Pre-Maccabean Halakhah in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Biblical Tradition

Abstract

This paper will investigate evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls for pre-Maccabean Jewish law and its relationship with the Hebrew Bible and the legal materials preserved there. To be discussed are issues of both content and form, showing how both midrashic and apodictic forms of law appear in both collections,1 and how, in particular, the priestly tradition was continued beyond the last books of the Hebrew Bible. Along the way observations will be made about the state of Jewish legal materials in the early second temple period. Any attempt to investigate the nature of pre-Maccabean halakhah must, by definition, be a complex, triangulated extrapolation. The extrapolation proceeds on two axes. One axis is that of chronology, in that certain differences that we observe between corpora written at different times can result from historical development. But other differences between corpora result from the existence of competing approaches to Jewish life and law in different, often competing, groups within the Jewish community. Because these two factors, the issues of chronology and competing approaches, often termed sectarianism, are operative simultaneously in the entire period we will be discussing, we are presented with one of the fundamental methodological challenges for our study. How do we determine if a specific difference between sources results from historical development or from differing halakhic trends, evidence for which happens to be sporadically represented? Closely related to this methodological problem is a paucity of sources. For this study, in particular, we are confronted immediately by the need for extrapolation in order to reach any conclusions at all.