"), and D ("Appendices", including a bibliography, indexes, and information about the authors in the volume). This collection appears in a series entitled Writings in Late Antiquity on Ethical and Religious Issues, which has thus far been devoted to Greek and Latin texts from late antiquity. The series is now also opening up to "contexts of philosophy, ethics and religion" of Hebrew-speaking Judaism of the late second and first centuries b.c.e. (Reinhard G. Kratz, "Introduction," p. 18). In the case of 4QMMT, the volume also "documents in its own way the formative interrelation between Hellenistic and Jewish culture" (Kratz, "Preface," p. vii).

In his "Introduction," Kratz discusses the Dead Sea Scrolls and the "community of Qumran," "without advancing any further claims concerning the origin or historical localization of the community itself" (p. 6), and then turns to a description of the content, manuscripts, editions and research, and presentation of 4Q394 as the principal manuscript for textual reconstruction of 4QMMT. In regard to contextualization, the introduction is rather Qumran-centered, even attributing "occasional readings" of biblical manuscripts to the "Qumran community itself" (p. 16). This has not always been the communis opinio, since Eugene C. Ulrich previously wrote about the subject in "The Absence of 'Sectarian Variants' in the Jewish Scriptural Scrolls Found at Qumran" (in The Bible as Book [ed. E. D. Herbert and E. Tov; London: British Library–Oak Knoll Press, 2002] 179–95). In his survey of the manuscripts, Kratz meticulously documents the state of the evidence, additionally identified fragments of 4Q397 as well as disidentified calendar fragments previously assigned to 4Q394, in the years since the principal edition of 4QMMT by Elisha Qimron and John Strugnell in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series, vol. 10 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). This survey also prepares the way for part B, "Text, Translation and Notes," by Kratz, who incorporates new reconstructions of additional fragments of 4Q397 (4QMMT^d) (cf. Eibert Tigchelaar, RevQ 26 [2014] 455–59; 32 [2020] 117–20; Émile Puech, RevQ 27 [2015] 99–136). The presentation of the text thereby contains parts A (A 20–21; Calendar), B (B 01–82; Halakhah), and C (C19–24, 01–18, 25–32; Parenesis). This new edition is part of a broader reconsideration of the text of 4QMMT, and there may be more to follow—witness work in preparation by Vered Noam 4QMMT: Some Precepts of the Torah for the Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls series.

The section of essays (part C) contains the following nine contributions, which highlight major contexts for the study of 4QMMT: "Material Construction and Palaeographic Dating of 4QMMT: The Evidence of the Manuscripts," by Eibert Tigchelaar; "The Language of 4QMMT," by Noam Mizrahi; "Law and Narrative: 4QMMT and the Hebrew Bible," by Kratz; "The Calendar and 4QMMT," by Jonathan Ben-Dov; "4QMMT in the Context of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Beyond," by Charlotte Hempel; "From 4QMMT to the Rabbinic Halakhah," by Vered Noam; "4QMMT and History," by John J. Collins; "4QMMT and / as Hellenistic Literature," by Lutz Doering; and "Contextualizing Paul's 'Works of the Law': 4QMMT in New Testament Scholarship," by Jörg Frey.

Tigchelaar refers to alternative material constructions and placement of frags. 11–13 among the total manuscript evidence of 4Q398, on which Kratz bases his different edition of 4QMMT C, starting with 19–24, as compared with the Qimron-Strugnell edition. He further revisits the paleography of the manuscripts (4Q394–399) of 4QMMT. In his survey of the Hebrew of 4QMMT, Mizrahi not...