Qumranic Studies

Michael Segal, “Interpreting History in Qumran Texts,” in M. Kister, M. Segal, and R. Clements (eds.), The Religious Worldviews Reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature (STDJ 127; Leiden: Brill, 2018), 212–244.

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The great Poem of Babylonian Creation, the myth of Enmeduranki, the book of secrets of Enoch, the scrolls of Qumran. For the first time a single research path reveals the connections between a small bronze model of liver found in Ciavernasco of Piacenza, at the dawn of the unification of Italy, and the hidden plot of one of the most guarded mysteric disciplines of antiquity .
The threshold of time, that which is permanently defined by the alternation of state between day and night and which is induced by the continuous motion of rotation of the celestial framework, is the very essence of the principle on which the whole cosmological construction will be based. From this conceptual dimension of the sacred, which will correspond, in different places and traditions, and declined only formally in different times and ways, all the doctrinal theories of the ancient world on the nature of time and its origin. It is in this conceptual construction that the legacy of the religious orders of the Mesopotamian cultures - the one we find in the West still expressed within the Etruscan religion at the time of writing Qumran manuscripts - differs from others in assigning a key cosmogonic role to the functions of the liver, as a mundus of the body and metaphysical "threshold" placed at the origin of life and of the universe itself.
To the extent that the rhythms and rules of the passage of the great stars and the entire celestial framework on the threshold between light and darkness constituted the key to approaching the Great Secrets of the Cosmos, it was logical to imagine that the Great Babylonian Creation Poem had indicated right in the liver of Tiāmat, the germinator center of the ancient Mother on which Marduk recompiled the new celestial order, the vital seat for the "empathic" understanding of those laws.
Like a mirror of the "enimmatic" configurations that the system would have assumed in its future temporal development, the divination based on the inspection of the liver was considered in Mesopotamia, and then again for the Greeks and the Etruscans, the first and most important form of interrogation of the future destinies. And it is to this more extensive cosmological construction, and not to the only and changing outcomes of the judgments derived from it, that it is more correctly traced the interpretation of one of the most enigmatic archaeological finds of antiquity: the Etruscan Liver of Piacenza.

Scroll 5Q21 is extremely fragmentary and difficult to decipher. Its DJD editor, Joseph Milik, did not even attempt to provide an edition of the scroll. A re-examination of the fragments revealed it is to be a copy of the Temple Scroll. In this paper, I suggest a new collation of the fragments and present a preliminary edition of the scroll.

Il Dizionario Teologico degli scritti di Qumran ha per obiettivo di contribuire in misura sostanziale alla conoscenza
e allo studio della letteratura di Qumran.
Vengono passati in rassegna nella loro specificità
tutti gli scritti rinvenuti nelle grotte del Mar Morto e nel Deserto di Giuda.
Grazie a Qumran è possibile accedere a nuove concezioni teologiche:
figure bibliche specifiche (Melchisedek, Mosè, Aronne, Sadoq, Levi)
vengono associate a nuove concezioni,
le quali mettono in grado di riconsiderare da nuove prospettive
molti ambiti problematici relativi a giudaismo e Nuovo Testamento.

The article describes the double documents from the Judaean Desert, on the one hand their material conditions and their lay out, on the other hand the relationship between the upper (inner) and the lower (outer) texts. There are three different forms: two widely identical texts, written one below the other on one side of a sheet; two such texts the first of which starts on the back of the sheet; and, third, documents with a noticeably shortened upper text. The upper text is often less carefully written. Both the lay out and some of the differences between the two texts point to the conclusion that the upper text was written first, while the lower text was copied from the upper one.

4Q390 is a document akin to but not identical with Apocryphon of Jeremiah C. It presents the exilic and postexilic era of history of Israel as a period of 70 x 7 = 70 + 7 x 49 + 70 + 7 years of forced theocracy. 4Q390 may partially account for the rise of Messianic expectations in Israel ca. 200-175 B.C. and ca. 103-96 B.C.

In 2012 the Israel Antiquities Authority launched the new photographic digital database for Judaean Desert manuscripts, the Leon Levy Digital Dead Sea Scrolls Library (www.deadseascrolls.il). The site features new images of a large number of Qumran mss, with the promise of many more on the way, including for many of these fragments the first ever photographs in full colour. This paper illustrates how the new IAA photographs can assist efforts of manuscript identification, reconstruction and interpretation on a digital platform applied to one of the Cave 4Q copies of the War Scroll, 4QMa (4Q491). I will set special attention on the colour photographs and the usage of colour for increasing our knowledge about this scroll. First, I will very briefly introduce 4Q491, and its somewhat controversial history of scholarship. While the first editor identified and published the fragments all together as part of a single manuscript, others have since delivered persuasive arguments for the existence of two and even three separate scrolls among the fragments, and this is a matter that I will challenge directly through an investigation of the new digital images. Second, I will illustrate my study in two parts of the physical features of 4Q491, in a close examination of one set of fragment pieces—those assigned to frg. 11 i–ii. I will initially explore and identify patterns of damage in the overall shape of the fragment pieces and the composite whole, and will illustrate how these are most clearly discerned with the application of colour. Then I will use targeted colour selection of the RGB images to make digital transparencies of the fragments, which are a useful tool for precisely interpreting various types of surface damage. Third, the results of my physical examination of frg. 11 i–ii will be applied to the whole manuscript in terms of how to understand the scribal activity, how to classify its literary content, and finally how a new arrangement of the fragments affects the structure of the composition and its meaning.

A number of texts from the Qumran scrolls demonstrate the community's interest in heavenly ascent and in communion with angels. This article lays out a pattern observable in some of the poetic/liturgical texts (for example, the Hodayot and other noncanonical psalms) in which the leader of the community is taken up into the divine council of God to be taught the heavenly mysteries, is appointed a teacher of those mysteries, and is then commissioned to share the teachings with his followers. Upon learning the mysteries, the followers are enabled to likewise ascend to heaven to praise God with the angels. In some texts, the human worshippers appear to undergo a transfiguration so that they become like the heavenly beings. This article further illustrates how these elements can be found together in a liturgical text known as the  Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice ; their collective presence suggests that all were part of a ritual sequence. Finally, the article argues that these same el...

The association of the Essenes with the site of Qumran, and the specific instructions regarding latrine placement and etiquette in the Temple and War Scrolls, combine to make the toilet practices of the Qumran community an issue with a direct relation to the study of the site and of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The texts most often associated with toilet practices at Qumran present accounts and instructions which are incompatible with each other, while the presence of a cesspit toilet in Locus 51 of Qumran contradicts each of these texts. Further, the difficulties presented by this toilet's presence are increased by its being taken out of use at the end of Period Ib of the site (31 BC), after which it appears not to have been replaced – a development which suggests either a significant change in Qumranites' beliefs after 31 BC, or a change in the makeup of the community's inhabitants themselves.

Georg Molin gehörte zu den ersten, die die neu aufgefundenen Qumran-Schriften übersetzte, außerdem war er einer der wenigen evangelischen Theologen, der als Fachmann für Altorientalistik an der Einheitsübersetzung des Alten Testaments mitarbeitete.