A collection of essays by Philip Davies on aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls. While composed to stand along, together these essays create a strong synthetic argument about the Essenes and the production of the Dead Sea Scrolls that remains important and challenging to the present day.
EISBN: 978-1-946527-47-9
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5fbTable of Contents
The age of forty years is, in a human life, commonly associated with a change, psychological and even biological. It marks definitively the end of serious pretension to youth, but can also be attended by a reversion to some aspects of adolescent behaviour. The study of the Dead Sea Scrolls has now reached middle age: I shall not chase the parallel any further, except to suggest that a new beginning in our understanding of the phenomenon of the Qumran community may be occurring. The publication of more texts after a long famine will put the already published texts into perspective,...
Surveying a decade of intense and often bizarre controversy, Millar Burrows wrote in 1958 that “scholars have not yet reached agreement concerning the origin of the Qumran community”.¹ Yet J. T. Milik’s Dix ans de decouverts had appeared in 1957, and in the same year F. M. Cross completed the Haskell lectures. In 1959 both of these were available as books in English,² and from that moment on the a ccount of Qumran origins whic h Cross and Milik offered, with only minor differences, became a consensus, moreover, endorsed not only by Milik and Cross, but by de Vaux,³ a...
In his article “The Damascus Document Revisited”,¹ Jerome Murphy-O’Connor has responded critically and sympathetically to the analysis of the first part of the Damascus Document (the Admonition) which I published in 1983.² It was to be expected that just as some scholars had dismissed Murphy-O’Connor’s conclusions or criticized his methods as “subjective” or “speculative” - for example, Charlesworth³ and Vermes⁴ - so my own subsequent adoption of a literary-historical-critical methodology would attract the same accusation; this expectation was not unfulfilled.⁵ However, Murphy-O’Connor’s reply illustrates quite clearly that he does not see either my arguments or my conclusions as dependent on...
The connection of the name “Zadok” with the Qumran community in a sense antedates considerably the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves. One of S. Schechter’s Documents of Jewish Sectaries¹ retrieved from the old Qaraite synagogue in Cairo and published in 1910 he entitled “Fragments of a Zadokite Work”. R.H. Charles also entitled this work “The Zadokite Fragments“² referring to its authors as the “Zadokites” and identifying them with “(reformed) Sad-ducees”, in both respects following the conclusions of I. Levi.³ Although various identifications were proposed in the following decades,4 the name “Zadokite” remained the standard appellation for the "sect"...
Few passages in the Damascus Document have provoked more discussion than the apparent prohibition in 4.20ff. against a man taking two wives during his lifetime. The statement, couched in the form of a criticism of a practice by others, is precise and, one would think, unambiguously expressed: the practice in question is of a man being married, during his lifetime, to more than one woman. However, the implication that those formulating the criticism did not permit themselves more than one wife has perplexed many, if not most, commentators, who attempt to extract from the text a meaning which it does...
The Hymns scroll from Cave 1 (1QH) poses numerous problems for the student of “Qumran theology” (and their significance in this respect has been overestimated), but no less important are the questions of authorship and function which have been more or less permanently a matter of debate. In many respects the Hodayoth remain without a clear ideological or historical-social context; the sentiments they express are different enough in form and content from other major Qumran documents (1QM, 1QS, CD, HQMelch, etc.) to leave doubt about their place within the beliefs of the community, and equally our ignorance of the devotional...
Among the documents found at Qumran but not generally reckoned to be composed there are 1 Enoch and Jubilees. The correspondences between these documents and certain features of the Qumran compositions have led scholars to assign them to “pre-Essene” or “proto-Essene” circles. The suggestion that the “Damascus Document” represents a pre-Qumranic composition redacted in the Qumran community, based largely on internal grounds but also prompted by the need to explain its obvious differences from Qumran compositions¹ invites confirmation through a comparison with the two other texts mentioned. The object of the limited comparison being offered here is to examine two...
Saturday, April 25, 2026
Behind the Essenes: History and Ideology in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Philip R. Davies
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