Before and After Scripture

Abstract

With special focus on the law of judges in the Temple Scroll (LI:11–18) and the pentateuchal texts that it engages, this article examines the treatment of narrative chronology in the revision of pentateuchal texts. It argues that, although what first facilitated the reception of the Torah as a unified text was the pentateuchal compiler’s chronological arrangement of its plot, early Jewish revisionary interpreters rejected this chronological arrangement even as they accepted the Torah as a unified whole. In rejecting the chronology of the Torah’s narrative, early Jewish interpreters mimicked the authors of the Torah sources, who themselves disregarded the chronologies of the plots in their thematically-based revisions of their literary precursors. They also used this thematic, conflationary hermeneutic as an alternative basis for Torah unity.