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37 CHAPTER TWO QUMRAN AND THE ENOCH GROUPS: REVISITING THE ENOCHIC-ESSENE HYPOTHESIS Gabriele Boccaccini INTRODUCTION: THE QUMRAN LIBRARY Since the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, there has been considerable discussion about the nature of the “Qumran library.”1 The presence of biblical material and the recognition of diverse theologies in the scrolls2 demonstrate that the literature was not composed by the same group. However, geographical, chronological, and literary elements concur in support of the view that all the manuscripts were originally part of a single collection. The evidence is sufficient to justify the identification of the Dead Sea Scrolls as the remnants of an ancient library.3 Indeed, it is common ownership, not common authorship, that turns any collection of books, ancient and modern, into a “library.” The essential problem consists in finding the correct criteria to classify the material, in particular, to distinguish between the documents authored by the Qumran community and those simply owned, preserved, and copied by the group. Anachronistic criteria like the threefold distinction between (a) biblical texts, (b) Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and 1. Devorah Dimant, “The Qumran Manuscripts: Contents and Significance,” in Time to Prepare the Way in the Wilderness: Papers on the Qumran Scrolls by Fellows of the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1989–1990 (ed. D. Dimant and L. H. Schiffman; STDJ 16; Leiden: Brill, 1995), 23–58; Yaacov Shavit, “The ‘Qumran Library’ in the Light of the Attitude toward Books and Libraries in the Second Temple Period,” in Methods of Investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site: Present Realities and Future Prospects (ed. M. O. Wise et al.; New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 722; New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1994), 299–317. 2. James H. Charlesworth, “The Theologies in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Faith of Qumran: Theology of the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. H. Ringgren; rev. ed.; New York: Crossroad, 1995), xv–xxi. 3. Frank M. Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran (3d ed.; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995). 38 QUMRAN AND THE ENOCH GROUPS (c) hitherto unknown material—these criteria have been applied too often, with the result of imposing later canonical assumptions upon ancient sources. How can we assume, for example, that for the people of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1 Enoch or the Temple Scroll belonged to a different category than Genesis or Isaiah? In particular, how can we assume that a document is sectarian simply because we formerly did not know of its existence? The first modern collections of Dead Sea Scrolls were selections of previously unknown “sectarian” documents, a practical and yet hardly scientific criterion. The biblical, apocryphal, and pseudepigraphic texts from Qumran became footnotes in the editions of the already established corpora of the Hebrew Bible, Apocrypha, and Pseudepigrapha. In one case only, the Damascus Document, whose sectarian features seemed too obvious to be overlooked, the overlapping was solved by removing the document from the corpus of the Pseudepigrapha, in which it had been previously included, and moving it into the Dead Sea Scrolls.4 In other cases, notably 1 Enoch and Jubilees, the recognition of sectarian features was not considered enough to justify such a dramatic change, and the documents remained in their traditional corpus. The Dead Sea Scrolls were and in common opinion still are the documents discovered at Qumran minus those belonging to other corpora. The Dead Sea Scrolls have become a scholarly and marketing label for a selected body of sectarian texts. The most recent editions of the Qumran texts are struggling to overcome this “original sin” of Dead Sea Scrolls research. Older standard collections, like that of Géza Vermes, have gradually expanded their material, edition after edition,5 and are now being replaced by new, more inclusive collections. Both the García Martínez and the Charlesworth editions , although still limited for practical reasons to “nonbiblical” material, have abolished the most misleading distinction between apocryphal, pseudepigraphic , and sectarian literature; they are consciously and effectively promoting a more comprehensive approach to the entire material discovered in the caves.6 4. After the publication of the editio princeps by Solomon Schechter in Fragments of a Zadokite Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), it was natural to see the Damascus Document in the collections of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha by Robert H. Charles, ed., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), 2:785–834; and Paul Riessler, Altjüdisches Schrifttum ausserhalb...

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