MIDRASHIC EXEGESIS AND ITS PRECEDENTS IN THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

Abstract

Imagine the following scenario: The time is early 1947. A scholar who has spent much time studying the works of rabbinic literature comprising the Oral Torah-the Mishnah and Talmuds, the Bible and its Aramaic targums, the many midrashic and aggadic works-is walking in the desert hills of Judea, near the northern tip of the Dead Sea. Suddenly, he is accosted by someone who relates strange stories of hidden caves and buried treasure, of coins, sandals, skeletons, earthenware pots, but mostly of scrolls: hundreds of scrolls on skin, papyrus and metal; scrolls of an ancient age, many crumbling into pieces, some in ancient script. The stranger proceeds to tell of the contents of these scrolls: sections of long lost works, works known from the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha-but in the Hebrew (or Aramaic) original, Aramaic targums, anthologies of biblical passages, biblical and Bible-like texts; psalms, prayers and texts containing mysteries; halakhic treatises, letters, historically oriented texts, and more. The scholar entreats the stranger to show him these treasures, and in a matter of instants he is in front of these texts, which he reads with great curiosity. Gradually, there unfolds in front of his eyes a vast Jewish library thousands of years old-composed hundreds of years before the first traditions of the Jewish Oral Torah were set down in writing. This imagined confrontation of a scholar well-versed in rabbinic texs with the entire known corpus of the Qumran sect may provide suitable background for a comparative investigation into the similarities and differences, in content and method, between rabbinic literature-in its present form the result of redactions of texts from the second to sixth or seventh centuries of the common era-and the earlier writings of the Qumran community. While the latter has come to the attention of scholars of Jewish texts in a piecemeal fashion over a